AUDIO:

"The EcoNews Report," July 13, 2024.

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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. So EPIC and Humboldt Waterkeeper and the Core Hub at the Humboldt Area Foundation have just launched a new website -- northcoastoffshorewind.org -- which we hope to be a resource for the community. And I have two of the authors of this website here on the show to talk about the website, and we're gonna go through some of the most frequently asked questions about offshore wind that you might have that are answered on this website. So this is going to be an audio edition of a website. Trust me. It's gonna work. Alright, so joining me is climate attorney Matt Simmons from EPIC. Hey, Matt.

MATT SIMMONS:

Hey Tom, thanks for having me.

WHEELER:

And we also have the director of Humboldt Waterkeeper, Jen Kalt. Hey, Jen.

JEN KALT:

Hey, Tom and Matt, good to see you.

WHEELER:

Thank you. Good to see you. All right. So, Matt, I touched on a little bit of the inspiration behind this website and what it's hoping to accomplish. I know that you have more thoughts having worked on this and having received feedback about the website. What do you want to communicate as to the purpose of this website and what you're trying to accomplish here?

SIMMONS:

Yeah, so the proposed offshore wind projects -- and there's really three projects, right? There's the offshore wind farm itself, the Humboldt Bay Harbor District's terminal project, and then the transmission lines going along with them are big and complicated and ever-changing. And there isn't currently one central place that you can go to learn more about these projects. And I think because of that, there's a lot of misinformation spreading around about what those projects entail. And in the sort of silence, people fill that vacuum with misinformation. And so the goal of this website is to provide factual, cited, referenced information about these projects and to have it be an updating living document that can be a resource for the community.

KALT:

Yeah, I mean, the whole idea here is that we live and breathe this stuff, right? Environmental issues are so complex nowadays that it's hard for a lot of people to follow. So we would be getting questions like, where can I find out anything about this? And we're like, we're drowning in information. So how do we bridge that gap and help point people to things they're really asking about and what they're interested in?

WHEELER:

So I'm just gonna jump right into the questions. I think that we have 10 questions. Whether or not we'll be able to get through 10 questions in a half hour, given that I think that there will be a lot of long answers here. So we'll try to do our best.

Jen, I'm gonna I'm gonna punch it to you first. I think the thing that people ask me the most about our whales, and this makes sense because there have been a lot of pretty hyperbolic headlines coming from the East Coast and from the offshore wind farms on the East Coast. So what do we know now? Granted that there is more information that will be forthcoming about how the proposed offshore wind farm off of Humboldt will affect whales and other marine mammals.

KALT:

Well, the short answer is we don't know a whole lot because the wind project is proposed 20 to 30 miles offshore, so nobody's ever proposed to build anything in that area. So we don't know a ton about it. So the wind developers are just starting to do surveys and assessing the site and seeing what's there. What we do know a lot more about, but not as much as we need to know about, are marine mammals inside Humboldt Bay, particularly harbor seals, which there are a lot of, but no one's ever really studied them very carefully because there's a lot of them and there haven't really been major threats to them in recent years.

So marine mammals writ large also will include porpoises and other types of seals. There's a lot of migratory seals that come through here. People are studying these questions and we don't have the answers yet, but that's why we made this website a living website that we're going to be constantly updating as we get more information over the next five to 10 years.

WHEELER:

But in terms of misinformation and things that we are trying to counter, I believe we do have an answer about whale impacts on East Coast offshore wind.

KALT:

Well, the answer that we have at this juncture is that there have been a lot of humpback whales dying on the East Coast for several years that precede the beginning of offshore wind activities. And so there's a bunch of pretty dubious sources of information trying to whip people up into opposing offshore wind, generally speaking, because it's going to kill all the whales and look, the whales are dying. We have a similar issue here with gray whales where there's been what's called an Unusual Mortality Event. Those are capital letters there. "Unusual Mortality Event" is a technical term used by whale experts.

And so what we do in this line of work is people say these things and we go and chase down the actual information. The gray whales on the West Coast are clearly not dying from offshore wind since we don't have any offshore wind.

SIMMONS:

Well, and so something that I think is interesting about this is, at least on the East Coast, one of the leading theories for these whale deaths is climate change, right? That climate change is warming the ocean temperature, changing the locations that the food that the whales eat is, and then causing more vessel strikes and negative interactions between whales. And so you have this situation where opponents of offshore wind, a renewable energy resource that can contribute to fighting climate change, are blaming offshore wind for something that might actually be being caused by climate change itself in our current fossil fuel-driven electricity system. And so you've got to be really careful about where you're getting sources and making sure you're not repeating misinformation.

