Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talks with the Executive Director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, Bonnie Brady, who expresses her concerns about the impact of commercial fishing and offshore wind energy projects on the ocean, coastal communities, and domestic food production.
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| Hey everybody, my guest today is Bonnie Brady, who's the Executive Director for the last 24 years of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, and we're going to talk about offshore wind, which is a long-term The interest of mine as an environmentalist and somebody who wants to reduce carbon, wind power has always been one of the solutions. | |
| I've been involved in building wind plants. | |
| My brother is deeply involved in that industry on onshore wind. | |
| But I've also been on the other side of fighting offshore wind. | |
| And one of the big proposals that I fought in the end of the 1990s, beginning of the 2000s, was the Cape Wind Project. | |
| And I mainly, I was asked to get involved because of my relationship with commercial, my 40-year relationship With commercial fishermen on the East Coast and the Hudson and Long Island Sound in North Carolina and elsewhere representing them in litigation. | |
| And the Cape Cod fishermen contacted me from Hyannis, from Chatham, from Wellfleet because of the threat to their fishing grounds that would be posed by these giant offshore wind turbines that were going to be put in Nantucket Sound. | |
| And the injury with the danger was to the fishing gear, their capacity to actually get onto their fishing ground safely. | |
| There were four million boating trips a year and a lot of it in the fog on that part of Cape Cod. | |
| A lot of these boats Don't have sophisticated radar, and it was a real, it was a hazard. | |
| It was a boating hazard, and particularly when you've got high winds, if an engine goes out on the boat, they can blow down onto the turbines and put a human life in danger. | |
| And when you're hauling nets that are That are thousands of yards out behind your boat. | |
| That gear can also get wound up around the turbines and you can end up killing people and destroying fishing equipment. | |
| But there was other issue as well, which is that the power was the most expensive power That anybody had ever thought about in Massachusetts. | |
| The cost of my brother at that time was selling land-based wind in Massachusetts for 11 cents a kilowatt hour. | |
| And the cost, the base cost of Cape Wind was going to be 22 cents a kilowatt hour, raising over the next five or six years, I forgot how many, to 32 cents a kilowatt hour. | |
| So three times the level that land-based wind was charging. | |
| And one of my points was that this was going to turn the public against wind power. | |
| It was going to turn fishermen, the boating public, but also the bill-paying public against green energy and wind because it was so wasteful. | |
| We now also have good information that the construction of these towers kills whales. | |
| It kills dolphins. | |
| And we're seeing these giant die-offs of endangered species, including the right whale. | |
| Only a few hundred left in the world. | |
| And they're dying on the beaches in the areas where these turbines are being built. | |
| So I wanted to, this is a flashpoint issue for the environmental movement. | |
| It is one of the biggest parts of Joe Biden's plan in the Inflation Reduction Act. | |
| To reduce carbon, he has wind power finance, and he has a lot of carbon capture, which is another kind of industry boondoggle. | |
| So the money, it's been used, the funnel money to the biggest corporations in the world, the Black Rocks, the Straight Streets, the Vanguards, the big companies that own these companies. | |
| Wind turbine companies that own the generating companies and huge, vast government subsidies for a very, very high-priced form of energy. | |
| And this is not the way we should be doing it. | |
| I wanted Bonnie on here today. | |
| Her nickname is Bon Chiodo. | |
| She's been tilting at the windmills and trying to stop them and done an amazing job. | |
| Let me tell you a little bit about her. | |
| She worked on the Montauk Reporter and the East Hampton Star as a As a reporter from 1990 to 1994. | |
| Before that, she was a legislative correspondent in the United States Senate. | |
| She was a health volunteer for the Peace Corps in the early 90s. | |
| She helped run the Inlet Seafood Restaurant. | |
| She was their social media manager. | |
| And that's on Long Island. | |
| And then for the past 24 years, She's been the executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, which is one of the plaintiffs in the litigation against 13 Different wind power projects off of Long Island. | |
| There are now 50 of these projects nationwide, and almost all of them are controversial. | |
| So give us a little bit about the history and why this is a problem, Bonnie. | |
| Thank you so much for having me. | |
| I gratefully appreciate the ability to speak about this issue. | |
| Gosh darn. | |
