Meet the whale that may upend the offshore oil industry
Dino Grandoni and Timothy Puko,
Updated Mon, September 25, 2023
By Nichola Groom and Clark Mindock
(Reuters) -A U.S. appeals court on Monday gave the Biden administration until Nov. 8 to hold an expanded sale of oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico, the latest development in a legal fight over federal protection of an endangered species of whale.
The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a request by the U.S. Interior Department to stay part of an order issued by a federal judge in Louisiana, which had given the government until the end of this month to hold an auction that includes 6 million acres (2.4 million hectares) more than it had planned to offer.
The Interior Department had told the appeals court it disagreed with U.S. District Judge James Cain's ruling, but only asked the court give its Bureau of Ocean Energy Management more time to hold the sale. The U.S. said the short deadline injected "chaos" into an auction that had already started by mail and needed to be changed significantly to comply with the order.
The 5th Circuit did not block the lower court judge's decision more broadly, which environmental groups had said was necessary to protect the endangered Rice's whale from oil and gas development.
Cain's Sept. 22 order had been celebrated by the oil and gas industry, which had sued in August alongside the state of Louisiana over an earlier decision by the Interior Department to scale back the auction.
The Interior Department declined to comment on the ruling.
The American Petroleum Institute (API), a plaintiff in the suit, said it was pleased that the court had upheld the lower court's decision to reinstate acreage and remove "burdensome stipulations," but expressed disappointment with the delay.
"It should not take a court order or an act of Congress for Interior to carry out its responsibility to meet the energy needs of the American people," API Senior Vice President Ryan Meyers said in a statement.
Representatives for the environmental groups and the Louisiana attorney general's office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Democratic President Joe Biden originally paused federal drilling auctions shortly after taking office in 2021 as part of his climate change agenda.
The Interior Department finalized plans for a reduced lease sale in August, after last year's Inflation Reduction Act mandated the auction move forward. The sale made about 67 million acres in the Gulf available for bids.
The changes stemmed from an agreement struck in August between federal agencies and environmental groups that had sued in 2020 alleging the government did not provide adequate safeguards for the whales.
Those groups had claimed the whales can be harmed or killed by oil spills, vessel strikes, noise, marine debris and other impacts of oil and gas exploration and development.
(Reporting by Nichola Groom and Clark Mindock; Editing by Sandra Maler, Alexia Garamfalvi, Richard Chang and Sonali Paul)
Coast Guard spots critically endangered whales off Louisiana
Emily Mae Czachor
Updated Tue, September 26, 2023
Officers with the United States Coast Guard captured video footage over the weekend of one of the most endangered whales on the planet, after encountering three of the creatures off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico.
The footage shows three Rice's whales, enormous members of the baleen whale family that have been seen in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico, marine wildlife officials say. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that there are likely fewer than 100 Rice's whales left in the world.
"CRITICALLY ENDANGERED SPECIES SIGHTING: Station Venice presents to you……. Rice's Whale," the U.S. Coast Guard station in Venice wrote on Facebook Sunday, captioning a 16-second video of the whales swimming nearby. The video was removed later on Tuesday from the U.S. Coast Guard Venice station's Facebook page.
"It is thought there is less than 100 individuals of this species remaining," the Coast Guard said.
Coast Guard officers from the agency's Venice station spotted the whales while on a Living Marine Resource patrol, an operation meant to manage and protect fish and other marine resources, in the Mississippi Canyon, a spokesperson for the U.S. Coast Guard said, according to the Miami Herald. What they initially believed to be large pieces of floating debris turned out to be three Rice's whales, estimated to measure about 25 feet long, according to the newspaper.
CBS News contacted the U.S. Coast Guard for confirmation and more details but did not receive an immediate reply.
The Mississippi Canyon is a sprawling underwater canyon located in the north-central part of the Gulf of Mexico, south of Louisiana. The Coast Guard's recent sighting in that area came after another by researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration over the summer. That sighting also happened in the Gulf of Mexico, according to NOAA Fisheries.
While surveying the northeastern portion of the Gulf, researchers observed a Rice's whale blow in the distance, and eventually steered their vessel closer to the whale until it was floating adjacent to their boat in the water. Tony Martinez, the field chief scientist on the survey, said in a statement that being able to capture such detailed photographs of the Rice's whale and observe the sounds it makes, is critical to understanding the endangered species, which in turn helps to protect the population.
Although previous surveys have mainly placed the remaining Rice's whales in the northeastern section of the Gulf of Mexico, it is thought that the whales may have once been found throughout a wider section of the Gulf, NOAA Fisheries said.
Chris D'Angelo
Updated Wed, September 27, 2023 at 5:18 AM MDT·6 min read
Former President Donald Trump has joined the right-wing war against offshore wind with an evidence-free rant about the fledgling industry being responsible for a spate of recent whale deaths along the East Coast.
