the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Long Beach Island NJ, Christine Todd Whitman, who as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under George W Bush at the time of the 9/11 attacks told the public the air around Ground Zero in New York was safe to breathe, has admitted for the first time she was wrong.
Among those who were exposed to toxins released when the World Trade Center collapsed, the toll of illness and death continues to rise. One major study of New York firefighters, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010, found significant decreases in lung capacity – even six years after the attacks. This is seen as a highly credible finding because it involved no fewer than 12,781 people and included lung function tests conducted before and after 9/11.
Like Whitman now some “environmental advocates” and Democratic lawmakers say that there is no evidence connecting offshore wind development to the deaths of whales and dolphins off the coast of New Jersey. They are instead pointing to climate change. The group gathered in Long Branch on Monday to dispel what they say is “disinformation” as well as to push to keep offshore drilling away from the Atlantic Coast. Sen. Cory Booker and Rep. Frank Pallone among them .
Insisting its “Climate change”, not wind power causing deaths of whales at Jersey Shore, activists and lawmakers say, but blaming climate change for political incompetence seems to become a go to in New Jersey .
Politicians of course love to blame the damage they cause on “Climate change” because it masks the fact governments are responsible for so many poorly made and incompetent decisions .
But according to NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) “Levels of underwater noise from human activities—including from ships, sonar, and drilling—have increased dramatically. Those growing levels of ocean noise affect marine animals and habitats in complex ways.”
NOAA states ,”Not all sound is created equal. Sources of ocean noise vary in many ways, including how loud they are (intensity, measured in decibels), how long they last (fractions of a second to never ending), and their pitch or tone (frequency, measured in hertz). Think about frequencies relative to tones on a piano. Way down low on the bottom keys are the frequencies that most of the large whale species, as well as large numbers of fish species, use to communicate.”
“Those growing levels of ocean noise affect marine animals and habitats in complex ways. For one thing, sounds below the surface differ from noises you hear above the waves. Underwater, noises travel farther. In one experiment from the early 1990s, researchers placed a speaker near Antarctica, played some low-frequency or deep-pitched sounds, and picked up those sounds near Bermuda—demonstrating that sound can literally travel halfway around the world.”
Senator Declan O’Scanlon and Senator Ed Durr renewed their call for Governor Murphy to pause offshore wind farm surveys to investigate if the work is responsible for dozens of whale and dolphin deaths. They also questioned why several recently announced projects to study marine life in the area are being conducted without a pause in the survey work.
“While I am happy to see that the Board of Public Utilities will start studying the diversity of marine life around the proposed wind farms, we continue to believe Governor Murphy should pause the survey work related to wind farm development,” said O’Scanlon (R-13). “It’s likely they won’t get an accurate picture of the marine life in the area while wind developers are disturbing our coastal waters with sonar blasts, drilling, and other activities. They should have started the marine life surveys before the wind farm work began to get an accurate baseline. A pause of offshore wind preparations would provide ample time for researchers to do their job and deliver accurate results from their studies.”
Since December 2022, there have been nearly 40 whales, dolphins, and porpoises that have died along the New Jersey coast, according to the Marine Mammal Stranding Center.
The BPU announced the funding of several projects to better understand marine life in the area around the wind farm, but will not pause the wind farm survey work as a number of Republican legislators and concerned groups have requested.
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