| I began fighting offshore wind in 2003 when they wanted to put 200 megawatts and 2 megawatt turbines within 3 miles of state waters on some of our more important squid fishing grounds. | |
| Just to say, just to fill this in for people, your husband is actually a commercial fisherman. | |
| My husband is a commercial fisherman. | |
| He is a commercial trawler fisherman. | |
| He is a 64-foot Trawler, he's been fishing since he was 15. | |
| He grew up on the Great South Bay on Long Island in Babylon, and he's been doing it ever since. | |
| He's out there right now, in fact. | |
| When we first started looking at the problem, and this was the Long Island Power Authority that wanted to make it happen, I went to the OSPAR Commission in Europe because that would be the go-to place since there had been other things done in Europe. | |
| I was like, oh, it works in Denmark. | |
| I started to look into it and found that there's quite a bit of issues with offshore wind in general. | |
| The more I looked... | |
| Honestly, the scary it began then in about 2011 when the Obama administration put through their national ocean policy. | |
| They created regional ocean councils that were a quasi-federal state commission with a head that was BOEM. And their goal was through marine spatial planning to basically zone the ocean area for offshore wind. | |
| What happened, and that was the only energy they supported. | |
| As a result, some of these leases started going in. | |
| The deepwater wind, which was the first one that we fought, was the 12 megawatt, I'm sorry, 12 turbine, 130 megawatt facility that's on Cox's Ledge, which is, if you fish in the area, it's very important spawning ground for cod. | |
| It's considered a habitat area of particular concern. | |
| The Rhode Island Council themselves said that if the project had been slated in state waters, they would have removed 38% of it because of its importance for habitat. | |
| That never happened. | |
| So we fought this because even though the wind farm is in Rhode Island, the cable is then traveling 51 miles, I believe, and plugging in in Wainscot on Long Island on the east end. | |
| So we started with that most recently and then these projects started just happening very quickly. | |
| We are actually, as much as I'd like to say that we're suing on 13 projects, we've already, I think, suing on two so far. | |
| But the way this is going to be happening, there are lawsuits up and down the country because of these things for a variety of reasons. | |
| In Massachusetts There's one group that is suing because of the endangered right whale, and that's coming right out of Nantucket. | |
| We are suing on the first record of decision, which is also Vineyard Wind. | |
| And for many of the reasons that you discussed that were back with Cape Wind in 2008 are the same reasons now, and that's the problem. | |
| I don't know if your viewers are probably aware, but The reality is that when it's fisheries management, we have the Magnuson-Stevens Act is the fisheries regulatory bible that manages regional fisheries that are in the waters outside of state waters in the ocean from 300 to 200 miles. | |
| We have been working on the precautionary principle since at least the early 90s, and that means that anything that we do, depending on what your gear type is, how you fish, when you fish, there are huge books of regulations for each thing, where the nets can be, where they can't be, closures for spawning, for year-round, you name it. | |
| And so each fishery has their own set of regulations. | |
| The problem is that What has been happening is, you know, the councils themselves that do this regulation, we have a combination of state regulators, you've got commercial fishermen, you have recreational fishermen, you have environmental NGOs. | |
| It's always been the precautionary principle, which is do no harm. | |
| Suddenly our own EEZ is being leased out from under us on our prime fishing grounds and What you talked about, the radar is unsafe. | |
| There are national security issues actually involved. | |
| The information that comes from Europe is not pretty by any means. | |
| You're talking about, an example would be the Thanet Wind Farm in England. | |
| There are, I believe there are two or three megawatt turbines and there are sediment plumes Under the water 24-7 that extend for up to 6 kilometers and are up to 500 feet wide. | |
| And that happens all the time. | |
| NASA can see them from space. | |
| And basically it's because they forgot about current. | |
| So you have this area that in England was known for cod and gillnet fishermen used to fish in that area. | |
| Now they have to go all the way around to get to other fishing areas far more far away because of it. | |
| They told them it would take eight months. | |
| It took two and a half years. | |
| They weren't able to fish at all during that time. | |
| And the only money they made was after selling fuel to the survey boats. | |
| Fast forward here to the US, we have had what you mentioned, which was an unusual mortality event for three different species of large whale, all baleen whales that hear in low frequency. | |
| The UME for humpbacks began in 2016 for the North Atlantic right whale and for minke whales in 2017. | |