“Their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before,” Trump said Sunday during a campaign speech in South Carolina. “The windmills are driving them crazy. They’re driving the whales, I think, a little batty.”
Trump, who as president spearheaded a fossil fuel-centric “energy dominance” agenda and repeatedly exaggerated the wind industry’s impact on birds, told the crowd that he “saw this weekend, three of them came [ashore].”
“You wouldn’t see it once a year,” he claimed, referring to some unspecified time in the past. “Now they’re coming up on a weekly basis.”
Trump appeared to be referencing reports from last month, when three dead humpback whales washed ashore in the Tri-State area over a four-day period. At least one showed signs of being hit by a boat, although federal officials have yet to conclude full necropsies.
To be clear, wind development — like any other offshore activity — does have the potential to disrupt and harm whales and otherwise negatively impact the ocean environment. It is not without environmental risks, and scientists have urged federal agencies to remain vigilant as the industry expands in U.S. waters.
But federal scientists have repeatedly thrown cold water on sweeping claims coming from fossil fuel-allied climate denial groups, anti-wind organizations and GOP lawmakers — namely, that offshore wind development is wreaking havoc on whales.
“At this point, there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause mortality of whales,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration states on its website. “There are no known links between recent large whale mortalities and ongoing offshore wind surveys.”
To make their case, anti-wind advocates often conflate the plight of the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale with recent humpback whale strandings, which federal authorities have classified as an “unusual mortality event” that dates back to 2016.
Along with dismissing any link between the whale deaths and offshore wind, officials have stressed that vessel strikes, entanglement in fishing gear and climate change are among the biggest human threats to whales, including humpback and right whales. More than 200 humpback whales have died along the East Coast since 2016. Forty percent of the animals that underwent necropsies showed signs of being struck by a boat or an entanglement.
Ironically, Trump’s comments were part of a broader attack on what he called the Biden administration’s “extreme regulatory attacks,” specifically a new proposal to expand vessel speed limits and seasonal speed zones along the East Coast — changes that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says are “essential to stabilize the ongoing right whale population decline and prevent the species’ extinction.”
An endangered North Atlantic right whale entangled in fishing rope swims alongside a newborn calf on Dec. 2, 2021, in waters near Cumberland Island, Georgia.
“The Biden administration, right now, is trying to bludgeon the boating and maritime industry,” Trump said, adding the proposed rule would limit vessels to the speed of “a slow golf cart.” He claimed that only one whale has been killed by a vessel strike off South Carolina in the last 50 years and, more bizarrely, that a person has “a better chance of being struck by lightning than hitting a whale with your boat” — talking points that sound like something pulled straight from a shipping industry newsletter.
The former president’s rant shines a clear light on the pipeline of misinformation now flowing between conservative, fossil-fuel aligned groups, right-wing media and GOP lawmakers.
As HuffPost reported last year, anti-offshore wind groups, including some of the nation’s most hard-line climate change denial outfits, suddenly branded themselves guardians of the endangered right whale as they ramped up a legal war against newly approved offshore wind projects. Fox News hosts have given anti-wind advocates hours of airtime to peddle unfounded claims about offshore wind devastating whale populations, while often parroting those talking points themselves.
In March, Republicans introduced a resolution that cited recent whale deaths and called for an immediate federal moratorium on offshore wind leasing and construction activity pending the outcome of an investigation to “determine the true impacts” of this development. The resolution came three days after Peter Murphy, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, or CFACT, a right-wing group with a long history of peddling climate change disinformation, penned a post on the organization’s website calling for a moratorium.
More recently, Michael Shellenberger, the two-time unsuccessful California gubernatorial candidate and centrist environmental nonprofit leader, co-produced a documentary, titled “Thrown to the Wind,” which argues in no uncertain terms that when it comes to offshore wind and the recent whale deaths, correlation is as good as causation.
The documentary “proves that the US government officials have been lying” about the cause of the whale mortalities, Shellenberger wrote in an Aug. 26 piece published in the conservative New York Post. (The Post added quotation marks to the headline, which reads: “New documentary ‘proves’ building offshore wind farms does kill whales.”)
Fox News has had Shellenberger on to promote his film at least four times, according to Media Matters to Media Matters, a media watchdog group. In one interview with Fox’s Brian Kilmeade, Shellenberger said he and his team are “working with Congress to get hearings and an investigation on this, because we think there is widespread corruption, including in the U.S. government.”
They’ll almost certainly find allies on Capitol Hill.
“These windmills, according to an earlier report on your network, are killing the whales,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told Fox in an interview earlier this month, apparently referencing the unfounded claims in Shellenberger documentary.
Even as whales have become a key tool in the right-wing fight against offshore wind, Trump and other conservatives are actively condemning more stringent vessel speed limits — a concrete action aimed at curbing one of the primary threats to the animals.
Last year, HuffPost asked CFACT’s Collister Johnson about the vessel speed rule. He dismissed the idea that reducing vessel speeds could help safeguard whales. And when pressed about what he sees as the solution, he quickly argued that’s for federal regulators to figure out.
