Offshore Wind Farms Threaten Fishing Communities

0:00 Speaker 1 Sunday Morning with us Today’s Bonnie Brady, and she’s been a real spokesperson about saving our oceans, saving the environment on the entire East Coast of America. And those windmills, those windmills are not environmentally friendly. Well, Bonnie Brady, give us an update. What have you been doing and what’s going on with the windmills?

0:24 Speaker 2 Hi, John, thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate the time to get back and give you several updates. First of all, I have a new job. I am now the policy director for the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship’s Association, which is a fishermen’s group that goes all the way from Maine down to New Jersey. And same concept. We’re

0:46 fighting for fishermen’s rights and for US domestic American seafood and all of that, but also involving not only just offshore wind, but floating wind further up north. So it’s going to be a big year. And in addition to that, I wanted to tell you about a couple of we had some horrible instances last months. We had you may

1:09 have heard the fishing vessel Lily Jean from Gloucester went down at sea on its way in during a rather large finish to a storm, and that diced up quite a bit, and apparently the boat went down about twenty five miles east of Gloucester with seven Oh.

1:26 Speaker 1 My god, what does this usually happen?

1:30 Speaker 2 No, honestly, and Gus, I mean there were seven people on board. The captain, Gus san Filippo. He was a consummate professional. I think he was a fifth generation commercial fisherman, and everybody on the boat, for the most part, had had time at sea. It’s happened sometimes very quickly. You know, you have freezing spray that can occur. You can also

1:56 have just in general from the temper sure of the water, you can suddenly start getting ice onto the boat. It happens in the northeast. A lot usually take baseball bats and beat it off that way. But sometimes the closer to land that you get it’s actually warmer. When you’re further out on the ocean, the closer to land is

2:18 when the temperatures tend to get colder, and that’s when these situations happened. We haven’t had anything like this happen in years.

2:26 Speaker 1 And everybody passed away.

2:29 Speaker 2 Yeah, they I guess the EPRB, which is the beacon that goes off if for some reason the boat takes on water. And it went off at just before seven o’clock in the morning on the twenty I’m sorry, the thirtieth, and they sent a helicopter from Cape Cod Air Station.

2:50 Cape Cod is really quick flip to there, and they found only an empty life raft and someone who had already been deceased, and that was it. So it had come quickly.

3:06 Speaker 1 Tell us about the windmills. Now, is there any problems?

3:10 Speaker 2 Well, I just actually was reading Bloomberg before this chat, and it turns out the administration is planning on appealing on all of the offshore wind farms that they lost through various motions in the various district courts. Now they did not lose all of them completely, some of the judges are. What they did is say they wanted an

3:32 expedited summary briefing schedules so that the two sides could put their documents together and let the judge see it all. The only judge that said you’re not going to do anything until I say so was the judge down in Virginia for the dominion Cival Offshore wind Farms. So that has to definitely be appealed. And the orsted sites at

3:56 Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind were run by Royce Lambert, he’s a ninety two year old out of the District Court in DC. That those cases are still moving through, but because of the no goes for any of them in the whether they allowed for a temporary injunction or not, the government now is going to appeal all of them.

4:22 So it looks like it will be District Court of Appeals time for all of them, which is.

4:25 Speaker 1 Now explain to the people that are listening to us and don’t know what the heck we’re talking about. We’re talking about the windmills being put in the Atlantic Ocean that is going to end up coursing people two hundred three hundred percent more for electricity when they’re finished, and they’re not and they claim it’s pro environmental, but it’s

4:48 actually very bad for the environment.

4:50 Speaker 2 Right Absolutely, Sorry, I was being a little bit in the weeds there, John, Yes, they are horrible for the environment, the wind farms that they want to put in place. There are five active construction sites in the Atlantic Ocean right now. We have two just south of Rhode Island, plus one site that actually they finished completing. We have

5:16 the Vineyard wind site south of Nantucket, the one that had the blade explosion.

5:21 Speaker 1 Are they working now? Have they gone back to work again?

5:26 Speaker 2 They’ve gone back because they all requested a temporary restraining order on the government’s stopping when Secretary Bergham came out right before Christmas and said, I want a ninety day pause on all of this. We have national security, national defense issues. I’m sorry.

5:46 Speaker 1 Have they pussed?

5:48 Speaker 2 Well, they did pause until they all started a lawyer up and went judge shopping and figured out that they would get an easier way to get a temporary restraining order, and the majority of judges allow out it absolutely. One judge said you can’t do anything else until I say so.

6:04 The other four are letting it move through the courts, but have still allowed them to continue construction. Yeah, all right, cause huge amounts, huge dollars, four to five times more expensive energy, bad for the ocean, bad for the whales, bad for everyone, bad for the fishermen, and bad for USD food.

6:24 Speaker 1 Bonnie Brady, thank you for the update. And that’s what I wanted to hear of because I just wanted to get an update. What the heck is going on, and I feel so bad about the loss of people in the seventh in that boat, but stuff happens, and just very sad. Thank you so much for the fun John.

6:43 Speaker 2 If I can tell you quickly, f FV Lily Gene Fund, and that is specifically to be split between all of the people that were on board. It’s f V l I l Y Gene fund dot org and that’s what the money is being going to help the families.

7:03 Speaker 1 Thank you so much, and we’ll catch up with you again. Russel