| And coincidentally, much of the survey work started, some with something called an incidental harassment authorization or an IHA. Some just chose not to get one at the time. | |
| So when people say, oh, no, this started far before that, no, it started right then. | |
| You mean the die-off started then? | |
| Right. | |
| Well, it started in 2016. | |
| In 2016, we knew there was something that was happening. | |
| And the only thing that was different, at least to my eyes, was suddenly this inclusion, all these survey votes. | |
| You had surveys going on in Maryland and Delaware in 2015. | |
| In 2016, you had surveys at Bay State, which was DONG, Danish Oil and Natural Gas. | |
| Right off of Massachusetts, you had Vineyard Wind Surveying, you had the Block Island Wind Farm being constructed then, you had South Fork doing survey work. | |
| And if you look at the years in the states and where these whales were stranding, there is something that was going on. | |
| But being able to prove that, the government allows for level B and level A harassment. | |
| Level B means it affects the whales in such a way that they want to get away from the sound. | |
| So they may avoid feeding or breeding or nursing or communicating with each other. | |
| What level B also includes is something called temporary threshold shifts in hearing. | |
| That's temporary deafness. | |
| Level A includes all of the things I mentioned before and also permanent threshold shifts. | |
| Permanent deafness. | |
| By the way, Whales communicate and they orient themselves using their ears so they know where they are, what depth they are, where they are in the ocean, where their families are, where everything has to do with their ears because the sound moves so much farther through water than it does. | |
| And the whales have evolved that way. | |
| They rely on their eaters. | |
| And so if you're enough, you might be dead. | |
| No, I'm saying I've learned more about whales than I've ever expected to in my life. | |
| You know, the medium frequency whales They are the toothed whales. | |
| They echolocate, those that have the fleshy foreheads and that's the whole thing where they sound, they communicate, they chase prey together exactly. | |
| You've got the high frequency dolphins and then you have the low frequency which are mostly baleen whales. | |
| Those whales do not have the typical echolocation that the other whales do. | |
| However, someone on the West Coast for a while they thought that it vibrates off of their jaws because they're so much larger and that's how they can hear. | |
| Then there was a A graduate student that was able to get a whale head, a young whale, into an MRI, and there's fatty deposits right above the bulle and the acoustic structures of the ear, so they think it might be more in a forward direction. | |
| But what you're saying, sound, right. | |
| Not only does it travel far faster, It travels for longer distances. | |
| There's this thing called surface duct, which I was not aware of until last week, talking about how in certain frequencies, the sound can travel and dissipate, but based on the water temperature, based on what the bottom looks like, | |
| based on the thermoclines and what time of year it is, it can start at a loud sound, then drop, then all of a sudden appear Several kilometers up to 100 kilometers later as that same loud frequency. | |
| So between December 1st of 2022 and December 31st of 2023, between Massachusetts, a little bit of Maine, but the numbers were from Maine to Florida, we had 85 large whales die. | |
| And there wasn't one entanglement. | |
| There were ship stripes. | |
| You know, Sylvia Earle, I think, is the one that was quoted as saying, a deaf whale is a dead whale. | |
| And in February, after we probably had close to 20 dead whales stacking up like cordwood in 2023, we asked for a pause in all survey work and for a federal investigation. | |
| Why? | |
| Because the necropsies The level B, which is a partial necropsy, and the level C, which are full necropsies, are proprietary to the stranding centers. | |
| Some of the stranding centers have unique boards of directors that include folks that work for offshore wind companies either directly or lobbyists directly for them. | |
| So the only way during an unusual mortality event that you can get to look at those necropsies is through a federal investigation. | |
| And it wasn't just that. | |
| We wanted to be able to take a look at the black boxes that are in these giant survey boats. | |
| Everyone has to have it. | |
| Everything that goes on, you hear. | |
| Have confidential conversations with the protected species observers. | |
| Some of them, we've heard anecdotal things that they've not exactly been able to stop boats when they should have. | |
| Basically open everything up, lots of sunshine, and see what's there. | |
| and we're waiting now over a year for that. - So it's ironic that the environmental movement that began with saving the whales and saving the seals, the sea mammals really drove so many Americans out of the street, 20 million Americans out of the street on Earth Day 1978. | |
| and that the environmental movement has almost completely forgotten about The whales now, and they're letting them be destroyed. | |