“That’s not our problem,” he said.
Related...
Republicans Are Latching On To A New Conspiracy Theory — And It's Comically Absurd
Climate Deniers Exploit Endangered Whales In Bid To Kill Offshore Wind
Ron Johnson Spouts A Big Blubbery Tale About Whale-Killing Windmills
‘Debris’ floating in Gulf of Mexico turns out to be 3 endangered creatures
Moira Ritter
Mon, September 25, 2023 at 2:19 PM MDT·1 min read
210
Unsplash
CLARIFICATION: This story has been updated to reflect that Coast Guard officials identified the whales spotted in the Gulf of Mexico as sperm whales after previously identifying them as critically endangered Rice’s whales. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also told McClatchy News in a statement that they are sperm whales.
The story continues below.
Coast Guard officers were conducting a routine patrol in the Gulf of Mexico when they spotted something strange.
The officers from the U.S. Coast Guard Station Venice were on a Living Marine Resource patrol — which seeks to protect fish and marine resources — near the Mississippi Canyon, a spokesperson told McClatchy News. That’s when they saw what appeared to be a pile of debris floating in the water.
As the officers got closer though, they realized they had discovered something much more special: It was three 25-foot sperm whales.
Officials shared a video of one of the creatures swimming through the water in a Sept. 24 Facebook post.
The video shows a sperm whale, a spokesperson from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wrote in an email to McClatchy News.
Sperm whales are endangered and are typically found in Alaska and the northern Atlantic, according to Whale Sense. The deep-diving creatures are known to prey on squid, sharks and other fish. Females can grow to 40 feet and 15 tons, while males can be up to 52 feet and 45 tons.
The whales were spotted roughly 30 miles south of the SouthWest Pass, which is south of New Orleans.
Dino Grandoni and Timothy Puko,
(c) 2023, The Washington Post
Tue, September 26, 2023
Rice's whale, also known as the Gulf of Mexico whale. (NOAA Fisheries)
It was a whale of an announcement.
After years of research, scientists said they had discovered an entirely new species of whale swimming right under their noses in the Gulf of Mexico.
Yet as soon as scientists identified Rice's whale, also known as the Gulf of Mexico whale, two years ago, there was a problem. There were hardly any left. With only about 50 remaining, the whale is one of the most endangered marine mammals on Earth.
Now efforts to protect the whale are running headfirst into that other behemoth off the Gulf Coast: the offshore oil and gas industry.
The Biden administration has proposed protecting a massive swath of ocean from Texas to Florida, potentially restricting fossil fuel activity in one of the nation's top oil-producing spots. Already Biden's deputies sought to remove millions of acres within its habitat from an offshore oil lease sale originally scheduled for Wednesday.
Offshore oil drillers and Republican lawmakers from Gulf Coast states responded with lawsuits to stop protections they say are economically crippling and hastily executed.
A federal district judge last week agreed, ordering the Biden administration to reverse course on the upcoming lease sale. An appellate court Monday delayed the lease sale until November.
The decision to remove acreage from auction "circumvented the law, ignored science, and bypassed public input," said Erik Milito, head of the National Ocean Industries Association, an offshore energy lobbying group.
But scientists say oil extraction still poses a clear risk to the whale, with officials estimating the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010 wiped out about one-fifth of the population. With so few Rice's whales left, the loss of even a single individual is devastating for the species.
"The science is quite clear that these whales won't survive in an environment with such heavy industry," said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group. "It would just be an incredible tragedy to watch this whale species go extinct, especially so soon after we learned that it was its own species."
---
An all-American whale
In early 2019, a whale washed ashore in the Florida Everglades. It was a bad day for the whale, which died, but a great one for Michael McGowen.
Like many marine biologists, McGowen, a research zoologist and curator of marine mammals at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, knew there was something special about the whales in the Gulf of Mexico.
For decades, the region's whales were thought to be members of a widespread species called Bryde's whales. But a genetic analysis in 2014 suggested that the whales were so different that they might be a species unto themselves.
But to officially declare an animal a new species, scientists needed a body - a single example of an organism used to formally describe a new branch on the tree of life. For years, marine biologists struggled to find that first specimen - what scientists call a holotype - for the Gulf of Mexico's whales.
So when he got the call in 2019 about the whale, McGowen was elated. "We said that we would take the whole thing."
Transporting a rotting, 38-foot carcass up the East Coast is not easy. To allow its flesh to decompose, the body was loaded on a flatbed truck and driven 200 miles north to be buried in a secluded sand spit south of St. Petersburg. "People are going to complain if this giant whale is stinking up everything," McGowen said.
Five months later, the team exhumed the bones and drove them to the Bonehenge Whale Center in North Carolina to be buried in manure for further composting. Finally, the skeleton was shipped to a Smithsonian storage facility in Maryland to remove the grease from the blubbery remains.
