Speaker 1: This is the meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear.
Speaker 2: Listeningdcast, you can't predict anything.
Speaker 1: The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.
Speaker 1: Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting
Speaker 1: for el, First Light has performance apparel to support every
Speaker 1: hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light
Speaker 1: dot com. F I R S T L I T
Speaker 1: E dot com fills your machine on machines on how long.
Speaker 2: Has it been on?
Speaker 3: Long enough?
Speaker 2: Let's we'll start it right where I said. Is it on? Great?
Speaker 2: I'm holding my hands right here? Uh uh?
Speaker 1: Who's the kid? That's a kid sent this in? I
Speaker 1: call him a kid. Yeah, he's like said age I
Speaker 1: don't know. Called a Musky Manifesto Observer number five, September eighteenth,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three.
Speaker 4: The Musky Dossier.
Speaker 1: A lot of mail comes in. I don't know how
Speaker 1: this email got sent me, but I had it printed off,
Speaker 1: which makes it seem more thing.
Speaker 2: It's from a kid.
Speaker 1: It's a manifesto full of photos and everything, and it
Speaker 1: has to do with one of my favorite pet peeves,
Speaker 1: which is the latest the new craze of the new
Speaker 1: musky craze, like Musky two point zero.
Speaker 3: This is something that you've made up.
Speaker 1: No, yes, my as I was just saying before Phil
Speaker 1: turned the machine on. My maternal grandfather was a Musky fisherman.
Speaker 1: Now back then you just went fishing muskies. Now it's
Speaker 1: this whole thing of like they treat them like they're
Speaker 1: like people, treat them like they're like pets. They got
Speaker 1: all these strains, they turn them out. There's like they're
Speaker 1: they're like, it's it's rotten. Real guys that have gotten
Speaker 1: his persnickety is is UH catch and release trout anglers? Well,
Speaker 1: supposedly super interested in the well being of the fish,
Speaker 1: but not so interesting that you wouldn't try to jab
Speaker 1: a big hook in its lip.
Speaker 4: A lot of the recent UH enthusiasm comes from the
Speaker 4: fly fishing crowd. No, yes from US muskies.
Speaker 1: Yes, maybe you cast out a big lure, you get close,
Speaker 1: you do the figure eight, they do that with you.
Speaker 1: You get mad if someone is mean to one.
Speaker 5: All I can say is, if you're new timeline is
Speaker 5: my entire life.
Speaker 3: It maybe which made five years. This is an example
Speaker 3: of that just came about came into my universe and
Speaker 3: now I'm interested in it, and so it's musky.
Speaker 1: Geologic time, this whole thing of like, oh, did you
Speaker 1: hear that in Dickerson Lake they released the quad four
Speaker 1: strain three quad four strains.
Speaker 3: Oh, I don't know about this either.
Speaker 1: I'm making up the words, and I guarantee there's a
Speaker 1: Dickerson Lake though, Brandon, are you aware.
Speaker 2: Of when was musky one point? Oh, I've caught one
Speaker 2: old day, the old days forty maternal grandfather, and then
Speaker 2: there was a hiatus for then there was.
Speaker 1: A break, and then there was just like fishing, and
Speaker 1: then all of a sudden it became like that the
Speaker 1: catch and release, the really precious, persnickety, mean spirited catch
Speaker 1: and release school of thought got moved away from brown
Speaker 1: trout and laid.
Speaker 2: Upon the muskie. Interesting, and now brown trout are being
Speaker 2: given a break? Are the col people.
Speaker 1: Are still mean to give your mean to a brown trout?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I guess there's a lot of top water action.
Speaker 5: There's some similar baits, just similar sizing, folks going nighttime activities,
Speaker 5: all that stuff, going after both species.
Speaker 2: Fish with a thousand. I caught thou musky chet caught
Speaker 2: some muskies caught one musky in my life by tiger musk.
Speaker 2: No musky musky? What strain? I didn't ask it? You
Speaker 2: turn it right out? It strained the line. I turned
Speaker 2: it loose. We took one photo. I was fishing a
Speaker 2: little spinner bait. Thought I might pick up a walleye
Speaker 2: and a little lake in Wisconsin, and thought I had
Speaker 2: a log. Wasn't a log. Fought it for about twenty
Speaker 2: five minutes, and my dad got in a net. This
Speaker 2: is a little We were in a little john boat
Speaker 2: we rented for twenty five bucks on this this lake
Speaker 2: in Wisconsin. We just thought we were going to mess around,
Speaker 2: and we were messing around. Didn't think we'd catch a musky.
Speaker 2: And my picture's still on the wall of that place. Really,
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, how big was it? I don't know, forty
Speaker 2: five inches. We didn't have we didn't have a scale,
Speaker 2: we didn't have a ruler. It was a nice fish.
Speaker 1: The anger hearing from his Brendan Rundy here from North Carolina.
Speaker 1: He's a marine scientist.
Speaker 2: What did I say wrong?
Speaker 6: His last name?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 7: He took me sorry, I stand corrected.
Speaker 5: I will think that's right.
Speaker 2: That's that's my uncle. Actually nice, really.
Speaker 5: So now now I'm real dubious about this supposed fish
Speaker 5: he's got on the wall.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's a marine scientist of the Nature Conservancy, and
Speaker 1: he's not going to put it this way, but he's
Speaker 1: here to talk about what I'm what I suspect to
Speaker 1: be a little bit of a deal with the devil
Speaker 1: on on alternative energy.
Speaker 2: Definitely not how I'm going to put it.
Speaker 1: No, not the devil, but but uh a fatal compromise,
Speaker 1: a fatal compromise. But I don't want to lose sight
Speaker 1: of the muskie manifesto. I don't want to spend ton.
Speaker 2: Of time on it.
Speaker 1: So this kid and his dad and his grandpa are
Speaker 1: outfish and muskies muscle lunges, and they catch a whopper.
Speaker 1: They catch the world record musky by a good stretch.
Speaker 4: Well, let's hear how good of a stretch? You gotta
Speaker 4: have details if you're talking world record man.
Speaker 2: They catch it.
Speaker 1: This kid that wrote in his observer number.
Speaker 2: Five okay out of some undetermined number of observers.
Speaker 1: Um, okay. He even tells us the Linnean name.
Speaker 2: He socks mass quiner g.
Speaker 1: Seventy two pound musky. All kinds of witnesses they weigh it.
Speaker 1: They put it on a thing. They mayn't handle it.
Speaker 2: They're mean to it. The rub off, rub the slime
Speaker 2: off it, turn it loose. Uh. They go and they
Speaker 2: tell a guy.
Speaker 1: They go and tell a guy at the dock about
Speaker 1: The guy says man, the musky community. I wouldn't even
Speaker 1: put it out there because the muskie community will come
Speaker 1: after you.
Speaker 2: Anyways.
Speaker 1: The I g F A kicks him off because they
Speaker 1: weighed the fish on a boat.
Speaker 4: M A lot of technicalities with the idea.
Speaker 1: The muskie has to be weighed on dry land.
Speaker 3: So you have to kill the fish. Basically, how are
Speaker 3: you going to pull that off with that in a
Speaker 3: regular old boat?
Speaker 5: You have that cradle and then you like nurse the
Speaker 5: thing all the way.
Speaker 2: He's got all these photos.
Speaker 3: More stress, more stress.
Speaker 2: Here's the fish here.
Speaker 1: But one thing he gets into is he gets in
Speaker 1: it probably weighed more of course, because they will. They
Speaker 1: had to certify their scale after the fact. The scale
Speaker 1: they certified after the fact was dead on balls at
Speaker 1: fifty but a seventy five pound weight when they certified
Speaker 1: their scale is seventy five pound weight rang in at
Speaker 1: seventy two fifty.
Speaker 2: Seventy two five.
Speaker 1: Kicked off, and this is his story, kicked off because
Speaker 1: they didn't weigh it.
Speaker 2: On land.
Speaker 1: Then he gets into a bunch of other really big
Speaker 1: musky that had been disqualified for all kinds of reasons.
Speaker 5: Is there consensus for that rule? Is like, since you
Speaker 5: aren't on a solid ground, that.
Speaker 2: The boat sinks, the certified.
Speaker 5: The certified scale isn't as accurate. That's that's the reason.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but he's pointing out. Imagine if you'd
Speaker 1: killed that fish, what you would have heard about from
Speaker 1: the walleye, from the muskie community, which apparently is a
Speaker 1: you know, musky two point zero.
Speaker 4: But if you'd have killed it fifty years ago, nobody
Speaker 4: would have cared, would have said nothing.
Speaker 1: Now it's catched, it's now it's like what you supposed.
Speaker 2: Hsky two point oh?
Speaker 1: Well, just think about all the cat.
Speaker 3: And panfish that you'd save by killing that fish.
Speaker 1: It's a two point oh catch twenty two.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: In the old days, we hadn't name this podcast that
Speaker 1: two point oh catch twenty two.
Speaker 6: Title days one point oh. Now it's title Day's two
Speaker 6: point oh.
Speaker 2: What was your comment?
Speaker 3: Just think about all the chipmunks and and uh small
Speaker 3: mouth and panfish. They would have saved by killing that.
Speaker 2: Save a perch killing musky, dont forget ducklings.
Speaker 3: Yeah, little kid toes, stuff like that.
Speaker 5: There's that dude up in Canada three years ago that
Speaker 5: got smashed by a Walleye and BC tore his hand
Speaker 5: all up.
Speaker 3: Wiley or a musky.
Speaker 5: I'm sorry, musky, yep, musky. Yeah, those Walleye anglers just
Speaker 5: really perked up there, like see, we knew that fish
Speaker 5: was bad.
Speaker 2: We know it wasn't real lazy.
Speaker 5: It's not just for eating Sowa's buddy.
Speaker 1: I hear you, man, you got bone. Your grandpa got
Speaker 1: boned by the IGFA.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a boomer.
Speaker 2: I don't know what more to say about it.
Speaker 8: What do you want the igf A to.
Speaker 2: Do about it? Though? I send the guy something. Yeah,
Speaker 2: consolation lure got away in that land. It's a catch
Speaker 2: twenty two. What are you supposed to do?
Speaker 4: Rules or rules?
Speaker 3: Rules is rules?
Speaker 1: You kill it and you're gonna hear about it from
Speaker 1: the musky community. Two point zero. You don't kill it.
Speaker 1: You can't be in the thing.
Speaker 8: Would you killed it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'd have made a video about it.
Speaker 4: He'd cut it into stakes.
Speaker 1: I'd have got out my spearfish and k ivy right
Speaker 1: in the top of the head. Now to do it
Speaker 1: not been like sucket musky community.
Speaker 5: For context, I'd like to understand catch twenty one and
Speaker 5: catch twenty three. You should come up with those.
Speaker 2: It's a real catch twenty three. Catch twenty three exists.
Speaker 2: It's Michael Jordan's fishing boat.
Speaker 5: That's right. Yeah, yeah, it never gets off.
Speaker 4: Not a musket work on the street.
Speaker 2: Wonder people hearing this?
Speaker 6: Crin first to April.
Speaker 1: Oh, hey, go check out. So we got our live
Speaker 1: tour coming up. Let me pull up the dates.
Speaker 2: We got our live tour.
Speaker 1: Coming up, just to remind everybody, where's my little thing?
Speaker 6: April? What is it? Twenty second or twenty third? To May?
Speaker 1: April twenty third, Mace, Arizona, bear with me here April
Speaker 1: twenty four, San Diego, California, April twenty five, Anaheim, California.
Speaker 1: April twenty seven, Sacramento, California. That winds up being a
Speaker 1: lot of California April twenty nine, Salt Lake City, April thirty, Boise, Idaho,
Speaker 1: May one, Missoula, Montana, which is gonna be a riot
Speaker 1: hometown crowd having spent many a night in that theater
Speaker 1: above it and in it.
Speaker 4: And blow it with your elevator operator, buddy, We used
Speaker 4: to catch pigeons below that thing.
Speaker 1: Scoot and Newton. I'm gonna tell the story of Scoot
Speaker 1: and Newton. May second, Spokane, May four, Portland, Oregon, Portland,
Speaker 1: Oregon and slow Gin Fizz. If that ain't loved, then
Speaker 1: tell me what is great tun Uh huh.
Speaker 5: You know it's a winner When Phil laughs, I know
Speaker 5: it about once a year something tis fancy.
Speaker 2: The other day what was it? Yeah, there are something
Speaker 2: caught Philsier.
Speaker 3: That was just a great uh retain impression. Uh huh.
Speaker 1: May five, Tacoma. Get your tickets. You can go to
Speaker 1: the actual you can go to the meeater dot com
Speaker 1: and you'll find a live events thing and find it there.
Speaker 1: Or you can go to the specific theaters. But I
Speaker 1: didn't just name the specific theaters, which makes it very tricky.
Speaker 1: Type go to your computer and type of media, your
Speaker 1: live you'll find it. Come check us out. It's gonna
Speaker 1: be a ton of fun.
Speaker 2: It's a three act show.
Speaker 5: Bring your wife, you know, I uh is a little
Speaker 5: in the weeds. But when we talk about reaching new
Speaker 5: audiences with the podcast. If there's gonna there's gotta be
Speaker 5: like a Venn diagram of when Phil laughs, mm hmm.
Speaker 5: We're reaching new audience members. I don't know if those
Speaker 5: people be around for a while, might pop in see
Speaker 5: what's going on.
Speaker 1: Like you'd have to just catch one of them to
Speaker 1: have me walking by someone playing it like you left
Speaker 1: your car door open at the gas station and you
Speaker 1: left it on and some guy caught some guy like
Speaker 1: Phil caught a little lick there. All right, Yannie, hit it,
Speaker 1: quick hit.
Speaker 3: If the live tour isn't it enough for you, you
Speaker 3: can come spend If that's not enough, Yanny, for you,
Speaker 3: three days with us and a new thing we're calling
Speaker 3: Meat Eater Experiences. We're gonna have a lot more details
Speaker 3: to come, but I've been instructured to do a quick
Speaker 3: hit here about this. We're hosting a fishing trip in Venice, Louisiana,
Speaker 3: as well as.
