Oregon’s attorney general announced a nearly $700 million settlement Thursday with the biotech giant Monsanto for its alleged role in polluting the state over the course of decades with toxic compounds known as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.“Polychlorinated biphenyls have caused and continue to cause devastating impact on the natural environment,” Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum said during a news conference in Portland. “They threaten the health of the people that use and enjoy our state’s natural resources — our air, our water, our ground, our fish, practically everything in our habitat.”From the 1930s to just before they were banned in 1979, Monsanto was the sole manufacturer of PCBs in the United States. Since at least 1937, the company knew they were harmful. The chemicals were distributed throughout the U.S. in a variety of products, including paint, caulking, and electrical equipment.Read More[Humboldt Bay was designated as impaired by PCBs under Section 303(d) of the Clean Water Act in 2002, based on levels of PCBs found in fish tissue. PCBs have been demonstrated to cause a variety of serious health effects, including cancer and serious effects on the immune system, reproductive system, nervous system, and endocrine system. For more info on PCBs and their health effects, click HERE].
To much fanfare, two foreign multinational corporations combined to spend more than $331 million on winning bids for the chance to develop more than 207 square miles of ocean off Humboldt Bay into two floating offshore wind farms.But the auctions also represent just a very early step in what promises to be a long process fraught with possible pitfalls and hurdles, potential risks and rewards, for Humboldt Bay and beyond. Here's a quick look at the road ahead.Read More
The first offshore wind lease auction off the California coast has come to a close and the winners of the leases have been announced. The U.S. Department of the Interior announced the two leases in the Humboldt wind energy area, 21 miles off the coast of Humboldt Bay, were awarded to RWE Offshore Wind Holdings — 63,338 acres for $157.7 million — and California North Floating — 69,031 for $173.8 million — just before noon on Wednesday.The five leases, including three roughly 80,000-acre apiece leases off Morro Bay, garnered $757.1 million for 373,268 acres capable of generating 4.6 gigawatts of energy, or enough power for 1.5 million homes. The winning bids off the coast of Morro Bay were from Equinor Wind US ($130 million), Central California Offshore Wind ($150.3 million), and Invenergy California Offshore ($145.3 million).The lease sale is a significant milestone in meeting the state and nation’s goals to address the climate crisis. Wind energy is expected to complement solar energy, which is plentiful during the day while wind speeds are stronger when the sun goes down.Humboldt County doesn’t have the transmission infrastructure in place to develop a large offshore wind farm right away, so developers are expected to start with a smaller community-scale project. Read More
California North Floating, LLC, a subsidiary of Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, and RWE Offshore Wind Holdings, LLC, a German multinational energy company, placed the winning bids for two lease areas in the Humboldt Wind Energy Area (WEA), which spans more than 132,000 acres approximately 20 miles west of Eureka.When the auction ended just before noon today, the swath of watery real estate went for more than $331.5 million, with California North Floating, LLC bidding $173.8 million for 69,031 acres and RWE Offshore Wind Holdings, LLC bidding 63,338 acres for $157.7 million.Now that the provisional winners have been announced, BOEM will return the non-winners’ bid deposits and the Department of Justice will initiate an antitrust review of the auction. All winners are considered provisional until they sign the lease, provide financial assurance and pay any outstanding balance of their bid.Read More
As plans to bring offshore wind to the North Coast move steadily ahead, commercial fishermen are urging federal and state regulatory agencies to pump the brakes.“I want to make one thing clear: Fishermen are not opposing [renewable] projects up here, we’re opposing the loss of thousands of miles of fishing grounds,” Ken Bates, president of the California Fishermen’s Resiliency Association (CFRA), told the Outpost in a recent interview. “Fishermen understand what’s going on with the climate. They can see what’s going on with the ocean. They get it. … That being said, we need to exercise a little bit of caution before we just throw these projects to the wind, so to speak.”“Interestingly enough, the areas that are the windiest on the California, Oregon and Washington coasts are also the areas that are most biologically productive,” Bates said. Bates has relayed his concerns to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the federal agency that oversees the development of offshore renewable energy projects, but he feels commercial fishermen aren’t being heard.“The lease area was picked by [BOEM] without input from anybody in the fishing fleet,” he said, adding that there are only a handful of fully operational floating wind turbines in the world. “Part of what fishermen are asking for is to slow down. Let’s be careful and make sure we’re not doing more damage than we’re hoping to alleviate by implementing this technology in the ocean. …We’re scrambling to try to find a way to have some input in this process.”Read More