"This skeleton of a mature male was very greasy," said John Ososky, who led the carcass retrieval for the museum.
After examining the whale's skull, scientists with the National Marine Fisheries Service published a study in 2021 declaring Rice's whale a new species. The animal was named after the late biologist Dale Rice, the first to identify the whales in the Gulf of Mexico.
Because the whales appear to live exclusively in U.S. waters, only the United States can protect them.
"This is the only whale in the world that lives entirely in the waters of one nation," said Peter Corkeron, a whale biologist who has been ringing the alarm bell. "I initially wanted to see it called the 'American whale.'"
---
A whale in 'prime real estate'
Despite the discovery, very little is known about America's newest whale.
They are "very difficult to work with because they're very shy," said Jeremy Kiszka, a Florida International University marine biologist who helped decipher their diet. The whales are picky eaters, diving deep for fatty fish.
"They will not let you come too close," he said.
Another thing we know: Humans are a big threat.
Beyond oil spills, seismic air guns that blast sound waves underwater to search for oil and gas deposits can create a deafening environment for marine mammals. Other threats include vessel strikes, entanglement in fishing gear and debris in the ocean. A hard piece of plastic found in the stomach of the Rice's whale that washed up in the Florida Everglades may have contributed to its death.
Prompted by lawsuits from environmental groups, the Biden administration started taking greater steps this summer to protect the whales under the Endangered Species Act and other laws.
In July, National Marine Fisheries Service proposed designating a 28,000-square-mile swath in the Gulf of Mexico as critical habitat for Rice's whales.
And in August, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which oversees offshore oil and gas leasing, removed 6 million acres of Rice's whale habitat from the Wednesday offshore oil lease sale.
The agency also wanted to require oil companies to lower the speed of their vessels in the whales' waters and avoid the area after sunset. The whales rest at the surface at night, making them vulnerable to being hit by boats.
"This whale is really a poster species for why we need to end offshore oil and gas drilling," Monsell said.
But immediately, Republican lawmakers complained that throttling vessel traffic would hamper the Gulf Coast economy. The speed limits, said Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), would "detrimentally impact our nation's ability to domestically produce oil and gas in hopes of becoming energy independent."
Milito, the offshore lobbyist, said it is too early to tell right now how offshore wind and other industries would be impacted by protections for the whales. But he and other lobbyists said they could lead oil companies and investors to rethink their plans for the region.
"For oil and gas, it could be significant," Milito said. "The withdrawn acreage, it's prime real estate."
A ban on overnight maritime shipping could cause gridlock for an industry that runs around-the-clock, oil lobbyists said. Such changes could lead to offshore operations consuming more energy or a sharp increase in the cost of running them, they said.
The National Marine Fisheries Service, also known as NOAA Fisheries, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
---
'The least we could be doing' to protect the whale
The state of Louisiana and the oil giant Chevron joined the American Petroleum Institute (API), a top lobbying group, to sue the Biden administration and put those 6 million acres back on the auction block on Wednesday without the new stipulations for the whales. They argued officials made a last-minute decision that the science supported restrictions across the Gulf.
"At 11th hour, right before this lease sale, the administration did a 180 turn," said Ryan Meyers, API's senior vice president and general counsel.
In a decision issued Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge James D. Cain Jr. ruled in favor of Louisiana and the oil sector. The judge, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, wrote the "process followed here looks more like a weaponization of the Endangered Species Act than the collaborative, reasoned approach."
Environmental groups responded by appealing the decision while BOEM asked for an emergency stay of the judge's order. On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit delayed the lease sale until Nov. 8.
"These baseline protections for the Rice's whale are quite literally the least we could be doing to save the species from extinction," Steve Mashuda, an attorney at the green group Earthjustice, said in a statement.
Despite the legal battle, the Biden administration is still considering designating a long stretch of the Gulf of Mexico as critical habitat, a move that could end up imposing more restrictions on oil and gas activity in future lease sales.
Many oil lobbyists are still wary of President Biden's campaign promise to ban offshore drilling. His administration is expected to announce this week a long-awaited plan for offshore oil leasing for the next five years.
The oil and gas sector is the first affected by the whale protections because the environmental groups' lawsuit targeted it specifically, but other industries might face restrictions, too, Milito said. The proposal arrives at a time of transformation in U.S. waters, with anti-wind advocates worried about the impact of offshore turbines on whales.
"It might be oil and gas now," Milito said. "But eventually it's going to apply to every maritime business" in the Gulf.
For environmentalists and scientists, there is little time left to protect the whales. The Smithsonian plans to raise awareness with a forthcoming exhibit of one of its Rice's whale bones and the piece of plastic from its stomach. And marine biologist Kiszka will continue studying what the whale eats.
"I'm not confident that in 50 years they're going to be around," Kiszka said. "Honestly, I wouldn't bet my life on it."
This article is part of Animalia, a column exploring the strange and fascinating world of animals and the ways in which we appreciate, imperil and depend on them.