KALT:

Well, and on the East Coast too, I mean I looked into this for an article that I wrote for our website and for EcoNews because I really wanted to know the answer and contact experts and find out what's happening. The direct local impacts to humpback whales on the East Coast has been found to be mostly from ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear. And actually it's thought to be an increase in juveniles living near the surface of the water, especially in the New York, New Jersey area where there's been a huge increase in shipping traffic during the pandemic as everyone's ordering more and more crap from China. So that's all very interesting, but again, not associated with offshore wind because the site assessment there hadn't even started yet. But if you want to read that article, we have a special section on the Humboldt Waterkeeper website on offshore wind and that article is posted there.

WHEELER:

And you can also read more about this on northcoastoffshorewind.org. I'm going to keep plugging that throughout the entirety of this show. All right, Matt, if whales and marine mammals, I think, are maybe the top question I get, the second most is going to be birds and bats. So what are the impacts or what would the impacts be from an offshore wind farm on birds and bats, as far as we understand at this moment?

SIMMONS:

Yeah, so I think the obvious potential impact is that a bird or a bat would fly into the turbine or even fly into the area that the turbine cycles through, which creates a little bit of displacement of the air, and that that would negatively impact those individuals.

Since wind turbines were first introduced 40 years ago, a lot of work has been done to make them safer for birds and bats. A lot of that is doing a lot of pre-siting activities to make sure you know what birds and bats are in the area before you put the turbines there. That work is currently ongoing off the coast of Humboldt, and so there's actually a thermal camera that's been out in the ocean for a couple of years that's tracking all the birds that fly through the area to get a better sense of how many of them there are, how high they fly, where they fly, what kind of interactions will they likely have if these wind turbines are put in.

And so the beginning of analyzing that data are actually just starting to come out. In April 2024, an article was published that talked about how 70% of the birds that they tracked using this thermal camera flew well below the height of the wind turbine. And so the idea there is that maybe they'd be safer from the wind turbines because they're flying underneath that. Also research in Europe, where there have been offshore wind turbines for a lot longer than in the U.S., have shown that a lot of birds are capable of just avoiding the wind turbines. They fly around them. So overall, this is to say there's a lot more surveys and research that needs to be done to better understand these interactions, and that as we get more information, we'll be updating the website with that.

WHEELER:

And can you talk about this process of studying and how these surveys and all this data collection that's being done, all of the modeling and all of the everything, how that feeds back into the project, because it's going to be examined at some time. 

SIMMONS:

So Tom and I are both attorneys, and so this is the wonderful world of the National Environmental Policy Act. And so before any wind turbines are built off of our coast, they'll first have to go through a programmatic environmental impact statement where the federal government is going to analyze the cumulative impacts of all of the Humboldt wind projects and all of the Morro Bay wind projects. Then each individual leaseholder is going to do an environmental impact statement for their specific construction and operation plan, you know, the specific ideas of what they are going to do off the coast. And so that's where you will gather all of this information in one place, analyze it. There'll be an opportunity for public comment, for other agencies to comment. And through that process, we will hopefully design a project that will have as few impacts as possible.

KALT:

Well, and you mentioned NEPA, but that's the federal regulations, but these projects will have to go through the Coastal Commission as well. And the NEPA process is kind of odd in that it's broken up. The earlier site assessment activity NEPA process has already been through the Coastal Commission. So back to your question, Tom, about whales, the Coastal Commission has already stated that all vessels associated with offshore wind must use a speed limit of 10 knots. And that is a very good way to avoid vessel strikes, because if you're going slower, the whales can get out of the way if you don't see them. But there are lots of other ways to avoid them.

WHEELER:

We also have more eyes on the ocean because part of the requirement again, from the Coastal Commission is that we have protected species observers who are on vessels associated with offshore wind that are to look out for whales and pinnipeds and whatever else that all of these protected species and to try to again, increase avoidance of impacts there. Let's go to something Jen that I know that you're worried about because I think a lot of the time people accuse us of being homers for offshore wind or in a pocket of offshore wind energy developers.

KALT:

Not me. 