Speaker 2: I get some background on that one waterfowl.
Speaker 3: Hunt in Kansas. You have some background, I'd like.
Speaker 2: To give some background. Oh yeah, please do the last couple.
Speaker 1: Of years when we've been down been going down spearfish
Speaker 1: and on spearfish and the oil rigs out of you know,
Speaker 1: coastal Louisiana. And I fell into becoming friends with Renee,
Speaker 1: who owns Cypress Cove Marina, and we got talking about
Speaker 1: something fun we'd like to do, and we're gonna basically,
Speaker 1: not basically, we're gonna take over Cypress Coved Marina.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: So we're doing a thing where he's got a house boat, condos,
Speaker 1: a hotel, We're getting all the spots. He's got a
Speaker 1: whole ton of charter captains that charter out of his
Speaker 1: marina and friends and stuff. So we're getting all the boats,
Speaker 1: all the lodging, put together food plan, and then we're
Speaker 1: gonna have meat eater crew guys there and we're doing
Speaker 1: big fishing party, guys and gals, guys and gals, big
Speaker 1: fishing party in shore, offshore on guide boats, hanging out
Speaker 1: at night, cooking fish, cleaning fish.
Speaker 3: It's gonna be a good time. Renee is gonna do
Speaker 3: once per group is going to do a big Cajun
Speaker 3: seafood boil, which I'm very excited about. He's so I
Speaker 3: like people that are so into doing their type of
Speaker 3: food that when when you meet someone that has custom
Speaker 3: made or had someone custom made them, the thing to
Speaker 3: cook their food in you know, it's serious and there
Speaker 3: it's gonna be good. So we're gonna get that experience
Speaker 3: down there. And then yeah, the waterfowl Honting in Kansas,
Speaker 3: three different trips between November December and uh well January
Speaker 3: first really is the last one for that hunt, so
Speaker 3: uh check, go to go to the website. There'll be
Speaker 3: a drop down menu under Mediator Experiences and all the details.
Speaker 2: Will be there here shortly.
Speaker 1: You know what I like about the waterfowl part of
Speaker 1: it is that's gonna be the thing I need to
Speaker 1: motivate me to finally get me.
Speaker 2: A power plucker.
Speaker 1: I'm going to have my power plucker sent there, know
Speaker 1: when it's all said and done on and bring that
Speaker 1: power plucker back home.
Speaker 3: It's good idea.
Speaker 2: What's that kind of power plucker I want?
Speaker 3: You know, the one that my brother in law has Now,
Speaker 3: I think it's called the foul foul Plucker.
Speaker 2: Isn't it?
Speaker 3: Dude?
Speaker 2: Do you ever be on that guy's website? Nope?
Speaker 1: I got the nosing around there, and my neighbor, Pottery
Speaker 1: pat he after he offered to go haves. He's on
Speaker 1: it with me, But I don't know if I want
Speaker 1: to like want to share. Well, hey, then you know.
Speaker 2: Whatever, then I gotta go looking for it over his house.
Speaker 4: So I mean, you guys live like fifty yards apart.
Speaker 2: It's not like.
Speaker 1: Sharing being me and powdered pad or to share everything.
Speaker 2: Anyway.
Speaker 5: It's I've told you where I've seen these things set up.
Speaker 5: Eventually there's a shack that gets built around them.
Speaker 1: Kahl was saying, because because the feather mate, the feather
Speaker 1: management so much.
Speaker 2: Eventually just yeah, you kind of dig it out.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you're like, boy, it doesn't really work in the
Speaker 5: garage all the time.
Speaker 1: That's a creeping cost if you start out with a
Speaker 1: power plucker and then you end up with a building.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and then you have a house that's built around well,
Speaker 5: yeah exactly.
Speaker 3: I think it could be modified a little bit. They're
Speaker 3: not cheap. I'm looking at it right now on the
Speaker 3: orbist site. There's seven hundred and thirty bucks. Yeah, but
Speaker 3: they get for him. But it makes it pretty duck
Speaker 3: well when you do it right, you read the that
Speaker 3: guy is so serious. People place the order with that guy.
Speaker 3: And also, like you go place the order, all of
Speaker 3: a sudden your phone rings. He's calling you to make
Speaker 3: sure that you're serious about this purchase.
Speaker 1: To be like, well, I saw you bought one of
Speaker 1: the pluckers. Here's the deal, right, let's work together.
Speaker 3: Uh, Cal, I could see that there could be some
Speaker 3: feather build up, you know, I mean especially if you
Speaker 3: I mean if you're processing you know, at fifty a day.
Speaker 3: But I mean we processed almost twenty birds and we've
Speaker 3: basically filled up a shot full canister shot back in
Speaker 3: that you know, two hour period and it was full,
Speaker 3: like you couldn't really done too many more without dumping it.
Speaker 2: But it worked, said two hours for twenty birds.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I'm guessing. I mean we had kids
Speaker 3: there that are, you know, helping and messing around, but
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, the keys, it's got to be a
Speaker 3: dry bird.
Speaker 1: Well, you gotta read more. I started reading more than
Speaker 1: you read.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I just send that.
Speaker 5: Guy a picture of my thumb, say like, is it
Speaker 5: going to be better than this?
Speaker 3: I do better, but we'll do faster. That's one hundred
Speaker 3: percent sure, petition buddy, I want.
Speaker 2: One of those things still.
Speaker 1: Man, I'm gonna have it sent there so when we're
Speaker 1: doing our when we're doing our mediator experiences deal, we
Speaker 1: can people can power.
Speaker 3: Pluck totally go home with a bunch of birds.
Speaker 2: Hopefully you got more to say.
Speaker 3: No, I think that's uh, that's good for it.
Speaker 7: Off.
Speaker 1: Quick hit spots are available to the general public starting
Speaker 1: the opening day of bear season.
Speaker 3: And turkey season in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: April fifteen.
Speaker 2: Isn't that? What's tax day? Yep?
Speaker 6: That's it?
Speaker 1: Oh okay, so when you go to either send your
Speaker 1: money in or file for your money.
Speaker 3: Who was it that had a horse named Iris because
Speaker 3: she was born on April fifteenth? You remember that?
Speaker 2: No, I thought that was a cute ir s.
Speaker 1: Yeah, April fifteen spotsor availed again. We got our trip
Speaker 1: fishing Louisiana in shore. Offshore, you can even go jug
Speaker 1: and catfish.
Speaker 3: Yeah, listen, man, I would have gone way deeper, but
Speaker 3: I was asked to do a quick hit. But yeah,
Speaker 3: we got all kinds of things we can talk about
Speaker 3: for this trip or.
Speaker 2: Or ducks and geese and Kansas. Yeah, and every night
Speaker 2: there's gonna be a long We're gonna give a long.
Speaker 1: Lecture about something.
Speaker 3: Every dight.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna read this Musky Manifesto with everybody present.
Speaker 3: That's right, and that's optional. If you don't want to
Speaker 3: stay for that. You can just go get some rest
Speaker 3: because the next day is going to be another big
Speaker 3: day of hunting or fish.
Speaker 1: And so there's a thing we spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time on a uh something blowing up out a blow
Speaker 1: I don't know, blowing up that might be over selling it.
Speaker 1: A problem in Wisconsin that is just disconcerting to me.
Speaker 1: Unbeknownst to me for my whole life, I had no
Speaker 1: idea you can't spear a Northern pike in wiscon which
Speaker 1: to me seems like the pike spirit. If you'd have
Speaker 1: said to me before I found this out, if you
Speaker 1: said to me, what is the pike spear in the
Speaker 1: state in America? I would have just said, Eh, Wisconsin
Speaker 1: is there?
Speaker 4: Is it because of Musky two point zero?
Speaker 1: Is that what they don't who's driving it right now?
Speaker 2: Yes, that's what I thought.
Speaker 1: I don't know who is driving it. Prior to Muski
Speaker 1: two point oh, you cannot spear a Northern pike in Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: You can spare a sturgeon in Wisconsin. Can't spear a
Speaker 1: Northern pike Why because they can't trust one. They think
Speaker 1: pike spears will get all the Biggins and they think
Speaker 1: that a pike spearer cannot tell the difference between a
Speaker 1: northy in a muscle lunch man.
Speaker 4: It's like looking into an aquarium at the zoo.
Speaker 1: He can you can trust Americans. You can trust Americans
Speaker 1: to tell the difference between a button buck and a spike.
Speaker 1: You can trust Americans to tell if a deer has
Speaker 1: three times on one side. You can trust an American
Speaker 1: to tell a hen pintail from a drake pintail in
Speaker 1: the early season when they don't have their breeding plumage.
Speaker 1: You can tell Americans how to tell a hen pheasant
Speaker 1: from a rooster pheasant. You can trust Americans how to
Speaker 1: catch a pike and not mistakenly, or catch a muskie
Speaker 1: and not mistake it for a pike.
Speaker 2: What else do you trust Americans to do?
Speaker 5: I think I think you know fast moving waterfowls. Fantastic example.
Speaker 2: For sure, you brought up hen versus rooster pheasant. How
Speaker 2: about a sharp tail and a hen pheasant when they
Speaker 2: get up into the city.
Speaker 1: You can trust an American to tell the difference between
Speaker 1: a sharp tail hen and a hen pheasant. To drab
Speaker 1: colored brown birds with a pointy tail, the sun in
Speaker 1: the bright sun. There's no prohibition on hunting them in
Speaker 1: the bright sun. Far from it, no prohibition against walking
Speaker 1: into the sun. What else can you trust Americans?
Speaker 3: Nothing?
Speaker 5: You can trus men's room from the women's room.
Speaker 2: You can trust Americans tell the men's well you used to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can trust Americans to not shoot a black
Speaker 1: bearsyle with cubs. You can trust Americans to identify a
Speaker 1: male mountain goat. But apparently you cannot trust Americans to
Speaker 1: not spear muskies while spear and pike. Therefore, the entire
Speaker 1: state of Wisconsin can't go pike spearing. As we explained
Speaker 1: in the past episode, they put it to Wisconsin has
Speaker 1: this kind of cool but widely widely celebrated and widely
Speaker 1: displot despised.
Speaker 2: Way that you.
Speaker 1: Can get game loss change. What's it called calendar? You
Speaker 1: remember the advisory panel?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 5: Yeah, the regional like Pat Dirkins always talking about, and yeah,
Speaker 5: regional advisor or yeah, there's an acronym, but it's a
Speaker 5: county by county or region by region citizens Advisory Council.
Speaker 1: So if you want to get a game a long
Speaker 1: Wisconsin change, you can bring it to the citizen's advisory panel.
Speaker 1: Like I'm going to get in there heavy duty as
Speaker 1: a non resident because they're trying to move through the Citizens'
Speaker 1: Advisory Panel process. They're trying to move youth turkey in
Speaker 1: Wisconsin from two days to four days, which I firmly support,
Speaker 1: and the Wisconsin public supports that. What the Wisconsin public
Speaker 1: is uneasy about is youth deer going from two days
Speaker 1: to four days, but they're supportive of it going four
Speaker 1: days for turkey.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of people that gripe about those youth
Speaker 4: hunting seasons.
Speaker 2: I don't understand. Well, if I didn't have kids, i'd
Speaker 2: hate them.
Speaker 1: Well, I was staying there to day. If we had
Speaker 1: a youth elk, I was saying, I would have never
Speaker 1: gotten the vast ectomy. I said that on the show.
Speaker 5: As a man with no children. Here in Gallason County,
Speaker 5: here we go, I pay out the nose for your kids'
Speaker 5: education already.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 5: I don't know why they also need to beat me
Speaker 5: out into the field.
Speaker 2: Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 3: Pick one or the other.
Speaker 4: How's that You've had plenty opportunity at this point in
Speaker 4: your life. Those kids need a little opportunity to.
Speaker 2: Okay, help me out here.
Speaker 1: Whoa I got my glasses on. Who can help me
Speaker 1: out finding this?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 2: How did the vote break?
Speaker 1: So they put it to the citizens Advisory Panel and
Speaker 1: it got shot down kind of. They said, do you
Speaker 1: support pike spearing, and how in the world could someone
Speaker 1: say no?
Speaker 2: But here's what happened.
Speaker 1: They had a nearly even vote of yes no, and
Speaker 1: you had the option to say no opinion, okay, which
Speaker 1: was so close that it actually advanced to the Conservation
Speaker 1: the Conservation Congress in Wisconsin after a somewhat anemic public input,
Speaker 1: meaning evenly broke yes no. I think it was slightly no.
Speaker 1: But then there's all these people that copped out with
Speaker 1: a no opinion. So then it goes to the Conservation Congress,
Speaker 1: and the Conservation Congress in Wisconsin says thirty five to
Speaker 1: twenty eight, Yes, we want a pike speerience season. But
Speaker 1: as this guy puts it, the DNR Wisconsin's now dragging
Speaker 1: their feet. This guy that writes in about it wrote
Speaker 1: this letter. Myself and the two thousand other individuals I
Speaker 1: represent as part of the Wisconsin Dark House Angling Association
Speaker 1: and the Powerful Fish Decoy Association National, The Powerful National
Speaker 1: Fish Decoy Association are going to continue the fight. So
Speaker 1: it's like it's it's a pot boiler in Wisconsin.
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, I mean, what what is the risk? Like,
Speaker 5: are you aware of any long studies that examine the
Speaker 5: abuse of overtake by spear fishermen during the ice season,
Speaker 5: like a guy committed to a fish shack versus six
Speaker 5: tip ups?
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like that's what I was going to say, Like
Speaker 4: I've I've speared pike and you're you're not out fishing.
Speaker 4: The guy's got a whole set of tip ups out
Speaker 4: like no way, yeah, and you're sitting there and like, yeah,
Speaker 4: maybe you're targeting bigger pike.