US gets more time for oil auction in lawsuit over Gulf of Mexico whales
Tue, September 26, 2023
Rice's whale, also known as the Gulf of Mexico whale. (NOAA Fisheries)
It was a whale of an announcement.
After years of research, scientists said they had discovered an entirely new species of whale swimming right under their noses in the Gulf of Mexico.
Yet as soon as scientists identified Rice's whale, also known as the Gulf of Mexico whale, two years ago, there was a problem. There were hardly any left. With only about 50 remaining, the whale is one of the most endangered marine mammals on Earth.
Now efforts to protect the whale are running headfirst into that other behemoth off the Gulf Coast: the offshore oil and gas industry.
The Biden administration has proposed protecting a massive swath of ocean from Texas to Florida, potentially restricting fossil fuel activity in one of the nation's top oil-producing spots. Already Biden's deputies sought to remove millions of acres within its habitat from an offshore oil lease sale originally scheduled for Wednesday.
Offshore oil drillers and Republican lawmakers from Gulf Coast states responded with lawsuits to stop protections they say are economically crippling and hastily executed.
A federal district judge last week agreed, ordering the Biden administration to reverse course on the upcoming lease sale. An appellate court Monday delayed the lease sale until November.
The decision to remove acreage from auction "circumvented the law, ignored science, and bypassed public input," said Erik Milito, head of the National Ocean Industries Association, an offshore energy lobbying group.
But scientists say oil extraction still poses a clear risk to the whale, with officials estimating the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010 wiped out about one-fifth of the population. With so few Rice's whales left, the loss of even a single individual is devastating for the species.
"The science is quite clear that these whales won't survive in an environment with such heavy industry," said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group. "It would just be an incredible tragedy to watch this whale species go extinct, especially so soon after we learned that it was its own species."
---
An all-American whale
In early 2019, a whale washed ashore in the Florida Everglades. It was a bad day for the whale, which died, but a great one for Michael McGowen.
Like many marine biologists, McGowen, a research zoologist and curator of marine mammals at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, knew there was something special about the whales in the Gulf of Mexico.
For decades, the region's whales were thought to be members of a widespread species called Bryde's whales. But a genetic analysis in 2014 suggested that the whales were so different that they might be a species unto themselves.
But to officially declare an animal a new species, scientists needed a body - a single example of an organism used to formally describe a new branch on the tree of life. For years, marine biologists struggled to find that first specimen - what scientists call a holotype - for the Gulf of Mexico's whales.
So when he got the call in 2019 about the whale, McGowen was elated. "We said that we would take the whole thing."
Transporting a rotting, 38-foot carcass up the East Coast is not easy. To allow its flesh to decompose, the body was loaded on a flatbed truck and driven 200 miles north to be buried in a secluded sand spit south of St. Petersburg. "People are going to complain if this giant whale is stinking up everything," McGowen said.
Five months later, the team exhumed the bones and drove them to the Bonehenge Whale Center in North Carolina to be buried in manure for further composting. Finally, the skeleton was shipped to a Smithsonian storage facility in Maryland to remove the grease from the blubbery remains.
"This skeleton of a mature male was very greasy," said John Ososky, who led the carcass retrieval for the museum.
After examining the whale's skull, scientists with the National Marine Fisheries Service published a study in 2021 declaring Rice's whale a new species. The animal was named after the late biologist Dale Rice, the first to identify the whales in the Gulf of Mexico.
Because the whales appear to live exclusively in U.S. waters, only the United States can protect them.
"This is the only whale in the world that lives entirely in the waters of one nation," said Peter Corkeron, a whale biologist who has been ringing the alarm bell. "I initially wanted to see it called the 'American whale.'"
---
A whale in 'prime real estate'
Despite the discovery, very little is known about America's newest whale.
They are "very difficult to work with because they're very shy," said Jeremy Kiszka, a Florida International University marine biologist who helped decipher their diet. The whales are picky eaters, diving deep for fatty fish.
"They will not let you come too close," he said.
Another thing we know: Humans are a big threat.
Beyond oil spills, seismic air guns that blast sound waves underwater to search for oil and gas deposits can create a deafening environment for marine mammals. Other threats include vessel strikes, entanglement in fishing gear and debris in the ocean. A hard piece of plastic found in the stomach of the Rice's whale that washed up in the Florida Everglades may have contributed to its death.
Prompted by lawsuits from environmental groups, the Biden administration started taking greater steps this summer to protect the whales under the Endangered Species Act and other laws.
In July, National Marine Fisheries Service proposed designating a 28,000-square-mile swath in the Gulf of Mexico as critical habitat for Rice's whales.
And in August, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which oversees offshore oil and gas leasing, removed 6 million acres of Rice's whale habitat from the Wednesday offshore oil lease sale.
The agency also wanted to require oil companies to lower the speed of their vessels in the whales' waters and avoid the area after sunset. The whales rest at the surface at night, making them vulnerable to being hit by boats.