WHEELER:

Jen, tell us about the impact to Humboldt Bay and the particularly impacts of construction of the offshore wind terminal on Humboldt Bay and the increased dredging also associated with turbine construction.

KALT:

Yes, well, so there's been some talk about how the impacts to the ocean environment will be lessened because the turbines are floating rather than fixed bottom. But all of the pile driving and the disturbance on the sea floor, a lot of people don't realize the benthic community is living on the bottom of the sea. Off the coast here has all kinds of amazing diversity like corals and sponges and all kinds of things. And we're going to learn a lot more about this with the site assessment activities. But basically the way the floating turbines are proposed to be built, those impacts would be in Humboldt Bay instead of in the ocean. And Humboldt Bay is a very sensitive environment. It's not just the open ocean where you can say, well, this is a place that's sensitive, let's move it quarter mile this way or a mile this way. Once you build the terminal, that's where the turbines are going to be built.

So a lot of concerns involve the underwater and above water atmospheric sound, the noise from pile driving. So people are talking about something like 2000 piles that will need to be driven to install this terminal. And that would be something like maybe three to five years of pile driving during the work window for pile driving. And it is extremely loud, although there are ways to lessen the sound, there's really no way to avoid it entirely. So harbor seals, fish, all kinds of aquatic species are, they experience a lot of harm. And that's a big concern. Impacts to the bay from the amount of dredging that would need to be done to widen the navigational channel also to create the wet storage areas, air quotes, wet storage, temporary storage for the turbines that are being built. The harbor district is basically talking about dredging some areas right up against the west side of Tuluwat Island, which is the center of the universe for the Wiyot tribe.

And so all the noise, the dredging, potential erosion, the lights at night are all going to impact Tuluwat, including the egret and heron rookery that's right there on Tuluwat as well. And then there's a lot of eelgrass that will need to be destroyed. I mean, there's no other way to say it. It's not just something to avoid because if you're deepening the area around the terminal to something like 60 feet, eelgrass is never going to grow there because eelgrass in Humboldt Bay grows in a pretty shallow range in the intertidal area. And eelgrass is a keystone species. It's very protected in pretty much all states and in the federal, under federal law because it is such an important keystone species. Forty percent of the remaining eelgrass in the state of California is in Humboldt Bay because in other estuaries it's been destroyed either by dredging, industrial development, water pollution, so on and so forth. And we really don't want to do that.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report and we're talking about EPIC, Humboldt Waterkeeper and the Core Hub at the Humboldt Area Foundation have just launched a new website, northcoastoffshorewind.org, which we hope to be a resource for the community.

KALT:

Also the oyster industry in Humboldt Bay that is very concerned about the increase in vessel traffic and the potential to bring diseases that could ruin Humboldt Bay as far as being a place to grow baby oysters because it's the only place in California where there isn't oyster disease that limits how sending oyster seed elsewhere. So the oyster seed industry has boomed here tremendously in the last decade. So the whole West Coast oyster industry is dependent on Humboldt Bay for seed. I could do a whole show on the impacts to Humboldt Bay.

WHEELER:

We should. Somewhat relatedly, we can talk about site contamination. And here is perhaps potential for port development to improve existing conditions. And I believe you were on a field trip just today. This exact site. Looking at this exact site. So tell us about site contamination and how port development can impact site contamination.

KALT:

Well, the area that's being proposed for the wind terminal used to be a variety of lumber mills, plywood mills, and other industrial facilities that used a lot of different toxic chemicals, including pentachlorophenol, which hopefully our listeners know had dioxins in it. And it was so toxic, it was banned for use on lumber in the 1980s. These mills have all been abandoned quite a long time ago, and very little site assessment, meaning sampling to see what contamination there has been done. So some of these old lumber mills have maybe been abandoned for 50, 60, 70 years, and leaching contaminants into the bay and the groundwater. In some areas, we know for a fact that there are dioxins leaching into the bay, and just found this out in May.

So all this attention to this site means it will have to be assessed and cleaned up before any kind of ground disturbance can happen there. It's a catch-22. We're in the same situation with the Nordic Aqua Farms and the pulp mill, where unless there's a proponent of a development that could take another century or two to clean up the pulp mill site, but that's only because it's owned by a public agency. So private landowners are not eligible for grant money to clean up sites. So another topic we could do a whole show on, but if you're interested, check out our website, and then also we'll be expanding as we learn new information on the North Coast Offshore Wind website.