Speaker 2: But I'm not aware of any studies, and I could
Speaker 2: see an argument for going to lake by lake management. Yeah,
Speaker 2: well yeah, of course, depending on you know, the population
Speaker 2: status of muskies or the presence even of muskies in
Speaker 2: a given lake.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that'd be a great compromise. Of course if there's
Speaker 1: like big treasure. You know, what was the strain of
Speaker 1: muskies also quad for strain. So he as when the
Speaker 1: guy or the guy that we communicate about this issue,
Speaker 1: when he wrote his letter being like, hey, what gives
Speaker 1: the Conservation Congress supported and advanced it. How come Noah movement.
Speaker 1: The department came back to him. Department, the department, this
Speaker 1: is the this is the Fishing Game Department Wisconsin d
Speaker 1: and R coming back to him. The Department does not
Speaker 1: plan to advance this proposal as a d n R
Speaker 1: rule change. Question spearing Northern Pike through the ice may
Speaker 1: raise user conflicts with other ice fishers.
Speaker 5: Since I may not right, I mean sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 1: Since implementation of a rule change in nineteen nine twenty
Speaker 1: three that eliminated the January and February spearing seasons on
Speaker 1: the Monominee in Brule Rivers, no winter spearing has been
Speaker 1: allowed in Wisconsin, with the exception of ice spearing on
Speaker 1: Lake Superior. Spearing can be selective for the largest pike
Speaker 1: in the population a lot of maize and cans.
Speaker 2: So, if I get that argument correctly, he's saying that
Speaker 2: because spearfishing is so selective of the largest pike, then
Speaker 2: it could have negative population consequences.
Speaker 1: Now it's other guys, bitch, and that they're going to
Speaker 1: spear all the big pike.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the implication, right.
Speaker 5: It's like in your four foot chunk of a how
Speaker 5: many acre lake, your little window that you see you're
Speaker 5: going to be selective within that four foot chunk out
Speaker 5: of one hundred and fifty eight acres.
Speaker 2: But other states allow the spearing of northern pike. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: have we seen across the northern tier? Have we seen
Speaker 2: a truncation of the size distribution in lakes where spearing
Speaker 2: northern pike is allowed.
Speaker 1: I think the problem with that is it's been historically
Speaker 1: it's just always been historically present. But what I can
Speaker 1: tell you can study the dickens out of is the
Speaker 1: fact that there ain't nobody out spearing pike. Yeah, a
Speaker 1: little bit. It's like a it's not hurting anything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he goes on, the department goes on. There is also
Speaker 1: concern with spearers mistaking muske Lunge for Northern pike on
Speaker 1: water bodies. We're both Congeners.
Speaker 2: What's that mean? Same genus?
Speaker 1: We're both congenders, reside Congeners.
Speaker 2: That's what that means. Con generics. Yeah, good thing you're here.
Speaker 3: That's great.
Speaker 1: Yeah, congeners.
Speaker 2: Congeners are congenerics. Yeah, same genus ESOCHS E S O X.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna start saying that all the time all the time.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I get a word like that to write it
Speaker 1: on my hand for a few days and then then
Speaker 1: I got it.
Speaker 2: Then I got it down.
Speaker 1: While the public input for the twenty twenty three advice
Speaker 1: requestion was fairly close, more people did not support this proposal,
Speaker 1: with three thousand, one hundred and forty three in favor
Speaker 1: and three thousand, three hundred and fifty five opposed. We
Speaker 1: just don't govern that way.
Speaker 3: You know. It's a buddy of mine.
Speaker 5: He's a retired railroader out of Missoula, loves spear and
Speaker 5: pike has only to my knowledge, speared maybe a handful
Speaker 5: in many, many seasons. Because he is actively selecting for
Speaker 5: a huge pike. He has one pike mounted on his
Speaker 5: wall in his house, and it does not matter if
Speaker 5: you've been through that door a thousand times or for
Speaker 5: the very first time. Eventually he'll be like, did you
Speaker 5: see the pike? And you're like, yep, gam it's still.
Speaker 2: There, Like how did he get that one? With a spirit?
Speaker 5: Yep, spearin through the ice. But he's like, he would
Speaker 5: be the and this is an invasive species in this lake.
Speaker 5: It's it's the lake that you can underwaters spearfish for
Speaker 5: in western Montana. He would be he would raise Holy
Speaker 5: hell if anybody decided to eradicate the pike from that
Speaker 5: system because he loves that species so much. So that's
Speaker 5: just kind of like a random selection of dark house spearfishermen.
Speaker 5: They're not or this particular person, right, he's letting every
Speaker 5: fish go. Yeah, and he's up there all the time.
Speaker 5: And like the economic impacts that we always talk about
Speaker 5: people who do stuff like this, right, it's it's a
Speaker 5: weird thing. The other thing that is like worth pointing
Speaker 5: out here that's kind of a nowhere type of deal
Speaker 5: is like you want to talk to about people who
Speaker 5: discuss climate change and the impacts of that, talk to spearfishermen.
Speaker 5: I'm sorry, ice fisherman, ice anglers. Yeah, the catch is
Speaker 5: going down. They didn't ice fish this year the amount
Speaker 5: of days, right, they didn't. They didn't get out at all.
Speaker 5: But that could be a reason for the d NR
Speaker 5: to be like, well, why would we put in the
Speaker 5: expense of rewriting the rags, uh for something that's trending
Speaker 5: downward anyway?
Speaker 2: Uh, Yeah, I'm the idea on that.
Speaker 1: Like, I grew up in big time pike country in Michigan.
Speaker 2: We fished. That was our primary ice. Now one of
Speaker 2: our primary ice.
Speaker 1: Is that well, let me put this way, that was
Speaker 1: our only ice, big game fish that we concentrated on.
Speaker 1: You could spear, you could tip up, and you want
Speaker 1: to see some bloody ice, go out there on a
Speaker 1: big tip up day. If you were out for numbers,
Speaker 1: running tip ups is going to give you bigger numbers
Speaker 1: of fish.
Speaker 5: Well we're weren't you saying that your your lake as
Speaker 5: a kid had a bunch of dead pike all over
Speaker 5: during the summertime, like people would kill them and leave them.
Speaker 3: Is that right?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you see a lot of that, right, But that's
Speaker 1: and that's after the bass. Oh when the lake shore
Speaker 1: is like littered with fish that got let go with
Speaker 1: a nightcrawler and its anus. Let's talk about mercury and
Speaker 1: fish from sure.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: The reason I want to talk about mercury and fish
Speaker 1: is one we have a colleague of beloved colleague who
Speaker 1: he claims that have been mercury poisoned. I have been
Speaker 1: eating fish most of my life, and waters that carry
Speaker 1: a health advisory, state health advisories.
Speaker 2: I lived for a while.
Speaker 1: In Seattle, and we would have people not eat the
Speaker 1: perch we caught because they knew that those fish had
Speaker 1: a health advisory.
Speaker 2: People are aware of it.
Speaker 1: There was just a recently an article in the New
Speaker 1: York Times about you probably saw this. If we're cutting
Speaker 1: if we've been so successful in cutting mercury admit what's
Speaker 1: the word, not admissions, submission emissions, mercury emissions. If we've
Speaker 1: been so successful curbing mercury emissions, why do tuna still
Speaker 1: have mercury in them?
Speaker 2: It takes a very long time for mercury to leave
Speaker 2: the environment. It can be actually a bigger problem in
Speaker 2: freshwater systems than offshore, because no one's taking anything out
Speaker 2: of stink of remote lakes in Canada, for example, Atmospheric
Speaker 2: deposition of mercury puts mercury in that water. It's taken
Speaker 2: up by algae, other phytoplankton. It enters the food chain
Speaker 2: that way, it works its way up into say, let's
Speaker 2: say walleye are the top predator in a given lake.
Speaker 2: Then if very very few people are fishing that lake,
Speaker 2: harvesting fish out of that lake, the mercury never leaves.
Speaker 2: That's how the mercury has to be removed. Pretty much.
Speaker 2: It's got a very long half ton, it's got a
Speaker 2: very long half life, and so it just stays in
Speaker 2: the system. And it's actually the lakes that are fished
Speaker 2: harder that tend to have lower mercury.
Speaker 1: And like you're hauling the mercury out when you haul
Speaker 1: fish way, it's.
Speaker 2: Them get them big muskies out of there. There's there's
Speaker 2: no once it's in the food web. I mean, there's
Speaker 2: not really any mitigation that can be done. It's not
Speaker 2: like you can spray a lake.
Speaker 4: And where's it all coming from in the first place?
Speaker 4: Does industrial pollution?
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, fossil fuels too.
Speaker 1: Well, how are they curbing?
Speaker 2: I got a ton of questions about it now.
Speaker 5: I thought mercury was so heavy that it just works
Speaker 5: its way.
Speaker 2: Down in its elemental form. It's it's super dense, right,
Speaker 2: But the mercury that's dangerous to animals from a toxicity
Speaker 2: standpoint is the methylated form. Uh so, it's it's got
Speaker 2: a carbon and a couple of hydrogens on it. The
Speaker 2: density of that molecule I don't know off the top
Speaker 2: of my head. But it's not like the silver liquid
Speaker 2: you're thinking of in a in a thermode. The fun stuff,
Speaker 2: the fun stuff, Yeah, yeah, that you probably played with
Speaker 2: that you and I both so I were bald played
Speaker 2: with as kids in elementary school. No, that stuff has gone.
Speaker 1: How have we slowed emissions? We haven't slowed fossil fuel consumption.
Speaker 2: Well, depending on who you mean by we, we have
Speaker 2: slowed fossil fuel consumption as global you globally know. How
Speaker 2: have we slowed the emission of mercury? It's generally it's
Speaker 2: about uh, scrubbing procedures when those fossil fuel, when that
Speaker 2: that that gas is being emitted from coal burning powers.
Speaker 2: So want to hear about clean coal or whatever? Is
Speaker 2: that different? Uh? No, it's you're on the right track. Yeah,
Speaker 2: although we're hearing less about clean coal. But yeah, but
Speaker 2: that would be scrubbed where the emissions are scrubbed exactly,
Speaker 2: and mercury is part of that. Okay, yep.
Speaker 1: And then they use mercury in mining applications.
Speaker 2: It's out of my pay grade.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's that's not making its way. I mean they
Speaker 1: use mercury in like, you know, like leech mining. Okay,
Speaker 1: But I don't know if that gets into the water system,
Speaker 1: because everybody talks about the atmospheric mercury that shuts into your.
Speaker 2: Fish yeap, And depending on the fish, it could be both.
Speaker 2: It could be that that point source. You know, if
Speaker 2: you're talking about a fish that's in an estuary or
Speaker 2: close to shore, like bluefin tuna, for example, you brought
Speaker 2: up tuna. Bluefin tuna have elevated mercury. Often they're apex predators.
Speaker 2: They're eating a lot of fish that are associated with shore,
Speaker 2: that are living in rivers and systems that might be
Speaker 2: influenced by a single factory or something up upstream. But
Speaker 2: then you have fish that never come close to shore,
Speaker 2: like blue marlin, for example, that live in the blue
Speaker 2: water pelagic environment for their entire life. The mercury that's
Speaker 2: in those animals is just from non point source, from
Speaker 2: atmospheric deposition coming down in the rain.
Speaker 1: An atmospheric deposition is global, correct. I mean, you could
Speaker 1: go to the remotest corner of the Indian Ocean and
Speaker 1: mercury rains down in that.
Speaker 2: You'd find a Budweiser bottle, a food line bag, and
Speaker 2: some microplastics, and there'd be mercury there, got it, But
Speaker 2: not in.
Speaker 5: The concentration right of like the Great Lakes and its
Speaker 5: heyday of the industrial output of the Industrial Revolution right.
Speaker 2: Well, in general, since the nineteen seventies, mercury deposition worldwide
Speaker 2: has gone down largely as a result of the environmental
Speaker 2: movement in North America in that time. And again a
Speaker 2: little out of my depth here, but we as a
Speaker 2: country put pressure on other countries to be more environmentally
Speaker 2: responsible the emissions and the burning of fossil fuels, and
Speaker 2: that lowers atmospheric deposition of mercury too. Got it.
Speaker 1: So when will do you picture if current practices continue,
Speaker 1: Is there a day in which all of a sudden
Speaker 1: you notice that there's no more health advisories on the
Speaker 1: consumption of wildfish, probably.
Speaker 2: Out of the lifetime of everyone in this room. Unfortunately,
Speaker 2: that's my guess. You take that long, yeah, because you
Speaker 2: have some places where there's just super high concentrations, and
Speaker 2: you have some species that are just notorious notorious for
Speaker 2: high mercury content. But we'll see, so you.
Speaker 1: Can put less. Like the fact that we're putting less
Speaker 1: of it out there is not being represented in what
Speaker 1: we're seeing when we sample fish.
Speaker 2: That's fair to say. No, it is being represented, because.
Speaker 1: So I'm saying we're not seeing, like I said with
Speaker 1: this article's point about tuna, we're putting less of it
Speaker 1: in the sure, but we're not yet seeing less of
Speaker 1: it in our fish.
Speaker 2: Oh, I see. Well, So, first of all, I'll say
Speaker 2: that in order to observe a decline in a toxic
Speaker 2: kint like mercury, you have to have a really long
Speaker 2: time series of information. So, in other words, in order
Speaker 2: to observe that decline, you'd have to have the data
Speaker 2: going back to, say, the nineteen seventies. I'm not a
Speaker 2: tuna guy. I love eating tuna. I'm not aware of
Speaker 2: what sort of long term data sets there are for
Speaker 2: tuna muscle. And we keep saying tuna, but there's all
Speaker 2: these species in all these different environments. So I was
Speaker 2: part of a study a couple of years ago where
Speaker 2: we did have a long term data set for blue
Speaker 2: marlin muscle that went back to the nineteen seventies, and
Speaker 2: we did observe.
Speaker 1: DeLine like who was collecked in that?