"This whale is really a poster species for why we need to end offshore oil and gas drilling," Monsell said.
But immediately, Republican lawmakers complained that throttling vessel traffic would hamper the Gulf Coast economy. The speed limits, said Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), would "detrimentally impact our nation's ability to domestically produce oil and gas in hopes of becoming energy independent."
Milito, the offshore lobbyist, said it is too early to tell right now how offshore wind and other industries would be impacted by protections for the whales. But he and other lobbyists said they could lead oil companies and investors to rethink their plans for the region.
"For oil and gas, it could be significant," Milito said. "The withdrawn acreage, it's prime real estate."
A ban on overnight maritime shipping could cause gridlock for an industry that runs around-the-clock, oil lobbyists said. Such changes could lead to offshore operations consuming more energy or a sharp increase in the cost of running them, they said.
The National Marine Fisheries Service, also known as NOAA Fisheries, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
---
'The least we could be doing' to protect the whale
The state of Louisiana and the oil giant Chevron joined the American Petroleum Institute (API), a top lobbying group, to sue the Biden administration and put those 6 million acres back on the auction block on Wednesday without the new stipulations for the whales. They argued officials made a last-minute decision that the science supported restrictions across the Gulf.
"At 11th hour, right before this lease sale, the administration did a 180 turn," said Ryan Meyers, API's senior vice president and general counsel.
In a decision issued Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge James D. Cain Jr. ruled in favor of Louisiana and the oil sector. The judge, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, wrote the "process followed here looks more like a weaponization of the Endangered Species Act than the collaborative, reasoned approach."
Environmental groups responded by appealing the decision while BOEM asked for an emergency stay of the judge's order. On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit delayed the lease sale until Nov. 8.
"These baseline protections for the Rice's whale are quite literally the least we could be doing to save the species from extinction," Steve Mashuda, an attorney at the green group Earthjustice, said in a statement.
Despite the legal battle, the Biden administration is still considering designating a long stretch of the Gulf of Mexico as critical habitat, a move that could end up imposing more restrictions on oil and gas activity in future lease sales.
Many oil lobbyists are still wary of President Biden's campaign promise to ban offshore drilling. His administration is expected to announce this week a long-awaited plan for offshore oil leasing for the next five years.
The oil and gas sector is the first affected by the whale protections because the environmental groups' lawsuit targeted it specifically, but other industries might face restrictions, too, Milito said. The proposal arrives at a time of transformation in U.S. waters, with anti-wind advocates worried about the impact of offshore turbines on whales.
"It might be oil and gas now," Milito said. "But eventually it's going to apply to every maritime business" in the Gulf.
For environmentalists and scientists, there is little time left to protect the whales. The Smithsonian plans to raise awareness with a forthcoming exhibit of one of its Rice's whale bones and the piece of plastic from its stomach. And marine biologist Kiszka will continue studying what the whale eats.
"I'm not confident that in 50 years they're going to be around," Kiszka said. "Honestly, I wouldn't bet my life on it."
This article is part of Animalia, a column exploring the strange and fascinating world of animals and the ways in which we appreciate, imperil and depend on them.
US gets more time for oil auction in lawsuit over Gulf of Mexico whales
Updated Mon, September 25, 2023
By Nichola Groom and Clark Mindock
(Reuters) -A U.S. appeals court on Monday gave the Biden administration until Nov. 8 to hold an expanded sale of oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico, the latest development in a legal fight over federal protection of an endangered species of whale.
The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a request by the U.S. Interior Department to stay part of an order issued by a federal judge in Louisiana, which had given the government until the end of this month to hold an auction that includes 6 million acres (2.4 million hectares) more than it had planned to offer.
The Interior Department had told the appeals court it disagreed with U.S. District Judge James Cain's ruling, but only asked the court give its Bureau of Ocean Energy Management more time to hold the sale. The U.S. said the short deadline injected "chaos" into an auction that had already started by mail and needed to be changed significantly to comply with the order.
The 5th Circuit did not block the lower court judge's decision more broadly, which environmental groups had said was necessary to protect the endangered Rice's whale from oil and gas development.
Cain's Sept. 22 order had been celebrated by the oil and gas industry, which had sued in August alongside the state of Louisiana over an earlier decision by the Interior Department to scale back the auction.
The Interior Department declined to comment on the ruling.
The American Petroleum Institute (API), a plaintiff in the suit, said it was pleased that the court had upheld the lower court's decision to reinstate acreage and remove "burdensome stipulations," but expressed disappointment with the delay.
"It should not take a court order or an act of Congress for Interior to carry out its responsibility to meet the energy needs of the American people," API Senior Vice President Ryan Meyers said in a statement.
Representatives for the environmental groups and the Louisiana attorney general's office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Democratic President Joe Biden originally paused federal drilling auctions shortly after taking office in 2021 as part of his climate change agenda.
The Interior Department finalized plans for a reduced lease sale in August, after last year's Inflation Reduction Act mandated the auction move forward. The sale made about 67 million acres in the Gulf available for bids.