| And by the way, this is completely unnecessary, in this country particularly, because we have the best onshore wind of any country in the world. | |
| On any continent in the world, other than Antarctica, North Dakota, It's the windiest place on Earth at sea level. | |
| We have enough wind in North Dakota, harnessable wind. | |
| According to Scientific American, North Dakota, Montana, and Texas are the entire North American energy grid, a tiny fraction of what we're paying for offshore wind. | |
| And you could say, well, we don't have enough land-based places that are low enough expense To build the wind for the New England grid, but Canada has virtually unlimited wind, and they want to sell it to us. | |
| Of course, they've got hydropower, but they have tremendous amounts of wind going all the way up the taiga into the Arctic, and it is really windy up there, and they can generate huge amounts of wind at a tiny, tiny fraction of the cost, you know, 11 or 12 cents a kilowatt hour. | |
| And to charge people, what are they charging now? | |
| Like three or four times what you'd pay for land-based wind? | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| I mean, several studies have said, like I said, between four and six times even the amount, because obviously you've got corrosion, but there's all kinds of issues. | |
| That's not even the transmission cost. | |
| Right, right. | |
| And the transmission, I mean, it's Once you peel back this onion, which is called offshore wind, and frankly, I might disagree with you a little bit about land-based wind only because, yes, it's available, but what's happening is it's basically becoming a free-for-all where NEPA has gone right out the window. | |
| And this idea, it's segmented. | |
| There are no cumulative assessments of what's going on. | |
| People in rural areas in New York, they're doing something called the RAPID Act, where basically they are removing the ability of consistency review over projects as parties within Article 10, which is for transmission of... | |
| Article 7 for transmission cables, so people can at least have a say in that. | |
| That's gone. | |
| You've got the Department of Energy that's suddenly removing category, they're making categorical exclusions for any type of lithium battery site. | |
| I mean, and we're not talking about a teeny little site We're talking about giant 300, 400 megawatt sites that, for example, one company that's a wind company that's supposed to go into a battery center, it's a 300 megawatt battery. | |
| These are lithium-ion batteries which have this really nasty little habit of setting on fire for no reason. | |
| It's right in the middle of the Brooklyn Marine area between Wallabout Bay and Wallabout Canal, within a one-mile diameter are several colleges, churches, two bridges. | |
| They catch on fire all the time. | |
| I believe it's hydroxychlorine gas. | |
| It's just... | |
| They're not doing it in a way that is actually taking into account the people that live here and the environmental consequences. | |
| I mean, I could start at the beginning. | |
| The blades are resin. | |
| They're BPA. There is no way to recycle them. | |
| The steel is made in China with coal, shockingly. | |
| The cables themselves, copper wire, millions and millions of miles of copper wire zigzagging the ocean floor. | |
| The In the ocean, they've done studies out of the North Sea, which the North Sea between, I believe, up until 2020, there were a total of 60 wind farms together between England and Germany. | |
| They've been doing work out of the North Sea where they're talking about the wind-wake effect. | |
| It's in another article that was in E&E recently. | |
| Initially, they modeled it based on some fellow, I believe, from Norway in about 2015, that because, and I'm not a sailor, but I've learned enough about this, so if you have the first line of turbines and every successive line gets less wind from it, that doesn't just extend within the lease area. | |
| That extends behind it. | |
| Initially, in the North Sea, they measured out to 40 kilometers past the area and And then Arc Vera said, wait a minute, you're wrong because you're talking about little teeny windmills in Europe. | |
| These are much larger. | |
| They want 1,035-foot turbines. | |
| This is an 18-megawatt turbine with blades the size. | |
| Each one is the size of a football field. | |
| The point is, as they said through Arcvera, up to 60 miles past the lease area, you'll have less wind. | |
| So, of course, let's play this out. | |
| You've got a turbine site 18 miles offshore, and suddenly people that go to the beaches to relax, get those offshore breezes, suddenly get nothing. | |
| What are they going to do? | |
| They're going to turn up the air conditioning. | |
| Who's going to benefit? | |
| The utility companies, which in the case of Long Island, you've got Revolution Wind, which was owned by Eversource and Orsted. | |
| Eversource, of course, they decided to get out of it, so they hired Goldman Sachs. | |
| Goldman Sachs was an 18% owner of Dong Energy, which was Danish oil and natural gas, until they changed their name to Orsted from 2013 to 2018 when they sold out for their IPO. Eversource decided they wanted to get out because they'd lost so many billions of dollars. | |
