A Chumash tribe and conservationists fight offshore wind turbines

[NNadir]

LA Times: Nobody Seems to Like This Offshore Wind Project.

LOMPOC, Calif. — Along the wind-blasted shores of the Gaviota Coast, near the rocket gantries of Vandenberg Space Force Base, lazy breakers claw at the base of sandy bluffs and dunes, while farther out to sea, great white sharks cruise beneath churning whitecaps.

It’s a stunning and uniquely Californian vista, a place where pristine headlands overlook the submerged remains of sacred Chumash villages and launchpads fire the nation’s newest and most secret technology into orbit.

But in recent months, this stretch of the Santa Barbara County coastline has become a bitter collision point for several national and global imperatives — the reduction of planet-warming greenhouse gasses, the conservation of natural habitats and the atonement for injustices committed against Indigenous populations.

A plan by private corporations to float up to eight wind power generators less than three miles offshore has run headlong into efforts to designate a vast area of ocean off the Central Coast as a Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary.

The turbine proposal has sparked outrage among conservationists and members of the Northern Chumash Tribe, who say the sanctuary is intended to preserve Chumash tribal history and protect the area’s rich biodiversity. Building a network of floating turbines that are tethered to the seafloor and connected to one another and the mainland with electric cables is an affront to preservation, they say...

Our media has a nasty habit of repeating the dubious statement that wind power has something to do with fighting climate change.

This is a nonsense statement.

Vast worldwide enthusiasm for wind power, backed by trillions of dollars thrown at it, has done nothing, zero, zilch, to address climate change. Indeed with the rising popularity of converting places like the Gaviota beach into industrial parks, climate change is accelerating.

This of course is not the only dubious area that our media has a contentious struggle with the truth, but it is rather typical.

I am pleased to see for the first time in a long time that there are real conservationists, as opposed to say the Sierra Club, founded by John Muir in his losing battle to prevent the industrialization of the Hetch Hetchy valley, and now run by people who have a hard time finding a wilderness that they don't want to lace with access roads, wires, and grease ball, microplastic spitting, wind turbines.

[hunter]

1. Don't you know we had to destroy the natural environment in order to save it?

These wind turbines will not "save the world." They'll only prolong our dependence on natural gas.