FOX News claims that 1) 6 whales have been killed by wind farm development in the last month, and 2) offshore wind farms pose a severe threat to aquatic life.
What do you guys make of this?
FOX News claims that 1) 6 whales have been killed by wind farm development in the last month, and 2) offshore wind farms pose a severe threat to aquatic life.
What do you guys make of this?
Just two general thoughts, not a debunk in itself:
Any work, or simply presence, in any ecosystem will harm some life there in some way. That makes the statement “X will harm marine life” a bit pointless. Quantify the statement to make it worthwhile: How much harm does it cause, and how does this harm compare to other, similar activities? Especially interesting questions might be: Does it cause unecessary, or avoidable harm? If we don’t do X, but Y, how much harm would Y cause instead?
Again I’m missing context. What’s the opportunity cost of not building offshore wind farms? For example, how many whales are killed by oil spills and other energy related activities which could reduce if we build more wind farms? Not saying wind farms are better (although I believe they are, but that’s not the point), just saying we need to put the numbers in context to make sense of them.
In summary, it’s easy to find bad things about anything. To decide wether an option is still a good or even the best option, we have to compare it to the other options (all of which will also cause harm).