Speaker 2: Like? How? Yeah, good question. So the federal government, the
Speaker 2: National Marine Fishery Service otherwise known as Noah Fisheries, has
Speaker 2: a laboratory in Beaufort, North Carolina, where I live, and
Speaker 2: there were scientists there and at the Duke University Marine
Speaker 2: Lab also in Beaufort, that began collecting muscle tissue from
Speaker 2: blue marlin in the nineteen seventies in from in fact,
Speaker 2: the Big Rock Blue Marlin Tournament, which is something that
Speaker 2: you've covered on this podcast. Yeah, sopist opportunistic sampling of
Speaker 2: muscle taken from the animals that were landed in that tournament,
Speaker 2: and in the seventies also animals that were landed willy
Speaker 2: nilly and you know, just brought to shore or maybe
Speaker 2: in other tournaments. So there was a we had they
Speaker 2: analyzed those data. Then It's not like we had crusty
Speaker 2: chunks of marlin. Maybe they were drying it or something. Okay, yeah, no,
Speaker 2: they analyzed those data then, uh, and then we had
Speaker 2: there was a gap of twenty five years. And then
Speaker 2: in the late nineties, scientists at that same lab, the
Speaker 2: Noah Lab no Officieri's Lab in Beaufort began collecting muscle
Speaker 2: again from blue marlin in the Big Rock Tournament. The
Speaker 2: NC State University Lab where I went to graduate school
Speaker 2: in Morhead City, North Carolina, took over that sampling in
Speaker 2: the early two thousands and created a long term data set.
Speaker 2: I think the paper. The data in the paper went
Speaker 2: up to maybe twenty twenty two, So that's what for
Speaker 2: thirty year, forty year, fifty year time series. Yeah, of
Speaker 2: blue marlin muscle, and there was a market decline in
Speaker 2: the content of total mercury and methyl mercury in that
Speaker 2: muscle from the nineteen seventies to present day. Oh my god,
Speaker 2: good news, good news. And the other good news is
Speaker 2: huh for blue marlin in particular, for some reason, I
Speaker 2: don't know if I have a good speculation here, but
Speaker 2: for some reason, blue marlin are special in that most
Speaker 2: of the mercury in their muscle tissue is not the
Speaker 2: nasty stuff, the methylated form. For most fish, when they're
Speaker 2: forming FDA EPR or forming consumption advisories, they're sampling the
Speaker 2: muscle for total mercury. It's much easier year to run
Speaker 2: a sample for total mercury and the muscle tissue. They're
Speaker 2: coming up with an advisory at three parts per million
Speaker 2: or five parts per million or whatever, just based on
Speaker 2: that total mercury number, because they're assuming that all of
Speaker 2: that mercury is methyl mercury, the nasty stuff. That's true
Speaker 2: for most fish, most of the total mercury is the
Speaker 2: methal form, but in blue marlin it's a fraction of
Speaker 2: the total, which is really good from a from the
Speaker 2: standpoint of consumption. Now, I'm not hoping that people are
Speaker 2: going to go out and start exactly that stocks over
Speaker 2: fished and apex preaders. We don't want to take a
Speaker 2: lot of them out of the system anyway. But but
Speaker 2: you could, you could eat blue marlin. From a safety standpoint,
Speaker 2: very few of the samples in our study flirted with
Speaker 2: the consumption advisory.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean, Steve will tell you what you can
Speaker 5: and can't eat on a fisheries side of things.
Speaker 2: From an authority standpoint.
Speaker 5: Steve, Well, what do you mean, I mean, you're just
Speaker 5: going to eat it?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, I will tell you my favorite quote, which
Speaker 1: I've said thousand times. Me and Yanni were with a
Speaker 1: friend of ours that likes to fish off flattheads. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and when we asked him about his feeling about eating
Speaker 1: all those flattheads, he said, if I eat so, if
Speaker 1: I catch and eat so many big flattheads that it
Speaker 1: kills me, I win.
Speaker 2: So somewhat fatalistic viewpoint, yeah, markedly so.
Speaker 1: But I have not.
Speaker 2: I have never.
Speaker 1: I've never changed my fish consumption behavior because of health advisories.
Speaker 1: But it nags in the back of my head the
Speaker 1: same way when I'm eating deer meat, even if I
Speaker 1: had to test it, if I'm eating deer meat from
Speaker 1: areas that has like CWD, it is always in.
Speaker 2: The back of my head. So have you been tested
Speaker 2: for mercury? No, no intention to do so.
Speaker 7: No.
Speaker 1: I would definitely do it. If you got a kit
Speaker 1: right now, I would do it right now a kit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not. Somebody of the bag could never.
Speaker 8: Be in a home test for fish meat you bring home.
Speaker 2: Uh no, not other than from a culinary standpoint.
Speaker 5: It's a centrifuge, Like, don't isn't that what you do?
Speaker 5: You like put your blood samples in a centerfuge and
Speaker 5: spin them up and then it separates.
Speaker 2: I left my medical career behind a long time ago,
Speaker 2: but I know a guy in Morehead City who had
Speaker 2: blood drawn explicitly for a mercury test because he was wondering.
Speaker 2: He's like, man, I eat a lot of fish passed
Speaker 2: with flying colors. That's good to hear, that's what they
Speaker 2: were doing.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna text our doctor and we can get well.
Speaker 1: Recently I texted so recently, Yanni text. We were worried
Speaker 1: we had low tea. We asked so Yanni sent a
Speaker 1: note to our doctor wonder about his tea, And then
Speaker 1: a couple yes later, I have to send her a
Speaker 1: note wonder about my tea. And she's like, and I
Speaker 1: caught her breaking the hippocratic oath because she said, are
Speaker 1: you guys sitting around talking about testosterone?
Speaker 2: And I was like, who exactly? Who exactly? Referring to
Speaker 2: because I was under the depression.
Speaker 1: This is all very secret, isn't the hippocratical do no harm?
Speaker 3: That's nothing.
Speaker 2: You're thinking people's secrets, patient doctor confidence. Yeah, that's what
Speaker 2: she broke.
Speaker 5: Cracks who guys about Steve is Michigan or eats every
Speaker 5: single fish? And I think like one of the more
Speaker 5: thorough fish consumption advisories comes out of the state of Michigan.
Speaker 5: It seems like that's the state that has put the
Speaker 5: most work into and it's based off of like the
Speaker 5: Minton state. So it's a Michigan portion, So you put
Speaker 5: your hand up and that represents your fish full. And
Speaker 5: then the quantity based off of your weight and size
Speaker 5: is like you can have a thumb sized portion once
Speaker 5: a week, or you can have a palm size portion
Speaker 5: once a month.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I've always Yeah, that's made me chuckle.
Speaker 1: The in Lake Washington in Seattle. I don't know what
Speaker 1: it is now, but for a while the perch the
Speaker 1: fish advisor is very specific where they would even get
Speaker 1: into sizes of fish, meaning that an example would be
Speaker 1: there was no restriction or what not restrictions out the word.
Speaker 1: There's no advisory on perch under twelve inches yep, but
Speaker 1: perch over twelve inches carried a health advisory.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and they do it differently for children, men, pregnant women.
Speaker 4: Montana has some real specific like size based advisories.
Speaker 8: Steve, would you feed a pregnant woman mercury filled fish.
Speaker 3: Along with not?
Speaker 2: Would not?
Speaker 1: Would? I? I don't know, because here's the thing about it.
Speaker 1: Here's I don't want to spend all over I want
Speaker 1: to talk about alternative energy.
Speaker 2: Here's the thing about it.
Speaker 1: You know, if you're a fisherman, everything you know, if
Speaker 1: you if you're a fisherman and you dig into your rags,
Speaker 1: you're seeing the health advisories. But when you go to
Speaker 1: the grocery store and buy fish, you're just not that
Speaker 1: would all carry a health advisory as well.
Speaker 2: You've seen a lot of fresh I'm actually asking a
Speaker 2: lot of fresh caught wild walleye at the grocery store.
Speaker 1: No, well, there's a there's a wild walleye commercial fishery
Speaker 1: in Ontario. Yeah, so when you go and buy that,
Speaker 1: or when you go to a perch fry on Friday
Speaker 1: night in Michigan, you're not presented with the health advisory information.
Speaker 1: But if you're a fisherman, it's you get your nose
Speaker 1: rubbed in it. So I'm like, I feel like the
Speaker 1: whole So for people to think that this is a
Speaker 1: thing happening to fishermen, it's a thing happening to people
Speaker 1: that go to sushi restaurants.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so yeah, what's yours? What do you want me?
Speaker 2: Do you want it on the menu?
Speaker 1: No, I'm saying that this is this isn't the thing about.
Speaker 1: This isn't a thing for people to fish. This is
Speaker 1: a thing for people that eat fish.
Speaker 2: Sure, and I I just got this thing. There's this
Speaker 2: organization that does like fish.
Speaker 1: They do fish consumption estimates twenty five years, fifty years
Speaker 1: down the road and fish. They expect fish consumption to
Speaker 1: go up globally. So it's not like people that it's like,
Speaker 1: this is what we're talking about for people that go
Speaker 1: and catch a waho. It's people that eat a wahoo.
Speaker 2: Yep. So I guess we need to continue to reduce emissions.
Speaker 2: Ye take that, keep that mercury level down.
Speaker 1: But people be like, oh, you fish, you must eat
Speaker 1: a lot of mercury. It's like you go out to
Speaker 1: eat with your wife, you must eat a lot of mercury.
Speaker 2: I wonder if, in general, there's a presumption that people
Speaker 2: who fish or buy a fishing license are eating more
Speaker 2: fish than people who are going to the grocery store
Speaker 2: to get that fish.
Speaker 1: I think so, dude, if you're a big if you
Speaker 1: love sushi and you're going out once week and eating biggics,
Speaker 1: the kind of stuff that people go to sushi restaurants
Speaker 1: to eat, you're pounding a lot of mercury compared.
Speaker 2: To some dude that thumps a cup of wall I know.
Speaker 3: And then trout.
Speaker 5: I mean, I hate to play in Steve's hand here,
Speaker 5: but the think of the amount of catch and release
Speaker 5: trout fishermen. We all know that the only fish that
Speaker 5: they're eating are coming from the grocery store.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're just not.
Speaker 1: They're getting their mercury from down at I don't know
Speaker 1: the sushi joint. I can't name our old sushi joint.
Speaker 3: They got enough. Just as as one example, I think
Speaker 3: if I didn't get fish from you guys or my
Speaker 3: in laws from both Fort North Carolina when they bring
Speaker 3: us some shrimp, we wouldn't really eat fishkill. We just don't.
Speaker 3: I don't, I don't, but I don't like don't. Yeah,
Speaker 3: to Brendan's point, I don't know the light trying to
Speaker 3: see you know, I just don't buy a lot of fish.
Speaker 4: I'm with you, honest, like, dude, we eat way more like.
Speaker 1: Oh listen, I'm an outlier magnitude. All right, we're gonna
Speaker 1: not move on to where you're.
Speaker 2: Actually an expert. Okay, but I appreciate you. You just
Speaker 2: dragging you into this.
Speaker 5: Oh go ahead, Sorry, I just I'm like, I was
Speaker 5: straining my brain to try to figure out the last
Speaker 5: fish that I bought at a grocery store, and it
Speaker 5: has to get like further divided because it's like, the
Speaker 5: only fish I've purchased at a grocery store is bait
Speaker 5: to go catch other fish with.
Speaker 1: I would never buy it at a grocery store. In fact,
Speaker 1: there's no way smell Nope, I mean, oh yes, what
Speaker 1: you bought right. I'll eat it all day long in restaurants,
Speaker 1: but I would never buy it at a store to
Speaker 1: prepare it at home because I'm home. I just eat
Speaker 1: it out of my freezer. But if I go to
Speaker 1: it and there's fish, I'm probably getting the fish.
Speaker 3: Okay, back on track. Sorry.
Speaker 1: Brendan Runny is a marine scientist of Nature Conservancy, and
Speaker 1: Krin's been really wanting to get him on because we've
Speaker 1: been wanting to talk about offshore alternative energy development and
Speaker 1: what it might mean for fish, which led to a
Speaker 1: broader conversation about where I wanted to have that discussion
Speaker 1: as a sort of as.
Speaker 2: A example.
Speaker 1: Of the opportunities, challenges compromises around alternative energy development, which
Speaker 1: comes at a cost.
Speaker 2: Fair all energy development comes at a cost, comes at
Speaker 2: a cost.
Speaker 1: Now, I want to lay out something that I said.
Speaker 1: I'm going to tell you something I said on previous
Speaker 1: episodes on a previous episode when we talked about this,
Speaker 1: and then I'm gonna let you run.
Speaker 2: But I just want to tee this up.
Speaker 1: If I was the emperor of the world, Nope. If
Speaker 1: I was the emperor of the.
Speaker 6: Country, the emperor everybody.
Speaker 1: If I was in charge of America. If I was
Speaker 1: solely in charge with America of America and my people
Speaker 1: came to me and said, he, here's our plan on
Speaker 1: developing currently undeveloped landscapes offshore. On shore, here's our plan
Speaker 1: to take currently undeveloped landscapes and develop them for alternative
Speaker 1: energy in order to combat climate change. I would say, Man,
Speaker 1: here's why I'm not into it. I'm not into it
Speaker 1: because I fear that we're going to make these changes,
Speaker 1: these changes will not be enough to counteract what's happening
Speaker 1: on the Indian subcontinent in China and RU show. Okay,
Speaker 1: we will see no net decrease in fossil fuel consumption,
Speaker 1: and we will have burnt up our biggest asset, which
Speaker 1: is our wildlife habitat. So we'll sit. We'll have destroyed
Speaker 1: a bunch of wildlife habitat and seeing no difference in.
Speaker 2: Global average temperatures. Okay, now you go. Yeah, so a
Speaker 2: couple of things. So we're in a climate crisis, fair.
Speaker 1: Yes, Well, yeah we're seeing.
Speaker 3: Yes, if you're a Michigan ice fisherman, hell yeah.
Speaker 2: We're seeing. We're seeing annual increases.