The changes stemmed from an agreement struck in August between federal agencies and environmental groups that had sued in 2020 alleging the government did not provide adequate safeguards for the whales.
Those groups had claimed the whales can be harmed or killed by oil spills, vessel strikes, noise, marine debris and other impacts of oil and gas exploration and development.
(Reporting by Nichola Groom and Clark Mindock; Editing by Sandra Maler, Alexia Garamfalvi, Richard Chang and Sonali Paul)
Coast Guard spots critically endangered whales off Louisiana
Emily Mae Czachor
Updated Tue, September 26, 2023
Officers with the United States Coast Guard captured video footage over the weekend of one of the most endangered whales on the planet, after encountering three of the creatures off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico.
The footage shows three Rice's whales, enormous members of the baleen whale family that have been seen in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico, marine wildlife officials say. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that there are likely fewer than 100 Rice's whales left in the world.
"CRITICALLY ENDANGERED SPECIES SIGHTING: Station Venice presents to you……. Rice's Whale," the U.S. Coast Guard station in Venice wrote on Facebook Sunday, captioning a 16-second video of the whales swimming nearby. The video was removed later on Tuesday from the U.S. Coast Guard Venice station's Facebook page.
"It is thought there is less than 100 individuals of this species remaining," the Coast Guard said.
Coast Guard officers from the agency's Venice station spotted the whales while on a Living Marine Resource patrol, an operation meant to manage and protect fish and other marine resources, in the Mississippi Canyon, a spokesperson for the U.S. Coast Guard said, according to the Miami Herald. What they initially believed to be large pieces of floating debris turned out to be three Rice's whales, estimated to measure about 25 feet long, according to the newspaper.
CBS News contacted the U.S. Coast Guard for confirmation and more details but did not receive an immediate reply.
The Mississippi Canyon is a sprawling underwater canyon located in the north-central part of the Gulf of Mexico, south of Louisiana. The Coast Guard's recent sighting in that area came after another by researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration over the summer. That sighting also happened in the Gulf of Mexico, according to NOAA Fisheries.
While surveying the northeastern portion of the Gulf, researchers observed a Rice's whale blow in the distance, and eventually steered their vessel closer to the whale until it was floating adjacent to their boat in the water. Tony Martinez, the field chief scientist on the survey, said in a statement that being able to capture such detailed photographs of the Rice's whale and observe the sounds it makes, is critical to understanding the endangered species, which in turn helps to protect the population.
Although previous surveys have mainly placed the remaining Rice's whales in the northeastern section of the Gulf of Mexico, it is thought that the whales may have once been found throughout a wider section of the Gulf, NOAA Fisheries said.
Trump Hops On Evidence-Free Campaign To Kill Offshore Wind
Chris D'Angelo
Updated Wed, September 27, 2023 at 5:18 AM MDT·6 min read
Former President Donald Trump has joined the right-wing war against offshore wind with an evidence-free rant about the fledgling industry being responsible for a spate of recent whale deaths along the East Coast.
“Their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before,” Trump said Sunday during a campaign speech in South Carolina. “The windmills are driving them crazy. They’re driving the whales, I think, a little batty.”
Trump, who as president spearheaded a fossil fuel-centric “energy dominance” agenda and repeatedly exaggerated the wind industry’s impact on birds, told the crowd that he “saw this weekend, three of them came [ashore].”
“You wouldn’t see it once a year,” he claimed, referring to some unspecified time in the past. “Now they’re coming up on a weekly basis.”
Trump appeared to be referencing reports from last month, when three dead humpback whales washed ashore in the Tri-State area over a four-day period. At least one showed signs of being hit by a boat, although federal officials have yet to conclude full necropsies.
To be clear, wind development — like any other offshore activity — does have the potential to disrupt and harm whales and otherwise negatively impact the ocean environment. It is not without environmental risks, and scientists have urged federal agencies to remain vigilant as the industry expands in U.S. waters.
But federal scientists have repeatedly thrown cold water on sweeping claims coming from fossil fuel-allied climate denial groups, anti-wind organizations and GOP lawmakers — namely, that offshore wind development is wreaking havoc on whales.
“At this point, there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause mortality of whales,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration states on its website. “There are no known links between recent large whale mortalities and ongoing offshore wind surveys.”
To make their case, anti-wind advocates often conflate the plight of the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale with recent humpback whale strandings, which federal authorities have classified as an “unusual mortality event” that dates back to 2016.
Along with dismissing any link between the whale deaths and offshore wind, officials have stressed that vessel strikes, entanglement in fishing gear and climate change are among the biggest human threats to whales, including humpback and right whales. More than 200 humpback whales have died along the East Coast since 2016. Forty percent of the animals that underwent necropsies showed signs of being struck by a boat or an entanglement.