| They hired Goldman Sachs to advise them. | |
| And sure enough, within six months, the global infrastructure partners decided, we want to buy you. | |
| Turns out the head of global infrastructure partners is the managing director of Goldman Sachs. | |
| And then several weeks later, BlackRock came out and said, oh, yes, we're buying global infrastructure partners. | |
| It's these foreign government-owned energy companies, Orsted, 51% owned by the Danish government. | |
| Equinor, which has got two projects right south of Long Beach. | |
| They're 67% owned by the Norwegian government. | |
| They used to be called Stad Oil. | |
| We have Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, which was created by the Pension Denmark, one of the largest labor pension funds of Denmark. | |
| We've got every other country known to man, multinational corporations, you name it. | |
| Iberdrola is involved with Alvingrid with Vineyard Wind, which is right south of Nantucket. | |
| Nantucket, if all of the lease areas that go in, there's nine of them, I believe, in the Rhode Island, Massachusetts wind energy area, which for those keeping count is 1,409 square miles. | |
| Which is two-thirds the size of the Grand Canyon. | |
| So if you can imagine sitting at that vista and then a turbine one nautical mile apart in every direction. | |
| Iberdrola is Spain and their largest shareholder is Qatar. | |
| I mean the things that you've talked about in the past about corporate capture were right here and we've been here for years and they're just turning around Spinning with their LLCs, one sells, one goes, whoever's been putting into, you know, everyone wants to be in clean energy, but when you get down to the specifics, the environmental specifics of this, there's nothing clean about it. | |
| So, we're talking about the impacts on the fishery. | |
| Okay. | |
| Well, to start with, you know, leasing areas matter, and When they started leasing the first record of decision, which is Vineyard Wind South in Nantucket, you know, I remember, you know, we went to meetings. | |
| We showed the fact that BOEM wasn't even aware until 2016 that when they did a lease area, the different states' fishermen that had federal permits would travel to the area. | |
| So when Empire Wind was first set up, this is in the New York Bight, They told our organization, like, hey, New York, we're here. | |
| And I'm like, you've got to bring Massachusetts, you've got New Jersey, you've got Virginia, everyone. | |
| They all fish there. | |
| They had no idea. | |
| So with Vineyard Wind, they put it in literally prime squid grounds. | |
| And that's laligo squid, which for New York is, in general, over the last 10 years that New York has been Landed anywhere between 3 and 6 million pounds of squid. | |
| Some years, 40 to 60% comes specifically from that area. | |
| Other years, south of Long Island. | |
| The area that they're using when they pile drive the ocean floor, they use a 45 kilojoule hammer to pound these turbines 200 feet into the ocean floor. | |
| In addition to creating high intensity, low decibel sound for all those whales that keep going, it creates also concussive waves of pressure, which is particle motion. | |
| So people, I don't know what people, excuse me, fish, Marine mammals, everybody gets hit more than once through two different methods. | |
| Then they're going to jet plow the ocean floor, a target of four to six feet, which liquefies the ocean floor in order to put these giant cables in and crisscross in a pattern throughout the area, and then drag another cable and bring it onto land to go through what else? | |
| You've got the problem with electromagnetic frequency. | |
| If it's Sunk at least six feet into the ocean floor, at least because electricity for AC cables still comes out of the cables. | |
| All of the cables that are in the lease area are AC cables, so they will have electrical impulses if they're not buried, but electromagnetic frequency exists whether or not it's AC or DC. Certain species of fish we know are attracted, elasmobranchs, sharks and skates, others are repelled, cod, and lobsters aren't too fond of it either. | |
| They've done tests right over in the Sound here where they use the Neptune cable as an example and the lobsters were in situ in a cage. | |
| And they were able to cross the cable but they just wanted to stay as far away. | |
| You've got the magnetic pull of the earth and most scientists and fishermen will tell you a lot of that has to do with how the fish migrate year after year. | |
| And a big concern for fishermen that they've never tested is what that's going to do to the migrations. | |
| You've got the north-south Of the magnetic pull. | |
| And when you bring those cables in, depending on the angle, you can either add to the nature's pull, which is about 550 milligauss. | |
| When you bring it in a diagonal, it can either add to the amount or subtract from. | |
| If they bring in two cables within a short amount of time, you actually create a corridor of EMF. You know, these are concerns. | |