Speaker 1: And now I'm not I don't I don't want to
Speaker 1: go back like what they do where they try to
Speaker 1: go back a thousand years because we just weren't measuring
Speaker 1: temperature the same. But in the modern era with with
Speaker 1: how we measure temperature now, we are seeing increases, and
Speaker 1: there's some little blips and stuff, but generally we are
Speaker 1: seeing increased temperatures, and we're seeing impacts of increased temperatures
Speaker 1: on fisheries, on wildlife, on marine resources, and we're seeing
Speaker 1: like some chaotic weather.
Speaker 2: Patterns, weather patterns, we're seeing rain shifts, range expansions of
Speaker 2: many marine species, many terrestrial species for that matter. The
Speaker 2: United States is responsible for fifteen percent of the carbon
Speaker 2: emissions globally. China is responsible for thirty all right, but
Speaker 2: we have the leg up because we industrialized one hundred
Speaker 2: years before them. So we have an opportunity right now
Speaker 2: because we have the means and the motive to try
Speaker 2: to transition from an electricity generating sector that's largely dependent
Speaker 2: on fossil fuels into energy sources that do not produce
Speaker 2: any further carbon emissions. To your point about if we
Speaker 2: don't do this now, if we do this now, no
Speaker 2: one else is going to do anything else. We still
Speaker 2: have the opportunity to bring that DOWT, to get rid
Speaker 2: of that fifteen percent, to turn that fifteen percent into zero.
Speaker 2: Whether or not any of the other nations on this
Speaker 2: planet partake in transitioning from fossil fuel burning electricity production
Speaker 2: to renewable energies, we're still responsible for a huge portion
Speaker 2: of that. So as a nation, we can move towards
Speaker 2: an electricity producing sector that produces no carbon, and we should.
Speaker 2: That's why it's the goal of this presidential administration and
Speaker 2: the goal of the Nature Conservancy to bring us to
Speaker 2: net zero carbon emissions by the year twenty fifty. That's
Speaker 2: only twenty six years from now. We need a major
Speaker 2: uptake in the production of renewable energies like wind and
Speaker 2: solar on land and also offshore. Can I respond to
Speaker 2: another thing that you said, You can talk for an
Speaker 2: hour if you want start so I understand your trepidation
Speaker 2: about the loss of habitat.
Speaker 1: Can you, within this touch on the BLM's proposal. Definitely, Okay,
Speaker 1: tell everybody about that.
Speaker 2: So right now, the Bureau of Land Management is overseeing
Speaker 2: something called the Western Solar Plan. There is this is
Speaker 2: maybe going to be a little jargony there's right now
Speaker 2: a draft programmatic Environmental impact statement for the Western Solar Plan.
Speaker 2: There are several alternatives in that plan. They all involve
Speaker 2: opening public land BLM land to solar application. What a
Speaker 2: solar application means. Solar application means that that land has
Speaker 2: cleared the first hurdle, the first governmental hurdle, to be
Speaker 2: identified as suitable for the building of solar farms. It
Speaker 2: doesn't mean that all of that land, under any circumstance,
Speaker 2: will eventually have solar on it. You've seen a lot
Speaker 2: in the news about the government selected preferred alternative of
Speaker 2: that solar plan, which would open twenty two million acres
Speaker 2: of public land to solar application.
Speaker 1: Public hunting ground. Let's just call it that.
Speaker 2: BLM lands upon which a variety of recreation upon which
Speaker 2: a variety of consumptive and non consumptive outdoor activities can
Speaker 2: take place.
Speaker 4: Well, you met you like you mentioned that. And at
Speaker 4: the same time, the BLM has promised to prioritize recreation
Speaker 4: activities and wildlife habitat. So how do these two things.
Speaker 2: Like, I'm glad you asked. So, there's one other alternative
Speaker 2: in that plan that would only open eight million acres
Speaker 2: to solar application, and that eight million acres is lands
Speaker 2: that are both already disturbed and are within ten miles
Speaker 2: of transmission existing transmission infrastructure. So that's one thing to
Speaker 2: support with this. Where we know we need more renewable
Speaker 2: energy production, we have an opportunity we can build solar
Speaker 2: on lands that are already disturbed. By the way, twenty
Speaker 2: three million acres of federal land is currently an oil
Speaker 2: and gas leases, twenty three million acres twelve million acres
Speaker 2: currently producing oil and gas. Oh hit me? Is those
Speaker 2: numbers again? Twenty three million acres of federal land more
Speaker 2: than the preferred alternative in the draft Programmatic Environment Impacts.
Speaker 2: Twenty three million acres of federal land are currently leased
Speaker 2: to oil and gas companies, twelve million acres currently producing
Speaker 2: oil and gas of public land.
Speaker 1: So one of these proposals would more than double the
Speaker 1: amount of land, would more than double the amount of
Speaker 1: land given to energy production.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I understand the question. But what I'm not sure
Speaker 2: about is whether there's overlap in that twenty two millionaires
Speaker 2: for solar three.
Speaker 4: For the eight million dollars or eight million acre plan.
Speaker 4: They would use existing roads and things like that that
Speaker 4: are being used by fossil fuel extraction operations.
Speaker 2: Or wherever possible, we want to use existing transmission infrastructure,
Speaker 2: which of course includes things like roads, that includes things
Speaker 2: like power lines. Right, And that's what we that's what
Speaker 2: we know we need, and that the Nature Conservacy's working
Speaker 2: towards identifying the lowest impact ways to build out a
Speaker 2: clean energy economy.
Speaker 4: Right Because I mean, not only do you have like
Speaker 4: the idea of solar panels covering the ground, but all
Speaker 4: the roads in infrastructure you would have to build is
Speaker 4: not much different than what's already being done by fossil
Speaker 4: fuel viperation.
Speaker 2: The footprint of any energy installation is not restricted to
Speaker 2: just the infrastructure that's generating the electricity.
Speaker 8: Who are the biggest players that are foreign against this?
Speaker 2: When you say this, do you mean the renewable energy
Speaker 2: transition in general or the one.
Speaker 1: It's got to be a bitter pill for environmental groups
Speaker 1: who've been who've built their careers, who've built their organizations
Speaker 1: on fighting energy development.
Speaker 2: I don't think it's a bitter pill at all. I
Speaker 2: think all it's in my mouth right now, it's better,
Speaker 2: well not certainly not for every environmental group. So there's
Speaker 2: always trade offs with building any energy infrastructure, and why
Speaker 2: would we not transition to building renewable energy infrastructure. Why
Speaker 2: would we stick with fossil fuels when we have the
Speaker 2: opportunity to build infrastructure, to build utility scale projects that
Speaker 2: produce electricity at no net carbon emissions.
Speaker 1: You're asking a huge question, and I'm trying to keep
Speaker 1: this conversation contained because I could come I could come
Speaker 1: in with a lot of things that are sort of
Speaker 1: out of my area of direct interests and expertise, and
Speaker 1: I would get into I guess, national security questions. I
Speaker 1: don't know, like like I don't even know. I don't
Speaker 1: even know where the conversation would go. If we're talking
Speaker 1: about it from a sort of a perspective of the
Speaker 1: US economy security, it could go one hundred directions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, fine, But but from a public lens standpoint?
Speaker 2: From okay, that that I'm comfortable with. Yeah, there's always
Speaker 2: trade offs. Over the last several decades, we've seen oil
Speaker 2: and gas exploration, we've seen oil and gas, new oil
Speaker 2: and gas leases. So if we're going on public lands,
Speaker 2: so if we're if we're going to use public lane
Speaker 2: ends in the generation of electricity, why would we continue
Speaker 2: to do that with fossil fuels and not transition to renewables.
Speaker 2: I can't really tell you.
Speaker 1: A thing that I would explore would be efficiency meaning
Speaker 1: energy per unit of space.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's one way to measure efficiency, sure, but it's
Speaker 2: also about containing the climate crisis and trying to curb
Speaker 2: emissions and bring us to and and energy and an
Speaker 2: energy sector that's not continuing to contribute to what we've
Speaker 2: seen over the last several years. Runaway temperatures, species shifting,
Speaker 2: the distributions, all the things we just touched on. Are
Speaker 2: you familiar? I can't remember who. There's a novelist. He's
Speaker 2: a big birder.
Speaker 5: That's his name, read the French name Gay No no no.
Speaker 1: He's a contemporary novelist and he's a big.
Speaker 2: Burder, A novelist, not nonfiction. Who wrote the corrections? Was
Speaker 2: it him? Either way?
Speaker 3: Uh? But not leaves of.
Speaker 2: Either way? It doesn't matter. There's a perspective. His perspective
Speaker 2: was this.
Speaker 1: This perspective was as the climate, the climate's changing, climate's
Speaker 1: going to change. The best thing we can give wildlife
Speaker 1: is sanctuary to withstand those changes. Wildlife places to be
Speaker 1: wild and weather the storm and again, like I want
Speaker 1: you like I just I don't want to like I'm
Speaker 1: not I'm not looking to debate it. I'm just trying
Speaker 1: to lay out my reticence and then I want you
Speaker 1: just to go, Okay, but that's my my reticence is
Speaker 1: that we would give up good funk like any amount
Speaker 1: of good functioning, pristine wildlife habitat in it in exchange
Speaker 1: for chasing a thing that I'm not sure we can get.
Speaker 1: But I'm sure we're gonna lose habitat and chasing it.
Speaker 2: We're not necessarily going to lose pristine habitat. As I mentioned,
Speaker 2: one of the alternatives in this Western solar plant only
Speaker 2: includes previously disturbed lands. So we're not talking about cutting
Speaker 2: out what is the definition of that.
Speaker 1: You'd have to look at the because you could go
Speaker 1: to a ranch and say that's previously disturbed. Isn't it
Speaker 1: not from wildlife perspective? Okay, So then Mikyle's not condos guy, gotcha?
Speaker 5: Yeah, this is so like I'll make the the bargain
Speaker 5: with you right now. I'd be way more into it
Speaker 5: if my version of disturbed right like these old well pads,
Speaker 5: the infrastructure that go out to you know, you know,
Speaker 5: you fly over you know, parts of the Red Desert,
Speaker 5: all that stuff, that type of infrastructure BAM gets replaced
Speaker 5: with green energy infrastructure. I'm like, yeah, okay, I can
Speaker 5: see that. Like we're not gonna in any sort of
Speaker 5: good way be able to rehab that into the mixed
Speaker 5: grass prairie that it once was.
Speaker 2: So the good news here is that the public is
Speaker 2: involved in this process at every step of the way.
Speaker 2: Right now, there's a public comment period open for the
Speaker 2: Western Solar Plan. This is going to drop April first.
Speaker 3: I heard.
Speaker 2: The public comment period is open until April eighteenth. There
Speaker 2: right now, if you go to.
Speaker 1: Three days after the tickets going, yeah, get your tickets,
Speaker 1: get your tickets to the live show, and get a
Speaker 1: couple days of recoup a couple days.
Speaker 2: Proceed right to the BLM's website. Take a look. There
Speaker 2: will be recordings of virtual meetings that have already happened.
Speaker 2: But you can listen to the virtual webinars describing the
Speaker 2: solar plan. Maybe somebody asked, what's your definition of disturbed lends.
Speaker 2: Maybe you can get a nice crisp answer from the
Speaker 2: BLM on that, and then you can provide public comment.
Speaker 2: Tell them what you think, and that's that's the case
Speaker 2: with any not just solar, that's the case with any
Speaker 2: of these environmental impact statements, which every renewable or fossil
Speaker 2: fuel related project has to go through an environmental impact statement,
Speaker 2: and that the public is involved in every step of
Speaker 2: the way. The public is involved in narrowing down the
Speaker 2: area that's opened, the public is involved in reading and
Speaker 2: commenting on the proposal from the company, the construction and
Speaker 2: operations plan, all the way through until the project is built.
Speaker 7: I think that there are six options if I'm not mistaken,
Speaker 7: like five different frameworks for the plan. And then if
Speaker 7: I read this correctly, there's a no action status quo option,
Speaker 7: which I.
Speaker 2: Think theys thing happens. Yep, there's always a no action alternative.
Speaker 4: Is there any existing studies like where large scale solar
Speaker 4: operations have been built, like on wildlife impact? Like are
Speaker 4: they like what where are they basin what they're going
Speaker 4: to do and what's going to happen.
Speaker 2: On that's a little out of my expertise.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean it almost feels like we're like, hey,
Speaker 4: after you, but it's just like questians I have.
Speaker 2: No, that's perfectly fair. I mean there are ways that
Speaker 2: you can mitigate the impact on wildlife to things like
Speaker 2: a solar project. For example. Most solar projects are going
Speaker 2: to have a fence around them. That's not great from
Speaker 2: a migration standpoint, but you can make a permeable fence.
Speaker 2: Maybe not for an elk, but for foxes, Okay, for
Speaker 2: desert tortoise you can. You can have openings in the
Speaker 2: fence and allow them to move through that project even
Speaker 2: though it's there, and they do. We actually have footage
Speaker 2: of desert tortoises and swift foxes running along a solar
Speaker 2: farms fence and cutting through.
Speaker 1: There's two things I want to do, and you'd pick whatever,
Speaker 1: whatever one you.
Speaker 6: Want now, and then we should move to off I want.
Speaker 2: Yeah. One move is talk about offshore. Yeah, that's like
Speaker 2: you'd explained.
Speaker 1: The other move is we have an election coming up
Speaker 1: this November.
Speaker 2: What are you running for?
Speaker 1: If well, if there's a if there's an administration somewhere
Speaker 1: within this conversation, if there's a change in administration, how
Speaker 1: much did this just becomes a non issue. I mean
Speaker 1: Trump said he was he joked and was taken Like
Speaker 1: everything he says he like makes a joke and actually
Speaker 1: serious he joked that, Oh, no, I'm gonna be a
Speaker 1: what do He said, I'm gonna be a dictator for
Speaker 1: a day, just a day.
Speaker 2: He was he's joke.
