What is the impact of the wind building towers having on whale deaths?

0:00 Speaker 1 What’s killing all whales. I’ve been concerned about it for at least a year, where all in the last twelve months on the New Jersey Coast Long Island Coast, seventy one dead whales, and some organizations tell me that they’re not the many whales left with us today is Lisa Lino’s and she’s with the Wind Action Group and she

0:26 is co founder of Save Right Whales. Lisa, welcome to the Cats and Cosby Show. Tell me about yourself. Tell me about what’s going on.

0:37 Speaker 2 Thanks so much for having me. Well, the issue with the whales is a big deal. I have been involved in looking at large scale wind energy and impacts of those large turbines for nearly twenty years at this point.

0:54 But over the last year I’ve been really involved with the offshore wind development and watching what’s happening there. And this spike in whale debts that have occurred really beginning in December, and and you know, almost weekly we’re having dead whales. I’m myself and others started to investigate what is going on, and what we found is very surprising. First,

1:20 I’ll tell you that the federal government is absolutely committed to the idea that the whale debts have nothing to do with offshore wind development and the and the pre construction activities that are happening.

1:34 Speaker 1 The federal government doesn’t lie, do they, But.

1:39 Speaker 2 You know, I would like to think otherwise.

1:44 Speaker 1 Movie. I’m shocked, shocked there’s gambling in this place.

1:49 Speaker 2 Tell me it’s very disturbed. It’s very disturbing when you get such adamant responses back from the federal government where they will not even investigate what is happening here when the obvious large change in the environment right now for these whales happens to be offshore wind development on a scale that where we’re seeing in the industrialization of our

2:10 ocean that we have never seen before, and it’s happening right now now.

2:15 Speaker 1 Somebody told me last week when another group that was looking into it, that there’s only three hundred and seventy of these whales left. Is it possibly that low?

2:27 Speaker 2 Yeah, Actually, for the North Atlantic right whale, there are less than three hundred and fifty whales on the planet today, and so that fewer than one hundred female reproduct reproducing females right now. So they are on a path to extinction.

2:45 And the very place that they’re building these wind turbines right now is right where they have a critical habitat. We’re in the particularly southern Massachusetts and the Ocean waters just south of New England. It’s been found to be the only winter foraging habitat.

3:05 Speaker 1 Last, Now, what did you find out? You found out that it’s the sonar? Well, do you tell us, I’m going to tell you, you tell us.

3:15 Speaker 2 Yeah, So we started investigation. We wanted to find out first of all, is the number of whales that are dying? Is this new? And what we did was we looked back to twenty twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen through to today and we looked at boat traffic and activity within the areas where the whales were dying. And what we found

3:39 was a very tight correlation between whales dying and wind energy development in the form of the sonar. Where the sonar activity that’s happening, which means that the boats are going out there. The wind industry is putting out boats in these areas that have been leased for wind energy development and they are firing off high powered sonar. It

4:05 creates a loud blast that reflects off the seabed and at some point it penetrates below the seabed and brings back reflections, and that tells them what the seabed is comprised of, what the soil conditions are, what kind of how rocky it is, how sandy it is, and that’s all a precursor to being able to build on that land.

4:28 And we found that in every case where the whales were dying, both spatially as in the location and temporarily as in around the same time, there was high activity in the wind lease areas, and that started us looking more closely to find out what is it the sonar?

4:47 Is it the extra boat activity that’s happening within these wind lease areas? And when we’re finding now to leave it the sonar alsia, we have.

4:57 Speaker 1 A few about thirty second left. What do you want to tell people? Know what I say? You know what at LISTA, you know what I tell people? If this was absolutely necessary, because our people, our civilization is going to die that we don’t have these windmills, I can you know, we could find a solution, but these windmills

5:20 only add a little bit of energy, and it’s not worth chump changing a little bit of energy they’re adding.

5:29 Speaker 2 I mean, what do you say, if you we’ll see what the federal government says, and let’s see what the wind industry itself is saying. We’re being told that we need to industrialize our oceans with these massive turbines, take out habitat which is critically important to these whales, all in the name of solving the climate change problem. Their

5:48 own documentations state that these wind turbines are going to have no effect on climate change. We are building these turbines because the states have imposed very rigid climate change for policies and they want to meet those policies. That’s where we’re at, and no one is paying attention to what’s happening to the whales. The publicers to understand we’re

6:11 being lied to.

6:13 Speaker 1 Thank you, Lisa Noah’s linos. Thank you very much. I better give after we hang up. I’m going to give you by self number and you stay in touch with us. And we love those whales and we want them to, uh, you know, live and live long and prosper. Thank you so much.

6:32 Speaker 2 Thank you,