| All of these things that should have been studied before they even put one in the water, Hasn't happened. | |
| And everyone goes, oh, look, the Block Island Wind Farm, there's five of them. | |
| They were put in some of the most pristine area ever. | |
| They're small little six megawatt Allstom that GE bought out. | |
| Several of them have cracks to their turbines because their poor little arms beat off too much. | |
| The cable, eight months after, they had two cables, one from Block Island, the wind farm to Block Island, one from Block Island, the Sea Ashore cable to Narragansett. | |
| Both became exposed within 18 months. | |
| It took over five years to re-sync the cable. | |
| There's a lot of not ready for prime time here, but the sediment plumes, the fact that the area then that sand shoal environment suddenly becomes hard substrate. | |
| I mean this is completely changing ecosystems and the commercial fishermen If you have a trawler, if you have a scalper, if you're a clam dredge, you can't go in. | |
| If you catch your net on a cable, you can flip your boat and die, what you talked about before. | |
| I mean, and from a national security standpoint, or from actually a safety standpoint, there was a boat in Block Island back in 2019 on January 1st that was taking on water and One of the hazards, actually the only hazard that was mentioned in the report, I know because I've seen the FOIA copy, they talked about low visibility. | |
| They talked about really bad weather, inability to see the water at some point. | |
| But the only hazard they had was wind turbines, and that's because they reflect off and they wind up creating like a spirograph, and there's no solution to that. | |
| The National Academy of Sciences did a report two years ago and said, yeah, we've got real problems and we don't have a solution. | |
| The Fed's answer to that, write a report about it after you put them in. | |
| Well, I remember, you know, one of the ways that we were able to kill the Cape Wind project It was because we got the Federal Aviation Administration on our side. | |
| Because there's an airport in Nantucket, there's an airport in Mothis Vineyard, and there's an airport in Hyannis. | |
| And they said this is going to disrupt the radar and endanger the airplane, the passenger, and the military. | |
| It's all line of sight. | |
| Nantucket is going to be surrounded by about 700 turbines, over a thousand feet tall. | |
| They're all line of sight. | |
| You can see the South Coast Wind Farm that has, if you go online, you can see the visual assumptions that are made from someplace, I've never been to Nantucket, but there's someplace called Samford Farm. | |
| And if you're looking across Samford Farm onto the water, Between 24 and 48 miles out, you can see turbines, only you don't see the last nine of them. | |
| And they are huge. | |
| The whole point, when the first lease area, which was Empire Wind, was approved in 2016, What was it? | |
| The National Ocean Center came out and said, yeah, we have this problem. | |
| We've got high frequency radar from Cape May all the way up to, I believe, Massachusetts. | |
| And we use that for measuring the current flow, which is used for, I believe, tsunamis and for NOAA oil spills and for things like that. | |
| It's not going to work. | |
| You know, the FAA, most of the systems are line of sight. | |
| They haven't been updated since 73. | |
| Intermediate airports, serious issues with terminal radar, national security, the ASR-4 and the ARS-8. | |
| Our also line of sight. | |
| One is the first line of defense, 240 miles out. | |
| Line of sight. | |
| Will not work. | |
| And we're basically dog fencing ourselves in all the way down the Atlantic from the Gulf of Maine, where they just announced, I think, nine different lease areas with floating wind, all the way down to South Carolina, North Carolina. | |
| And nothing seems to stop them. | |
| Yes, back when Cape Wind happened, The government, listen, now you can go to the clearinghouse on offshore wind and mitigate, which is usually, I believe, put some money in someone's account for future. | |
| It's a time bomb waiting to happen. | |
| So, you know, what chance do we have, beside me, getting into the White House, what chance do we have on stopping this? | |
| Let me ask you this first. | |
| Are you getting any help from the National Environmental Groups? | |
| No, nothing. | |
| Because many of them have partnered. | |
| Look, when they created the National Ocean Policy with marine spatial planning, their only energy source that they would approve was offshore wind. | |
| And a year prior to, actually a couple of years afterwards, Nature Conservancy said, oh, we're doing this portal, just kind of generically show us where you fish, not exactly where your certain boat does, but just in general for what the offshore and the inshore areas are. | |
| Pretty much to a man, every single lease area is in our offshore areas. | |
| So, and I, you know, I actually know some people that used to work, or that still do, I think, work for NRDC that did the ocean stuff. | |
| I have been told that not everyone is really happy. | |
| There are people there that have worked for the oceans for years that have fought their whole life for the ocean. | |