Speaker 1: He doesn't have the authority, he said. Someone says, oh,
Speaker 1: everyone's afraid you're gonna be a dictator. He goes, no,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be a dictator one day, and on that day,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna close the border and I'm gonna take some action.
Speaker 1: I can't remember how I articulated it takes some action
Speaker 1: to increase domestic oil production. Then he says, then I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quit being a dictator.
Speaker 2: Let's do the offshore one.
Speaker 1: Okay, we'll do off short. But I want to come back,
Speaker 1: like all the things we're talking about, how much does
Speaker 1: this ride on? Like how much if you come back
Speaker 1: next January seven, how much would everything we just discussed
Speaker 1: become a non issue because there was a change in administrations.
Speaker 2: I can provide you with several names within the Nature
Speaker 2: Conservancy who would love to come on this program and
Speaker 2: answer that question.
Speaker 5: I got one more pragmatic question on here, and it's
Speaker 5: okay if we just like leave it on the table.
Speaker 5: But there's a finite amount of public land and it's
Speaker 5: declining of that public land habitat. A lot of it
Speaker 5: is already in question. We and we've we're losing good habitat.
Speaker 5: What what's the private land existing infrastructure option to carry
Speaker 5: out and get us to the same you know, net zero.
Speaker 2: Yeah, point like if we did this in a willing seller,
Speaker 2: willing buyers.
Speaker 4: Like wind farms, I mean a lot of those are
Speaker 4: on we could land.
Speaker 2: It's a great question. Kyle's not turbanes kind of.
Speaker 1: Turbineses.
Speaker 2: No, that's that I think that there is a lot
Speaker 2: of ground to make up by putting this infrastructure on
Speaker 2: private lands. And one thing that the Nature Conservancy has
Speaker 2: done some analyzes towards this rooftop solar not not just
Speaker 2: on homes but on big box stores things like that.
Speaker 2: An analysis was done that suggested that if thirty five
Speaker 2: percent of all suitable rooftops had solar on them by
Speaker 2: twenty fifty, which is aggressive but maybe reasonable, a third
Speaker 2: of all roofs in the United States is going to
Speaker 2: be hell on pigeons. That would meet that alone would
Speaker 2: meet ten percent of our needs for electricity. What level
Speaker 2: of compliance or what level of thirty a third of
Speaker 2: rooftops covered by solar panels were it. That's already that's
Speaker 2: ten percent. So that's a way. That's it right there,
Speaker 2: you go. Now, imagine there's a bunch of the problem
Speaker 2: right there. It's a bunch of the problem. And I
Speaker 2: think you recently said something about sports stadiums.
Speaker 3: Yep, just fill that whole thing in with solar.
Speaker 2: I would say the Bears, Chicago Bears Stadium first one
Speaker 2: to go, great Minnesota Vikings number two.
Speaker 1: To any one of those things that opens up, it's
Speaker 1: now closed, the top, the roof closed covered.
Speaker 3: What are you a Packers fan?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 8: Who would pay for the BLM proposal? If they like
Speaker 8: did this start doing?
Speaker 2: A great question? Who pays for it?
Speaker 8: I assume there's like some private individuals that are you know,
Speaker 8: footing the bills to these things.
Speaker 2: Do you mean who pays for the build out of
Speaker 2: the actual infrastructure of.
Speaker 8: It, Like, you know, are we paying for some portion
Speaker 8: of it? Or is it mostly private individuals who are
Speaker 8: like standing to make money off this.
Speaker 2: Like they're going to sell the lease or what are
Speaker 2: they gonna do? How's it work? Oh? Okay, so it's
Speaker 2: a it's a win win. So I know it's a
Speaker 2: win win. So the developer applies for a lease from
Speaker 2: the federal government or in the offshore wind space, the
Speaker 2: federal government holds an auction for the lease for the
Speaker 2: rights to build a project on that ground. It might
Speaker 2: go for ten million, one hundred million, whatever it depends
Speaker 2: on the lease, depends on how big it is, where
Speaker 2: it is. Whatever that money goes into the general treasury.
Speaker 2: That's in our pockets. Okay. The company then has the
Speaker 2: rights to develop that ground generate electricity, and that goes
Speaker 2: in their pockets once they start making money.
Speaker 1: Once they start pouring it into the grid.
Speaker 2: Which in the offshore wind space not a lot of
Speaker 2: is happening yet, but it were on.
Speaker 4: The brink, so it would operate just like fossil fuel.
Speaker 1: From a from a economics, the BLM makes money off it, Yeah.
Speaker 2: The public makes money off it or cattle grazing, and
Speaker 2: and I gotta feel it's more lucrative than the it's
Speaker 2: definitely contract. Yeah. So as far as as far as
Speaker 2: putting solar wind on private land, that does put money
Speaker 2: in the pocket of the landowner big time. The companies
Speaker 2: are really proprietary about how much money. But it's more
Speaker 2: lucrative than cattle ranching or grown corn.
Speaker 1: I recently, I don't want to get into any details.
Speaker 1: I have a friend that is in conversation with the
Speaker 1: solar people. It's life changing money. So there you go,
Speaker 1: like it's life, it's it's generation, it's generational money.
Speaker 2: So if you're listening to this and you got a
Speaker 2: big patch of ground, you want.
Speaker 1: To turn the turn off? Please you big patch of ground.
Speaker 3: Turned it off.
Speaker 5: But I mean, we got all these buildings out there
Speaker 5: that are already patched in to the grid somehow, some way, hmm.
Speaker 5: Like right, I mean there's going to need to be
Speaker 5: like if you're generating some serious your juice, you know,
Speaker 5: but that ship I don't like, lay a big, gross
Speaker 5: looking cable off the top. I don't care about that.
Speaker 5: Sure if it's fixing this problem. But like, you know,
Speaker 5: we I just came back from pheasant Fest, right, and
Speaker 5: you know we talk a lot about grasslands, right, the
Speaker 5: most imperiled ecosystem in North America. Right, And I'm like,
Speaker 5: what if you can say like this is the solution,
Speaker 5: then I'm like, oh uh, some trade offs, but I
Speaker 5: really want it to be in these places that are
Speaker 5: already messed up for wildlife. But if like we have
Speaker 5: all this stuff that is never going to go back
Speaker 5: to supporting anything but feral cats. Yep, Like let's slap
Speaker 5: some slap some rough tops, hold around that stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to get to I want to get
Speaker 1: to offshore bad. But it's like just for your colleagues.
Speaker 1: For you and your colleagues, please just make sure you're
Speaker 1: like really digging into like old junkie vacant lots like
Speaker 1: just whatever, Okay, whatever you guys can find. Well, I
Speaker 1: encourage you to actually parking lots that you park under
Speaker 1: the panels.
Speaker 2: I've parked in those. I've parked in.
Speaker 1: Those, So it's not even that it's not even that
Speaker 1: you lose the parking lot. Yep, it's covered parking.
Speaker 2: And what about agrivoltaics which we haven't touched on. But
Speaker 2: you can grow especially fruits and vegetables underneath solar panels.
Speaker 2: You can graze cattle. Dairy cattle in particular produce more
Speaker 2: milk when they are underneath solar panels, when they don't
Speaker 2: have exposure to extreme heat, extreme sunlight. Great, this is
Speaker 2: what I need to hear. I'm here for you. I
Speaker 2: want to talk about offshore.
Speaker 1: What I don't want to hear about I need to
Speaker 1: hear about all the alterns before we start talking about
Speaker 1: going out onto perfectly fine ground and breaking it up.
Speaker 1: And I would say this, I don't give I'd say
Speaker 1: that if it's coal, I say if it's gas, it's
Speaker 1: just like, I just don't think we can afford to
Speaker 1: lose habitat.
Speaker 2: We agree with you, we are looking for the lowest
Speaker 2: impact alternatives. Okay, let's talk about offshore.
Speaker 5: And while I did, just a little tip for you,
Speaker 5: if you want to talk about offshore from an improving
Speaker 5: fishing standpoint, that'd be a good way to do it.
Speaker 2: Is that where you want to.
Speaker 1: Start, what's the current? Give us where offshore for? Okay,
Speaker 1: do this explain what offshore means, because there's like there's
Speaker 1: state offshore in federal offshore. Sure, and then what are
Speaker 1: we currently doing for offshore wind and what are we
Speaker 1: getting out of it?
Speaker 2: Yep? Set the stage. So the distinguishing characteristic between state
Speaker 2: and federal waters is the three mile line. So in
Speaker 2: the Atlantic, so three miles from shore, the state has
Speaker 2: fisheries management jurisdiction, leasing the bottom jurisdiction. Once you get
Speaker 2: outside that three mile line into the edge of the
Speaker 2: exclusive economics and the EZ at two hundred miles that's
Speaker 2: federally controlled.
Speaker 1: Okay, I wasn't aware of the where it ended.
Speaker 2: Two hundred and then it's international waters, got it, yep.
Speaker 1: So three it becomes fed, and then at two hundred
Speaker 1: it becomes sort of everybody.
Speaker 2: Three to two hundred, and then it's it's everybody, it's nobody.
Speaker 2: It's foreign fishing fleets, it's you know, offshore accounts. They're
Speaker 2: out there somewhere.
Speaker 1: Yeah, little piles of money floating around.
Speaker 2: That's a fish aggregating device right there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the baiales of cocaine and yeah.
Speaker 2: Man, So here's where we are with offshore wind right now.
Speaker 2: As of last week, there are twenty four operational power
Speaker 2: producing wind turbines in the United States Atlantic. Five are
Speaker 2: actually in state waters off Black Island, Rhode Island. You know,
Speaker 2: they were the first Rhode Island thing. I think fished
Speaker 2: it totally. Twenty seventeen they built five then off of
Speaker 2: Virginia in federal waters. First federal project was built in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty two turbines. Okay, how big in what? By
Speaker 2: what metric? There's six megawatts each there.
Speaker 1: The circumference, What is the circumference of the thing coming
Speaker 1: up out of the water where it comes out of
Speaker 1: the water.
Speaker 2: I was what's today Friday. I was fishing around it
Speaker 2: five days ago, close enough that you could reach out
Speaker 2: and touch it with your fishing rod. Not that you should,
Speaker 2: because that would be trespassing. The diameter, which is easier
Speaker 2: for me to estimate it is maybe twenty feet coming
Speaker 2: out of at the surface of the water. It's bigger,
Speaker 2: of course, at the sea floor, slightly tapered larger at
Speaker 2: the sea floor. The tip of the blade when it's
Speaker 2: spinning and it's straight up and down is six hundred
Speaker 2: and six fifty off the surface of the ocean. And
Speaker 2: this is a six megawat how much water eighty five
Speaker 2: feet eighty five feet of depth? Yep, yep. So how's
Speaker 2: that sound, bitch anchored down? Well, we'll get into that,
Speaker 2: because that's that's important. But let me give you the
Speaker 2: rest of the rundown here I won't spend too much
Speaker 2: time on. Then. You've got a handful more projects that
Speaker 2: are underway right now off of between like Long Island
Speaker 2: and Martha's Vineyard, that little stretch of coast. One project
Speaker 2: just finished up last week. Twelve is the number twelve
Speaker 2: total turbines. Then there's another one that's underway. They've got five,
Speaker 2: so five, five, twelve and two, so that's twenty four.
Speaker 1: That's where we're currently in the Atlantic Ocean, and US
Speaker 1: water US or state waters.
Speaker 2: Are power producing power twenty four right now?
Speaker 1: Can I ask one more question as you set this
Speaker 1: whole thing up, Yeah, can you compare the output of
Speaker 1: one of because I think I know what. Most people
Speaker 1: haven't seen that, but most people have been driving down
Speaker 1: the road and they've seen a wind farm yep. So
Speaker 1: in size and output, ye, how similar is it to
Speaker 1: what you see off in the distance when you're driving.
Speaker 2: Down the highway? Offshore? It is way bigger. They're bigger. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So on land, your typical wind turbine generators three and
Speaker 2: a half megawatts, So I just mentioned the ones off
Speaker 2: Virginia six megawatts. That's the that's the pilot or research
Speaker 2: project for that. Developer will begin building a commercial scale
Speaker 2: project this May. They're going to be putting in fourteen's
Speaker 2: fourteen megawatt wind turbine generators. That project will be one
Speaker 2: hundred and seventy six turbines. Sure, it's going to power
Speaker 2: six hundred and sixty thousand homes annually. Six hundred and
Speaker 2: sixty thousand homes will be powered by those wind turbines
Speaker 2: off Virginia. So that project that's fairly big. One hundred
Speaker 2: and seventy six fairly big one in terms of what's
Speaker 2: been leased right now. But Bureau of Ocean Energy Management
Speaker 2: BOUM is the regulatory agency tasked with all of the
Speaker 2: permitting and all of the everything with offshore wind. Their
Speaker 2: current estimate by the year twenty thirty is just over
Speaker 2: three thousand turbines in the US Atlantic. That's the maximum
Speaker 2: build out. I think we're going to land a little
Speaker 2: lower than that in the twos in the two thousand,
Speaker 2: What year twenty thirty, Yeah, it's twenty twenty four, So
Speaker 2: six years from now three thousand, more like two to
Speaker 2: twenty five hundred probably in the d that's about just
Speaker 2: building the gold rush for well shit, there's there's a
Speaker 2: supply chain that needs to catch up.
Speaker 1: So the maximum man, you need to get more kids
Speaker 1: signing up for Vogue time school.
Speaker 2: So I'll give you what I mean by the maximal
Speaker 2: build out. So take the Virginia project for example. The
Speaker 2: maximal build out of that project was about two hundred
Speaker 2: and eight turbines. They are only going to build one
Speaker 2: hundred and seventy six. Where's the other thirty two going? Well?