Ironically, Trump’s comments were part of a broader attack on what he called the Biden administration’s “extreme regulatory attacks,” specifically a new proposal to expand vessel speed limits and seasonal speed zones along the East Coast — changes that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says are “essential to stabilize the ongoing right whale population decline and prevent the species’ extinction.”
An endangered North Atlantic right whale entangled in fishing rope swims alongside a newborn calf on Dec. 2, 2021, in waters near Cumberland Island, Georgia.
“The Biden administration, right now, is trying to bludgeon the boating and maritime industry,” Trump said, adding the proposed rule would limit vessels to the speed of “a slow golf cart.” He claimed that only one whale has been killed by a vessel strike off South Carolina in the last 50 years and, more bizarrely, that a person has “a better chance of being struck by lightning than hitting a whale with your boat” — talking points that sound like something pulled straight from a shipping industry newsletter.
The former president’s rant shines a clear light on the pipeline of misinformation now flowing between conservative, fossil-fuel aligned groups, right-wing media and GOP lawmakers.
As HuffPost reported last year, anti-offshore wind groups, including some of the nation’s most hard-line climate change denial outfits, suddenly branded themselves guardians of the endangered right whale as they ramped up a legal war against newly approved offshore wind projects. Fox News hosts have given anti-wind advocates hours of airtime to peddle unfounded claims about offshore wind devastating whale populations, while often parroting those talking points themselves.
In March, Republicans introduced a resolution that cited recent whale deaths and called for an immediate federal moratorium on offshore wind leasing and construction activity pending the outcome of an investigation to “determine the true impacts” of this development. The resolution came three days after Peter Murphy, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, or CFACT, a right-wing group with a long history of peddling climate change disinformation, penned a post on the organization’s website calling for a moratorium.
More recently, Michael Shellenberger, the two-time unsuccessful California gubernatorial candidate and centrist environmental nonprofit leader, co-produced a documentary, titled “Thrown to the Wind,” which argues in no uncertain terms that when it comes to offshore wind and the recent whale deaths, correlation is as good as causation.
The documentary “proves that the US government officials have been lying” about the cause of the whale mortalities, Shellenberger wrote in an Aug. 26 piece published in the conservative New York Post. (The Post added quotation marks to the headline, which reads: “New documentary ‘proves’ building offshore wind farms does kill whales.”)
Fox News has had Shellenberger on to promote his film at least four times, according to Media Matters to Media Matters, a media watchdog group. In one interview with Fox’s Brian Kilmeade, Shellenberger said he and his team are “working with Congress to get hearings and an investigation on this, because we think there is widespread corruption, including in the U.S. government.”
They’ll almost certainly find allies on Capitol Hill.
“These windmills, according to an earlier report on your network, are killing the whales,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told Fox in an interview earlier this month, apparently referencing the unfounded claims in Shellenberger documentary.
Even as whales have become a key tool in the right-wing fight against offshore wind, Trump and other conservatives are actively condemning more stringent vessel speed limits — a concrete action aimed at curbing one of the primary threats to the animals.
Last year, HuffPost asked CFACT’s Collister Johnson about the vessel speed rule. He dismissed the idea that reducing vessel speeds could help safeguard whales. And when pressed about what he sees as the solution, he quickly argued that’s for federal regulators to figure out.
“That’s not our problem,” he said.
Related...
Republicans Are Latching On To A New Conspiracy Theory — And It's Comically Absurd
Climate Deniers Exploit Endangered Whales In Bid To Kill Offshore Wind
Ron Johnson Spouts A Big Blubbery Tale About Whale-Killing Windmills
‘Debris’ floating in Gulf of Mexico turns out to be 3 endangered creatures
Moira Ritter
Mon, September 25, 2023 at 2:19 PM MDT·1 min read
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CLARIFICATION: This story has been updated to reflect that Coast Guard officials identified the whales spotted in the Gulf of Mexico as sperm whales after previously identifying them as critically endangered Rice’s whales. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also told McClatchy News in a statement that they are sperm whales.
The story continues below.
Coast Guard officers were conducting a routine patrol in the Gulf of Mexico when they spotted something strange.
The officers from the U.S. Coast Guard Station Venice were on a Living Marine Resource patrol — which seeks to protect fish and marine resources — near the Mississippi Canyon, a spokesperson told McClatchy News. That’s when they saw what appeared to be a pile of debris floating in the water.
As the officers got closer though, they realized they had discovered something much more special: It was three 25-foot sperm whales.
Officials shared a video of one of the creatures swimming through the water in a Sept. 24 Facebook post.
The video shows a sperm whale, a spokesperson from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wrote in an email to McClatchy News.
Sperm whales are endangered and are typically found in Alaska and the northern Atlantic, according to Whale Sense. The deep-diving creatures are known to prey on squid, sharks and other fish. Females can grow to 40 feet and 15 tons, while males can be up to 52 feet and 45 tons.
The whales were spotted roughly 30 miles south of the SouthWest Pass, which is south of New Orleans.
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