The field trip that you mentioned was with the U.S. EPA Brownfields staff who came up to Humboldt to tour a few sites, and the Harbor District Director and Consultant, and somebody from the Humboldt County Grants and Housing Department that I've never met before, which was great. Yeah, so we toured the site. It's a big, giant mess, and it's going to be really good to get it cleaned up if we can figure out how to build the terminal in a way that's really going to protect everything that we all care so much about. 

I could just clarify, though, that U.S. EPA awarded the Harbor District a $500,000 grant in May of 2023. So they're going to be using that money to start all the sampling and analysis that needs to be done to finally, finally look at these old lumber mills and get the sites cleaned up.

WHEELER:

So in talking about the impacts, I think a lot of people perhaps then will go, Oh gosh, why are we doing this in the first place? So Matt, I'm going to combine two questions cause I think you can answer them together. The climate and environmental benefits of offshore wind and relatedly, why can't we just use less electricity? Why is it necessary to develop new energy sources?

SIMMONS:

So we're in a climate crisis, and the reason we're in a climate crisis is because we are burning fossil fuels. We burn fossil fuels when you drive your car around, you burn fossil fuels when you use electricity, because a lot of our electricity still comes from burning fossil fuels. And so one of the best ways to fight the climate crisis is to develop new renewable energy resources that generate electricity without burning fossil fuels. That way you can then use that electricity to power your car, heat your home, do all the things that we need to do in order to have a society without burning fossil fuels.

The Humboldt Wind Energy Area has the capacity to generate like a truly astonishing amount of electricity, and so building this project would really make a significant dent in not just like far more than Humboldt's usage, like all of California's electricity usage. And as a country and as a state, as we're looking at trying to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, projects like this that significantly reduce our need for fossil fuels are, according to basically all the climate scientists who are studying how to fix this problem, pretty necessary.

So then your follow-up question is about why don't we just use less? And I would say we should use less. EPIC supports the Humboldt County Climate Action Plan and other measures that are designed to reduce our consumption and our use, right? There's all sorts of stuff we can do, like taking public transit, weatherizing our homes, all sorts of things. But at the end of the day, you need electricity, and you need electricity at all times of the day. And so a resource like solar power, which a lot of people point to as sort of a better alternative than offshore wind, really only works during the daytime, and you need other renewable energy resources to help balance that out. According to California's models and the federal government's models, wind and offshore wind are part of that energy mix to get us to being completely off of fossil fuels.

WHEELER:

All right, seems like a pretty good answer.

SIMMONS:

And I guess I should just say the word climate crisis doesn't have any specific meaning to it for a lot of people. There's a section of this website that talks specifically about how the climate crisis will impact the North Coast, whether it's sea level rise, ocean acidification, the loss of our coastal fog, which I think we all at Humboldt just felt this past week. We are experiencing the negative impacts of climate change already. And if we don't quickly build new renewable energy sources and shift away from fossil fuels, that's only gonna be felt worse. And so I think as we're talking about these projects, it's important to have that context in mind.

WHEELER:

All right, check it out on northcoastoffshorewind.org. Jen, I will bring it back to you. Fish, fish are something that people ask me a lot about. And I know that this has been one of the things that has driven some of the tribal concerns about this project. What do we know about fish and offshore wind?

KALT:

As far as I know, we don't know a ton about it. Maybe Matt knows more about it than I do. You know, I'm a botanist, but I love fish and I work to protect fish. I have heard a lot of talk about effects related to electromagnetic fields. And I actually look forward to reading this part of our website because I haven't researched it too much myself.

WHEELER:

All right, well then I'll pass it to Matt. Matt.

SIMMONS:

This part of our website is actually fairly sparse, and that's because most of the research that has been done on EMFs find limited localized impacts to marine species. So usually what happens is you'll have a cable in the water and the crabs will move slightly away from the cable, but EMFs dissipate very quickly in the ocean. And so it's a sort of contained effect, if that makes sense. There's also research out there that talks about the potential benefits of offshore wind to fish species. There's an idea that with less fishing in the area, you can actually see a benefit to some marine species.

KALT:

Well and we do know that the fishing industry is really experiencing some of the earliest effects of climate change. You know, whether it's ocean acidification or the type of marine heatwave that resulted in all the whale entanglement and crab gear in 2014 because the fishermen were delayed in getting their crab gear out until right when the gray whales were coming through. And so they've taken a lot of hits that are really directly linked to climate change.