Speaker 2: They through a collaborative process with the public and with
Speaker 2: the federal government, decided to lay off a couple locations
Speaker 2: that were too close to important resources like shipwrecks, like
Speaker 2: artificial briefs. They said, Okay, we could build one here
Speaker 2: and it's not going to be on top of a shipwreck,
Speaker 2: but it's close enough, and this is a valuable enough
Speaker 2: piece of bottom that people like to fish that we're
Speaker 2: not going to build our turbines there. We're just going
Speaker 2: to carve out a little box. And that type of
Speaker 2: thing is likely to happen with a lot of these projects,
Speaker 2: which is why I say the maximal build out three thousand,
Speaker 2: I think we're going to be maybe, I don't know,
Speaker 2: twenty percent lower than that.
Speaker 1: Can you hit me with Let's let's go to the
Speaker 1: current ones. How many miles from shore are the current ones?
Speaker 2: So the one I was fishing under five days ago
Speaker 2: is twenty seven nautical miles from Virginia Beach, Virginia straight east.
Speaker 1: You're still only eighty five feet of water there.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The continental shelf is a is a mysterious mistress
Speaker 2: and drops off at different distances from shore. I don't
Speaker 2: know where you are. Off Florida, you have five miles
Speaker 2: from the beach here in a thousand feet of water.
Speaker 2: But yeah, off Virginia, you gotta go a lot farther
Speaker 2: to get to that continental shelf break, okay, and.
Speaker 5: Then to transmit this energy or transport this energy?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, are.
Speaker 5: You trying to like bring things to a centralized cable
Speaker 5: and then bring that on shore or what's the infrastructure there?
Speaker 5: So sorry, we should hit Steve's quite of how is
Speaker 5: that some bitch anchored down?
Speaker 2: Which one you want to go to first transmission?
Speaker 1: Or just real quick touch on. I'm just curious that
Speaker 1: the engineering on it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so again, I'll speak from the Virginia project that
Speaker 2: I that I'm most familiar with. One hundred and seventy
Speaker 2: six turbines will within that farm will spider web to
Speaker 2: three offshore substations, which will then package up that power
Speaker 2: into larger cables and shoot them to shore in a
Speaker 2: cable export corridor.
Speaker 3: Are those substations above or blow water above water?
Speaker 2: Yep? How big is that? I'm not sure. The oil
Speaker 2: rig kind of look yeah, it looks like an oil rig. Yep, yep.
Speaker 2: And okay, now how do you anchor them down? Yeah?
Speaker 5: That the footprint of the actual turbine the pole. Yeah,
Speaker 5: look pad, Well there's no pad, so here's okay.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So most of the projects that are under development
Speaker 2: right now or will contribute to that three thousand by
Speaker 2: twenty thirty number are built with what are called monopile foundation,
Speaker 2: which means you guessed it, one pull, one piling. These
Speaker 2: are thirty ish feet in diameter and they're hammered into
Speaker 2: the seafloor using a hydraulic hammer. A massive vessel comes
Speaker 2: out there, holds itself. The vessel has like a power
Speaker 2: pole to hold you in place, but on a much
Speaker 2: bigger scale. Right, They anchor themselves and then they drive
Speaker 2: them in and then around the base and this comes
Speaker 2: into the fish habitat. Piece. To prevent what we call scour,
Speaker 2: they put scour protection. Scour is the idea that sediment
Speaker 2: will move or road because of currents and tides and
Speaker 2: things washing by. So if you go to the beach,
Speaker 2: take your shoes off, walk into the waves and just
Speaker 2: stand there let the waves wash around your feet. You
Speaker 2: become destabilized as the sand erodes from the pressure of
Speaker 2: your feet pressing down on it. Same thing happens at
Speaker 2: a much larger scale offshore. So they put rock or
Speaker 2: rubble around the base in a doughnut, around the base
Speaker 2: of the piling, and that can make the sound of
Speaker 2: that I know it, And that can extend let's see
Speaker 2: sixty to ninety feet maybe from the edge of the pole.
Speaker 2: It's a big donut.
Speaker 3: Where does that material come from?
Speaker 2: Well, that's a good question. So the Nature Conservancy recently
Speaker 2: put out a report about different materials that can be
Speaker 2: used to enhance scour protection. And when I say enhance,
Speaker 2: I mean from an ecological standpoint, to maximize the amount
Speaker 2: of positive ecological benefit that we're getting out of this
Speaker 2: material that's being placed in the water. If left to
Speaker 2: their own devices, the developers would rely on two criteria
Speaker 2: to decide what they're going to use as scour protection,
Speaker 2: and those would be the cost of it. We want
Speaker 2: to keep it cheat because these are ten billion dollar
Speaker 2: projects we're talking about, and does it accomplish our engineering objective?
Speaker 2: Does it do what it's supposed to do. So there's
Speaker 2: an opportunity here as we sit an inflection point on
Speaker 2: the build out of offshore wind with twenty four in
Speaker 2: the water almost you know, two thousand plus still to come,
Speaker 2: there's an opportunity to influence what material is being used
Speaker 2: as scour protection. If we can demonstrate that there is
Speaker 2: something to gain by switching it up. What they would
Speaker 2: use if left. Their advice would be like quarried rock.
Speaker 2: It would depend on your geography. It could be limestone,
Speaker 2: could be grantite, whatever they get their hands on. Another
Speaker 2: option is repurposed concrete. If somebody rebuilds a bridge or
Speaker 2: an overpass, all that material that's being busted up, you know,
Speaker 2: put that on a barge, take it out there. It works.
Speaker 8: What's the lifespan of one of these things, and like
Speaker 8: how long? What percentage of its life does it's been
Speaker 8: just trying to pay for itself.
Speaker 2: So the leases are generally for twenty five to thirty years.
Speaker 2: Most wind turbines pay for themselves within six months or
Speaker 2: a year. What, yeah, man, that's efficient?
Speaker 3: Is that the same with the ones that we see
Speaker 3: on out here in the west.
Speaker 1: Belief cell, Yeah, I could believe it there more and
Speaker 1: I could believe what you're talking about that just seems
Speaker 1: like a bigger pain in the ass, building it out
Speaker 1: in the ocean, big pain.
Speaker 2: In the ass.
Speaker 8: What happens at the end of that twenty five years, We're.
Speaker 2: Not really sure. So I know you guys have spearfished
Speaker 2: around the remains of oil and gas platforms in the
Speaker 2: Gulf of Mexico. There's a program now.
Speaker 1: Which is hilarious because can I get kind of lay
Speaker 1: this out? Really, there's thousands and the golf there are
Speaker 1: just like you're talking about thousands, twenty three hundred roughly
Speaker 1: in the goal. There are thousands of oil platforms from
Speaker 1: offshore oil rigs and many of them are being retired.
Speaker 1: And so to kind of give a little bit of
Speaker 1: a window into where this conversation is going around this
Speaker 1: wind development, is these oil rigs made.
Speaker 2: The golf bloom.
Speaker 1: I mean, the oil rigs created a fishery. You're shaking
Speaker 1: your head. They altered they created a fishery. Now there's
Speaker 1: a debate around. People are saying, well, now that they're here,
Speaker 1: please leave them here, because it they generate so much fish,
Speaker 1: they create so much habitat, they create all these vertical reefs,
Speaker 1: and so now people that might have lamented them coming
Speaker 1: in because of the disturbance, increased boat traffic, pollution, are
Speaker 1: now have gotten used to them. The fishery is built
Speaker 1: up around them. Anglers have gotten that's how they fish.
Speaker 1: And now they're fighting to keep some not everybody. Some
Speaker 1: people are fighting to keep the rigs in place to
Speaker 1: preserve the fishery that the rigs.
Speaker 2: Created, and that's likely to happen with offshore wind too.
Speaker 2: The fight. I don't know all those fights, and I
Speaker 2: don't know. No one knows what's going to happen twenty
Speaker 2: five to thirty years from now, the decommissioning thing. At
Speaker 2: this point, I believe that technically that the fine print
Speaker 2: says that the developer will take it down to the
Speaker 2: substrate and leave it looking like it did before they
Speaker 2: got there, which means removing all that scour protection material.
Speaker 1: To a body mind said, when they remove an oil
Speaker 1: rig in the golf, he said, it's not even a
Speaker 1: beer can down there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, probably cleaner leave no trace.
Speaker 1: No, it's like they come in with like high test
Speaker 1: sownar and when they're done, there's nothing nothing. It's cut
Speaker 1: off wave below the surface and everything's gone.
Speaker 2: And think of the expense and think of the loss
Speaker 2: of what may very well be extraordinarily valuable fish habitat.
Speaker 2: So that's a fight that we're probably going to have
Speaker 2: in twenty five or thirty years. And how much of
Speaker 2: a fight that is, I don't know. But the opportunity
Speaker 2: that we have now is to demonstrate whether these are
Speaker 2: valuable habitat, and in all likelihood for certain species they
Speaker 2: will be. Whether they produce new and animals or simply
Speaker 2: attract animals from elsewhere is a matter of open debate.
Speaker 2: My suspicion is that two thousand plus of these structures
Speaker 2: we will see for certain species and uptick in production
Speaker 2: of animals, especially species that are habitat limited or recruitment limited.
Speaker 2: Black sea bass for example, might be one. But where
Speaker 2: we are right now is that this whole thing is
Speaker 2: in its infancy, and we haven't.
Speaker 1: Well, how in its infancy can it be? If it's
Speaker 1: gonna be it's twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: Four, right. What I mean is we're any.
Speaker 1: Time how many by two thousand and thirty?
Speaker 2: What couple thousand?
Speaker 1: Okay, well it can't be that.
Speaker 2: I mean. What I mean is it's in infancy for.
Speaker 1: Us six years to build a couple thousands.
Speaker 2: But from a scientific study standpoint, we don't have any large,
Speaker 2: full scale operational turbines that can be used when far
Speaker 2: that can be used as a study location.
Speaker 1: So the biology is in its infancy, or the ecology
Speaker 1: is in its infancy.
Speaker 2: Correct. And there's a lot of money going into collecting
Speaker 2: before data right now as we're in the for many
Speaker 2: of these leases, in the waning hours of the before
Speaker 2: period m hm, we're trying to scrape together data that
Speaker 2: will be valuable comparison down the line when these wind
Speaker 2: farms are fully built out.
Speaker 1: Man, imagine if they had done that in a really
Speaker 1: good way in the goal of Mexico, how valuable that
Speaker 1: information would be now.
Speaker 2: I can imagine.
Speaker 1: So if you could go like, well, let's take a
Speaker 1: look now that it's all done, let's take a look
Speaker 1: at what we want and what we lost.
Speaker 2: Yep. And so a lot of a lot of scientific
Speaker 2: a lot of really cool fisheries work being done.
Speaker 4: When you compare this to oil rigs providing habitat and
Speaker 4: like fishing around defunct oil rigs, is there like is
Speaker 4: there gonna be travel restrictions in these areas for like
Speaker 4: the average recreational fishermen like wanting to run right under
Speaker 4: an operational because you can tie off.
Speaker 5: Well, that's said you can't touch them. And I was like,
Speaker 5: there should be anchor points on there so you can
Speaker 5: put your bungee line on there.
Speaker 2: You're not supposed to touch them. My understanding is that
Speaker 2: there won't. My understanding is there won't be any restrictions
Speaker 2: as far as how close you can get. Now, there
Speaker 2: may be, there may be. There may be day to
Speaker 2: day restrictions. If there's a maintenance of something going on
Speaker 2: on a specific turbine, the developer won't allow you to
Speaker 2: get up to it. But by and large, I think
Speaker 2: the recreational fleet or the charter fleet, or any hooking
Speaker 2: line vessel will be able to transit right up into
Speaker 2: that scour protection, right up into the good habitat.
Speaker 1: They need to get real clear on that point. If
Speaker 1: you're gonna want fishermen to buy in on it, you're
Speaker 1: gonna have to really clarify that point. And I would say,
Speaker 1: put a couple of mooring cleats on the side of
Speaker 1: that thing.
Speaker 2: I'll uh yeah, I'll place a call to the cleats.
Speaker 8: In twenty twenty one, Joe Soimelli Road an article on
Speaker 8: the media dot com about wind turbines off the coast
Speaker 8: of New Jersey and the Atlantic Shores manager Doug Colpland said,
Speaker 8: you're welcome to fish by the structures. We just asked
Speaker 8: that you don't tie up to them. And in general
Speaker 8: it seemed like they were like kind of supportive of
Speaker 8: like yeah, like come hang around him, just like, don't
Speaker 8: touch them.
Speaker 2: And they are supportive, and they have to be because
Speaker 2: it's this is a collaborative process in which the public
Speaker 2: is engaged and they need as many of the stakeholders
Speaker 2: and stakeholder groups on their side as they can get.
Speaker 4: They should set up some bait and tackle shops out there.
Speaker 6: I want that, Yeah, that floating barge and feed, so I.
Speaker 1: Could get on board, Like from the access point, that's
Speaker 1: a compromise. I could see fisher you want. Don't touch
Speaker 1: it seems fair. If it winds up being like don't
Speaker 1: go near it, you can't be within two hundred yards
Speaker 1: of it, I feel like that's going.
Speaker 2: To cause a lot of tension. I don't think we're
Speaker 2: going to see that though, And I like the idea
Speaker 2: of a tackle shop up out there. I was thinking
Speaker 2: on Sunday when I was fishing underneath them that I
Speaker 2: was putting tags on fish. Oh, we're asking for so
Speaker 2: you know, with tagging studies sometimes you ask the angling
Speaker 2: public to participate in some way, either call the tag
Speaker 2: in or release the fish. In this case, we're asking
Speaker 2: people to release the animals. I was thinking it'd be
Speaker 2: great to get the developer to let us put a
Speaker 2: big billboard up there, big sign says hey, if you
Speaker 2: catch fish looks like this, got a red streamer tag
Speaker 2: on it and a little electronic transmitter hanging off of it,
Speaker 2: would you please do us the favor of tossing that
Speaker 2: one back? Got it?
Speaker 7: So?
Speaker 5: Is there a big gripe from the commercial fishery here?
Speaker 5: Like where I mean there's We're haven't gotten nearly as
Speaker 5: contentious as with putting this stuff in good bird habitat,
Speaker 5: buck habitat.
Speaker 3: So like we got to get back to the fight here.