| But when you do a landmark agreement with the wind company and take a certain amount of money, there's an NDA and a non-disparagement clause that goes with that. | |
| We know for fishermen, we've seen that. | |
| If fishermen take compensation because their gear has been lost with the Block Island wind farm, they tried to make some guy sign it in order to get a better deal for what he would be getting back. | |
| Um, we know that there's been huge levels of financing. | |
| Everybody and their brother is getting money in order to study. | |
| Study this, study the marine mammal issue. | |
| Oh, we don't know enough. | |
| We'll have to look and, you know, study it some more. | |
| This stuff is getting pile driven into our ocean, right? | |
| Actually, they're supposed to be starting now in Revolution Wind. | |
| More Cox's Ledge. | |
| There's a lawsuit on that with Green Oceans. | |
| We've got Vineyard Wind. | |
| They have 45 turbines in and they had to submit for a second IHA for the other 15. | |
| So we've got a common period of 30 days. | |
| That's why we're suing. | |
| We are suing. | |
| We're not the lead plaintiff Seafreeze, which is a processing house for many different fisheries in Rhode Island. | |
| They are the main plaintiff in the case. | |
| We've got New York fishermen, Rhode Island fishermen, and it is a pro bono case and people have slammed me to death because it's, you know, the Texas Public Policy Foundation is taking it. | |
| And I basically say, look, You can't fight the government by yourself at this price. | |
| Anyone that would offer us pro bono, because I'm told, and I'm not an attorney, that this will be a case of first impressions, you know, we're going straight up the chain. | |
| I mean, this is, if this doesn't stop it, We're going to lose. | |
| It's the literally worst scenario for commercial fishermen throughout the US, bar none. | |
| And, you know, unfortunately, I think many of the NGOs made a, as I want to say, they made a deal with the devil. | |
| They knew it would get rid of us. | |
| And there's always been, you know, lots of Not necessarily best of friendships between the ENGOs and commercial fishing. | |
| And some of that, you know, back in the 80s was definitely warranted. | |
| But we're considered completely sustainable now. | |
| I mean, they just came out with the 2023 status of the stocks, 94% of the stocks that they know a status for. | |
| No overfishing is occurring. | |
| 84% are not overfished. | |
| We've brought 50 fisheries back from being overfished. | |
| We're held to a standard that no other country is held to. | |
| And we are getting beaten to death. | |
| It's really bad. | |
| Well, I'm going to help you if I get elected. | |
| That's all I can tell you, Bonnie. | |
| This makes my blood boil. | |
| I've represented commercial fishermen for 40 years. | |
| They saved the Hudson River. | |
| Can I ask you, were you involved with the PCB thing for the striped bass in the Hudson with GE? That was my case, yeah. | |
| Oh, wow. | |
| Okay. | |
| So, right. | |
| So then the Baymen out here, and we've dealt with that for a long time. | |
| And Peter Matheson, he did a lot of work talking about the Baymen. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| The thing is, is that the American people don't understand. | |
| I mean, it takes... | |
| I've spent years of reading these documents. | |
| I mean, Bohm's own documents says that this will have a negligible, that offshore wind, not only one lease area, not only one wind farm, but all of them will have a negligible effect on climate change. | |
| No effect on emissions. | |
| Zero. | |
| So why are we selling off our own exclusive economic zone to foreign government-owned energy companies that don't care about our domestic food production, about our coastal communities, about anything except for money? | |
| And as soon as they make the money, because the IRA is just handing out free money like nobody's business, plus all of the tax credits that they're being given up front to be able to take and then turn into derivatives that they're literally selling on the stock market, I mean, it's not just fishermen. | |
| It's people that, you know, people always get accused of NIMBY. Oh, you don't want to see them. | |
| No one should be subjected to that. | |
| People go to places of beauty because they're beautiful, not because they can be completely destroyed for an idea that has no basis in reality. | |
| And I mean, I used to be a reporter. | |
| I can't tell you how many emails I've sent to whatever the reporter was, New York Times, Washington Post, whatever. | |
| I want to win you a Pulitzer. | |
| I've got everything. | |
| Here, go ahead. | |
| Crickets. | |
| And now we're being accused of being... | |
| There goes Alexa telling me the weather. | |
| Forgive me. | |
| But now we're in a situation where commercial fishermen that were maligned for a long time are trying our best to fight for the ocean because we don't have anyone else to do it for us. | |
| Sorry. | |
| Sorry to be a downer. | |
| Bonnie, how can people support you? | |
| How can they find you, Bonnie Brady? | |
| Well, they can find me on Facebook. | |