SIMMONS:

I can say one more thing about this, which is on the East Coast, their wind turbines are fixed bottom. So they attach directly to the ocean floor and there's a belief that they will actually act as artificial reefs, right? So we actually see this with a lot of old oil rigs where over time, marine species have glommed on to the artificial structure and then it creates artificial habitat out in the ocean. Our floating offshore wind turbines are less likely to have as significant of a effect like that, although I actually just recently read a research where they looked at a floating wind turbine off the coast of Ireland.

WHEELER:

Scotland. Sorry, don't get my countries confused, buddy. Okay.

SIMMONS:

I knew it was one of the two of them. I took a stab in the dark. Scotland, thank you Tom, also reading this with me, and they actually did find marine species stuck to the bottom of these floating turbines and also some fish hanging out eating. And so anytime you put anything in the ocean, you're having some sort of effect, positive and negative probably. And I think there's a lot more research that needs to be done into those sort of interactions.

WHEELER:

All right. Having done all this research, having put together this website, what are you most concerned about? And then on the flip, what are you most excited about or what has been the kind of piece of information that you've learned that has most eased your mind?

KALT:

You can probably guess that I am most concerned about the impacts to Humboldt Bay from the heavy lift terminal. This would be a major, major change in Humboldt Bay and people have been working for many decades to restore the damage from the past and we've never seen any kind of industrial development like what's being proposed now. So that's deeply concerning. What I am most excited about is getting enough offshore wind into the state grid to unplug the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, which is dangerous. It's being operated beyond its lifespan and basically the governor extended its license for five years because California could not possibly unplug it, shut it down, take it off the grid without having brownouts and blackouts. And we're making big progress on expanding renewable production, but we need more that's at night and during the winter to be able to unplug that thing once and for all.

WHEELER:

All right, Matt, most concerned, most excited.

SIMMONS:

This might not be exactly the answer you're expecting, but I'm actually concerned that these projects will just disappear without us even really getting a chance to have influence on them. They require a lot of federal and state support. And there's a lot of people, fossil fuel interests and others, pushing back on this renewable energy transition. And so I'm actually very concerned that these projects will never get to a point where we can actually really, truly understand their impacts and make a choice as a community about whether or not it's right for us. I think the thing I'm most excited about is all of the surveys and studies that are being done, particularly off of our coast. We didn't get to talk about it, but RWE is currently using a robot to dive super deep in the ocean and study the seafloor, which is super cool. And we're learning more about the benthic communities living off the coast of our ocean than we've ever known before because of the research being done for this project. So I'm just personally, in a nerdy way, excited to learn all this information.

WHEELER:

I will say, I will give my own answer. I'm not part of this panel, but I'll kind of build on, on your answer. I'm really excited or it's really fun to engage in projects like this, where you get to really sink your teeth into the subject matter, you get to ask hard questions, I think that we all do better when we look deeply at something like this and we question our preexisting biases and we really try to, we try to engage meaningfully in the public question. And that's what we get to do here. And that's a lot of fun. And that's what I hope this website NorthCoastOffshoreWind.org can help us do. So unfortunately we are out of time and we're out of my top 10 questions about offshore wind. But there are a ton more, there are a ton more questions, a ton more answers on the website. So check it out.

KALT:

And, if you have a question that we haven't addressed, or information you think we should consider, please send us an email. There's an email that you can send it to, and we will research it. And the good news is that these are objective local environmental group reps that are doing this research. We're not putting out information and repeating information that's being developed by people with any particular agenda.

WHEELER:

And we've already had a couple of really great questions come in. What are some of the ones that we want to tackle next? I believe there's one on.

SIMMONS:

We got a question about earthquakes and tsunamis. We got a question about site surveys and what's going on with that. We got a question about job opportunities. Someone wanted to work on the offshore wind turbine and asked about what the jobs were. What do you think of a specific one, Tom?

WHEELER:

No

SIMMONS:

Oh, those were the w-

WHEELER:

ones. Okay. All right. Cool.

KALT:

And I wanna give a big shout out to Abigail Lowell who's been doing all the heavy lifting on putting this website together because this was sort of an idea that I had no idea how to really implement a couple of years ago and been collecting all this info. But thanks, Abigail.

WHEELER:

All right, check it out, NorthCoastOffshoreWind.org. Join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.