The Biden Administration’s Big Sellout in the Gulf
How the so-called ‘transition to clean energy’ is helping Big Oil to double down on what they do best.
Ironically, as news of hurricane Idalia aiming for the Gulf Coast of Florida fills the news, little is being broadcast about another Gulf disaster – Tuesday’s successful auction by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the first-ever in Gulf waters for offshore wind turbines.
Following the successful bid of $5.6 million by RWE AG, based in Germany, BOEM immediately sent out a congratulatory tweet on the sale of the 102,000-acre “Lake Charles” lease area.
While BOEM’S environmental assessment of the Gulf areas up for bid (which included two others off of Galveston that didn’t sell) acknowledged that although whales and other marine mammals would be most at risk by upcoming survey activities, it claimed that there’s already so much noise and pollution going on in the Gulf that offshore wind development will pose “minimal” threats and have “no significant impact” on environmental resources.
But one undeniable impact that occurred in advance of this offshore wind auction was the holding of yet another auction, also of offshore leases in the Gulf of Mexico, only this one for oil and gas drilling rights.
Oil and gas lease sale 259, held by BOEM on March 29, 2023, took in nearly $264 million for 313 tracks covering 1.6 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico. This additional devastation of Gulf waters and their environmental resources was the direct result of lease sales for offshore wind turbines.
As required by the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA), all offshore wind leases are predicated on making available millions of acres of Gulf and ocean waters for oil and gas drilling prior to an offshore wind lease offering. And that’s for the next ten years.
That makes lease sale 259 just the beginning of an offshore oil and gas drilling bonanza for the big names in Big Oil — all thanks to Big Wind.
In September 2023, another oil and gas sale in Gulf waters will be held by BOEM to comply with the IRA, lease 261. As BOEM states in its Environmental Impact Statement for both Gulf lease offerings:
Halting oil and gas leasing on the OCS would also halt OCS renewable energy leasing, which has otherwise accelerated sharply in recent years.
BOEM makes it very clear that lease offerings to drill for oil and gas on the OCS (outer continental shelf) will continue. And it will need to match the pace of offshore wind, making offshore turbine development an environmental catastrophe in every way.
Similar to the concerns of New Jersey environmental activists regarding the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale, with numbers now said to be below 350, the Gulf of Mexico is home to one of the most endangered large whales in the world, the Rice’s whale.
Native to the Gulf with no other populations anywhere in the world, there are only approximately 51 Rice’s whales left on Earth.
Will the upcoming “wind rigs” or lease 259 or however many more insults BOEM can give the Gulf be the final tipping point for this endangered marine mammal?
Fifty years ago, a much-reviled Republican president, Richard Nixon, signed the Endangered Species Act, which has been credited by the U.S. Department of Interior with saving hundreds of threatened species from extinction.
Will the Democratic Biden administration have the distinction of initiating and mandating a policy that will result in the first human-caused extinction of a large whale species? And will that be limited to just one such species under its less-than-trustworthy watch?
If you don't care about politics or big government intruding on every aspect of your life you really must care about this The future of our children and grandchildren depends on us stopping these turbines from destroying our oceans and everything that lives in it or flies over it So far they have only mapped the ocean floor off the New Jersey shore and other areas along the east coast and hundreds of whales dolphins and an unknown number of other species have washed ashore It has be reported by commercial fishermen who livelihood is imperiled that boats are towing the bodies of dead whales further out to sea so we won't see them on our beaches
The only winners here are the foreign companies like Orstead who build the monstrosities and the government officials who grant permits and probably line their own pockets along the way
Please do your research Follow reporters like Linda Bonvie who devote themselves to doing the hard work of finding the truth so we can know how our world will be affected and what we must do now before it's too late
By the time all the well-intentioned folks out there who have been unwittingly applauding the collusion and conspiratorial behavior of big corporate interests start to realize the game is "rigged," it will be too late to head off the massive damage that's about to be inflicted on the environment they so want preserved.