| I'm on Facebook. | |
| I'm on Twitter. | |
| And just so, yeah, I mean, I've heard all kinds of things, you know, dark money. | |
| I don't even get a paycheck. | |
| Right. | |
| So there's, you know, I mean, I'm not completely altruistic in that my husband is a commercial fisherman, but I'm doing this because I've spent almost 40 years here in Montauk and I love my community. | |
| And I've seen these guys be put through so much to get to a part where we're doing the right thing and we're the gold standard. | |
| And then for people to come in like the emperor's new wind closed salesman and just sell the American public a lie. | |
| I'm going to go to sleep exhausted every night and wake up swinging in the morning because we have to. | |
| We don't have another choice. | |
| If they would like to help, there's a variety of groups out there that they could probably find on Facebook that are fighting lawsuits and they're all C3s taking donations. | |
| We actually aren't taking any donations. | |
| Don't ask me why, but we're not. | |
| We are a C3 also. | |
| We're all about public education and this to me I heard you. | |
| I don't know if it was in a speech that you had done or at that movie that I just went last week, which I loved. | |
| It was hysterical at the beginning. | |
| And you talked about everything that you have done has brought you to the parlays where you are today. | |
| I can't agree with you more about offshore wind. | |
| This is every single thing I've learned from being a Peace Corps volunteer and a reporter and a paramedic. | |
| So I have a knowledge of biology. | |
| And working on the hill and then doing this, it's all brought me to this place. | |
| And it's not just me, by the way. | |
| There are at least that I can think of a dozen people in each state that are working their hardest. | |
| We created a group called the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance. | |
| Ooh, that's where people can do it. | |
| Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, Rota Fisheries, I'm part of the board, one of the founding members, and it was for us to be able to, when these leases started coming out super fast, you couldn't play whack-a-mole fast enough. | |
| I was going up and down the coast trying to do things, so we created this group. | |
| It's from fishermen on all three coasts, and we are trying our best. | |
| We're suing on Vineyard Wynn also. | |
| We're suing On one of the Rhode Island lease areas and in other ones to be able to bring MEPA back into this process. | |
| So people can go to rotofisheries.org and they can donate there. | |
| That would be great. | |
| Thank you so much. | |
| Thank you, Bonnie Brady. | |
| That's rotafisheries.org. | |
| Rotafisheries.org. | |
| Please go there to support Bonnie and follow Bonnie Brady on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook. | |
| Facebook, sorry. | |
| It's okay. | |
| God bless you, Bonnie. | |
| And, you know, please, I think you have my contacts. | |
| If I do get in the lighthouse, I want to hear from you because we want to put an end to this. | |
| Oh, absolutely. | |
| Thank you so much. | |
| And if you ever get toward Montauk, I can introduce you to the fleet. | |
| I know they'd love to see you. | |
| Thank you so much. | |
| I've been there. | |
| You know, I grew up in that area. | |
| And by the way, you mentioned Peter Matheson. | |
| Yes. | |
| Who was my friend and who wrote, you know, kind of the great book on the Long Island of Fishermen. | |
| The Bayman, yes. | |
| Well, also Men's Lives. | |
| He wrote that book, which is an illustrated sort of homage to the Long Island fishermen, to this ancient fishery on Long Island, the striped bass. | |
| But his... | |
| His son, Alec Fishman, Alec Matheson, was the Hudson Riverkeeper for many years. | |
| He was my client for many years. | |
| I knew Peter well. | |
| You know, and I spent a lot of time out there with the commercial fishermen on Long Island, the Baymen. | |
| So anyway, it's a pleasure talking to you. | |
| My son, Connor, worked in the commercial fishery off of Wellfleet out of Chatham in New Bedford. | |
| When he was up, he had summer jobs. | |
| He worked on the skate boats, on squid boats, On scallop and oyster boats. | |
| And then my son, Bobby, worked during his summer out of Norwalk, Connecticut, on the oyster boats out of Norwalk. | |
| Nice. | |
| We always need good new crew, so... | |
| Yeah, no. | |
| Peter Matheson was... | |
| I got to meet him once. | |
| He was a wonderful person. | |
| I've I knew of him from reading Snow Leopard, which I read way back in the 80s. | |
| He did great things for the Baymen. | |
| We still have some Baymen. | |
| We've got two crews of trap guys. | |
| If you ever get this way again, we can put you out on a boat and you can help haul with them. | |
| They've got between them about, oh, I don't know, just 15, 16 generations of knowledge. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, it's beautiful. | |
| We need to preserve the culture. | |
| We And our food supply. | |
| God bless you, Bonnie. | |
| And our paths will cross later on in this election. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thank you very much. |