Speaker 3: What's Yeah, it's all positive.
Speaker 1: That's what I want to return again to my the
Speaker 1: oil development and the golf. The shrimpers didn't like them.
Speaker 1: No different different critters, just the amount of debris they're
Speaker 1: after something totally different. Shrimp don't care about the rigs.
Speaker 1: It's all that much more debris. It's more stuff you
Speaker 1: got to avoid. So like winners losers, red snaper dudes, winners,
Speaker 1: shrimpers losers.
Speaker 2: And there's uh an important parallel in the Atlantic too.
Speaker 2: You're right that the there are commercial sectors of the
Speaker 2: fishing industry that aren't enthusiastic about some of these wind farms,
Speaker 2: especially the toad gear trawlers, uh, scallops.
Speaker 4: Bottom clams like bottom trawlers.
Speaker 2: Yep, and the trawling for invertebrates. Yeah five alums. Uh,
Speaker 2: they're not enthusiastic.
Speaker 1: When that's not the I mean, I don't want to
Speaker 1: cast judgment, but that's not always the friendliest.
Speaker 2: The ones that I know a great guys, I don't
Speaker 2: mean friendly, like not great guys. They get, they get,
Speaker 2: they catch it.
Speaker 4: They indiscriminate.
Speaker 1: If you go talk to you an anglers having a
Speaker 1: bad day of ficient and go like, what do you
Speaker 1: think is the main reason you're having a bad.
Speaker 2: Day of fision, he might say, well, Okay, this is
Speaker 2: a discussion for another time.
Speaker 1: I mean to talk about how people blame their bad
Speaker 1: day officient and stuff.
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, and I just said it's a discussion for
Speaker 2: another time. But I'll say one thing on, which is
Speaker 2: that for some species of fin fish, the recreational sector
Speaker 2: is a responsible for the majority of the mortality, not
Speaker 2: the commercial sectors. What we want to hear about that,
Speaker 2: that's not what we're talking about here, because we're talking
Speaker 2: about trawlers who are potentially upset about wind farms and
Speaker 2: on that topic they may have a case. Uh. And
Speaker 2: to that end, developers are offering let me think about
Speaker 2: how to phrase this, the developers that are at that
Speaker 2: stage now are offering compensatory mitigation to commercial fishermen who
Speaker 2: can demonstrate certain criteria. For example, within timeframe A to B,
Speaker 2: I drew ex revenue from the area that's within your lease,
Speaker 2: I'll pay you not to fish exactly. Well, I'm going
Speaker 2: to pay you because you can no longer fish here,
Speaker 2: but you can continue fishing elsewhere. So there's actually a
Speaker 2: financial opportunity here for these people because they can draw
Speaker 2: two revenues, one from their usual job and then they
Speaker 2: can catch the check from where they used to fish.
Speaker 2: It's more complex than that an individual basis, but in
Speaker 2: any case, there is there is mitigation involved for the
Speaker 2: commercial angler. The commercial fishermen who.
Speaker 5: Are yeah, yeah, I mean we can we can assume
Speaker 5: two ways. Right, it's pretty easy to prove your bad fishermen.
Speaker 2: Well. One other thing to mention is that, just like
Speaker 2: with on land renewable development, the sighting of offshore wind
Speaker 2: is an iterative process that takes into account things like
Speaker 2: where people are fishing. Okay, we're always looking for the
Speaker 2: lowest impact. We're always looking to put the energy infrastructure
Speaker 2: in the places where we weren't using that location for
Speaker 2: a whole lot of other stuff.
Speaker 1: When it comes down to onshore wind development, you're looking
Speaker 1: for these places that are you know, these high wind
Speaker 1: plateaus or whatever. Right, there's a micro site selection.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a resource and you want to extra.
Speaker 1: You'd be like, you know, you can't just put one
Speaker 1: anywhere you want one, and it has like very consistent
Speaker 1: wind windy spots right kind of areas to develop, you know,
Speaker 1: it can't have like huge topographical features, right, Right, So
Speaker 1: is the Atlantic is the Atlantic Coast? Does it have
Speaker 1: all these sort of micro wind channels or does it
Speaker 1: wind up being more a sort of more ubiquitous constant
Speaker 1: wind no matter where.
Speaker 2: You go, it's in between that. Okay. I don't think
Speaker 2: it's as micro as on land, where you have topography,
Speaker 2: ain't much topography twenty seven miles from shore, but you
Speaker 2: do have areas that are windier than others, consistently windier
Speaker 2: than others. The New England, the northeast is consistently windy.
Speaker 2: That's where a lot of off shore wind's gonna wind up.
Speaker 2: But we're talking about sort of large.
Speaker 1: You have large areas that are consistently windy, not like
Speaker 1: little teeny pockets that are consistently windy.
Speaker 2: Yeah that's right, Yeah, yep. And when you get that
Speaker 2: far from shore, that's right. Uh.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about winters and losers, all right, from a
Speaker 1: species standpoint, Yeah, humans winners? Yeah, what what's your guess on?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 1: I don't know, right, Whales, sword and fish like whatever?
Speaker 3: Like who who's a big part of the this sucks?
Speaker 2: I'll address cows. Comment about birds. So it's hard to
Speaker 2: avoid migratory pathways. When migratory pathways run through the Atlantic,
Speaker 2: a lot of these wind farms are likely to be
Speaker 2: in places that historically have been migratory pathways for some species.
Speaker 2: So I want to just real quick talk about this
Speaker 2: study that my colleagues at TNC Virginia are doing. Where
Speaker 2: they're putting satellite altimeter tags on a couple species of
Speaker 2: shore birds altimeter, meaning we get the altitude of the
Speaker 2: animal in addition to the lat loan. That's interesting and
Speaker 2: it's super It's three dimensional, right, it's three dimensional. It's
Speaker 2: critical to know that information because you could say, oh, well,
Speaker 2: fifty percent of the wimberles that we tagged went right
Speaker 2: through this wind farm area and think that, hey, maybe
Speaker 2: we need to not build it there because this is
Speaker 2: critical for the migratory pathway. But without knowing how far
Speaker 2: off the surface of the ocean those animals are relative
Speaker 2: to where those turbines are.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what does that mean? Yeah, I can see that.
Speaker 1: That's not something it would have occurred to me.
Speaker 2: But yeah, and so nailing down again, it's about building
Speaker 2: that foundation of scientific knowledge such that we can reduce
Speaker 2: the impacts as much as possible to all species, including birds.
Speaker 1: Give me a couple of species that are out twenty
Speaker 1: some miles off cruising through fish species.
Speaker 2: No birds, Give me a couple of birds. Oh man,
Speaker 2: I'm not a Yeah, gannets, mers, razor bills depending on
Speaker 2: the time of year, a lot of let's see sheer waters,
Speaker 2: things like that. I'm less of a burder than I
Speaker 2: am a fishermansood sort of armchair ornithologist. You know why.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you a little something about sheer waters. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you're much into etymology. Okay, he's sheer
Speaker 1: in the water. I can tell you where he's at.
Speaker 1: That's right, he's licking it.
Speaker 2: Yep. So you know there's a lot there's a lot
Speaker 2: of birds out there, a lot of different species, and
Speaker 2: that that's some maybe winners. In fact, you know, there's
Speaker 2: speculation that the habitat created by offshore winterbines will create
Speaker 2: good forage for birds that eat fish, got and invertebrates. Yeah, same,
Speaker 2: it is true. Submarine mammals, smarine mammals, harbor seals, gray
Speaker 2: seals in the North Sea. I think I have those
Speaker 2: species right have started feeding around wind platforms. They go
Speaker 2: right to him. God, but you got that all that activity,
Speaker 2: a little food chain in there. It's an oasis. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so what about go ahead, bro?
Speaker 3: No one that was drew in a breath of air
Speaker 3: to ask a question. Do they ever think talk about
Speaker 3: like you was talking about, to prevent the scouring effect,
Speaker 3: you do this thing, it creates some habitat, Like is
Speaker 3: there's someone else going like, oh, well, here's ten other
Speaker 3: things that you guys could also do and it might
Speaker 3: not even be beneficial to the turbine turbine, Yeah, but
Speaker 3: it's going to be really beneficial. It's all these things
Speaker 3: that swim around here.
Speaker 1: I like where you're going there totally hey while you're
Speaker 1: out there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So we have there's a process where from an
Speaker 2: impact standpoint, the first thing you want to do is avoid,
Speaker 2: Then you want to minimize, then you want to mitigate, right,
Speaker 2: and so that hierarchy is coming into play with all
Speaker 2: of these construction projects. There may be mitigation that these
Speaker 2: developers can partake in that would result in things like
Speaker 2: fishing opportunities. It might be scour protection enhancement, or it
Speaker 2: might be something that's off site from the wind farm
Speaker 2: but that they pay for, like oyster reef restoration or
Speaker 2: other habitat restoration still in the marine or estuarine environment
Speaker 2: and close ish to where the wind farm is off
Speaker 2: exactly but not necessarily at the wind farm.
Speaker 1: Have they kicked around drape sheathing those suckers and something
Speaker 1: that's really good for Bui valves to hang on to.
Speaker 2: Or don't they want bui a valve growth on.
Speaker 3: It, Yeah, like the drag or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think they want a lot of bivalve
Speaker 2: growth on it. I think, you know, that can actually
Speaker 2: destabilize the structure. The amount of biomass you're talking about
Speaker 2: could destabilize the structure. So I think they're they're actually
Speaker 2: cleaning bi valves off of certain parts of these things.
Speaker 1: Can I tell you something about the oil rigs. I
Speaker 1: just can't help but bring this background to oil rigs.
Speaker 1: Come on, those old oil rigs are encased in life. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: one's when you put your hand on them, you can
Speaker 1: just sit there and break away and it's like barnacles,
Speaker 1: but all these vacated barnacles that are full little fish,
Speaker 1: and you can actually sit there and crumble some of
Speaker 1: that stuff and watch fish coming up from the depth.
Speaker 1: They just see it coming down and they're so used
Speaker 1: to just chunks of the stuff breaking off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're coming up to meet it. Use that as
Speaker 2: a little bait for your spearfish and extras.
Speaker 1: They're encased in life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean that'll happen if you leave something
Speaker 2: in the ocean for a while. So if these wind
Speaker 2: turbine guys are listening, what's it like you fished under one.
Speaker 3: Now, I mean, that's obviously a very big part of
Speaker 3: the whole contentiousness of this whole thing, right, is what
Speaker 3: it looks like from shorts. I'd like you to speak
Speaker 3: to that, like the distance they put them out and
Speaker 3: how that's been worked on. But then when you're out there,
Speaker 3: I mean, obviously, like my some of my well one
Speaker 3: memory that I have now that my father in law
Speaker 3: is for years wanted us to go and do. He's like,
Speaker 3: you'll never experience a sunrise like the sunrise you experienced
Speaker 3: when you're fifty miles off shore. And he's right, like
Speaker 3: when that song breaks that horizon and there's just just
Speaker 3: ocean around you, it's amazing.
Speaker 2: It's amazing.
Speaker 3: If you're in the middle or near a wind farm,
Speaker 3: it's not the same.
Speaker 2: I'm sure that's the case. I haven't experienced a sunrise
Speaker 2: on the on the seas underneath a wind farm. I've
Speaker 2: experienced it many times elsewhere. I would suspect that, But
Speaker 2: you get my point. I do get your point. There's
Speaker 2: nothing uglier than the wind farm.
Speaker 1: There's a building.
Speaker 2: I guess there's an aesthetic, there's an aesthetic loss of that,
Speaker 2: you know, it's that sunrise observation.
Speaker 1: That's part of why they want to put him way
Speaker 1: out right.
Speaker 2: That's part of it the whole because people don't so
Speaker 2: you don't.
Speaker 4: Have the nim's sayings a mile off shore of mon
Speaker 4: talk like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you to like, oh no, we're going to put
Speaker 1: them right off shore in Nantok. You see how many
Speaker 1: people also aren't pro alternative energy.
Speaker 2: But you can see him from sure, you can, you can,
Speaker 2: but they're not big.
Speaker 8: So twenty seven miles out and they're big structures.
Speaker 2: Man, Yeah, you got the curvature of the earth, well
Speaker 2: depends on Yeah, that's so.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So what distance are they visible? Not visible?
Speaker 2: You can see him from short from twenty seven miles,
Speaker 2: but they're small and there's not much to them, and
Speaker 2: if they weren't moving, you would need a crystal clear
Speaker 2: day to even really know this.
Speaker 8: Do you have to look for him to find them?
Speaker 2: Or you're like very aware you'd have to look for
Speaker 2: him for sure. In fact, we took our first tagging
Speaker 2: trip for this project a couple of weeks ago, and
Speaker 2: the guy that I had volunteering to help me tag fish,
Speaker 2: he and I were in the hotel room in Virginia, beach.
Speaker 2: There's a fairly high floor. And we stood at the
Speaker 2: window and I said, oh, I see him. And it
Speaker 2: took him a minute. He's like, where man? Where? So?
Speaker 2: So what I would say is this might sound a
Speaker 2: little cynical, but if you want to observe a sunrise
Speaker 2: on the ocean near wind farm, just anchor up used
Speaker 2: to the wind farm and then watch the sunrise in
Speaker 2: that direction. Mm that that state, it's not gonna go
Speaker 2: over well.
Speaker 3: No, I mean when you're out there fishing underneath the
Speaker 3: wind farm, like what, after a day you're like, oh,
Speaker 3: it's just normal to have this big blade spinning above
Speaker 3: my hand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, after after the first couple of fish, you've forgotten
Speaker 2: about it. How loud is it? I can't hear it? Really.
Speaker 2: You might hear the wind rushing around the you know,
Speaker 2: you know, over the blades like anything. Yeah. Yeah. What
Speaker 2: about whales? Whales loving it or hating it? I han't asked,
Speaker 2: having asked the whales, how deep you want to get
Speaker 2: into this? To the bottom? You got the wrong guy. Okay,
Speaker 2: serves level whale.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, let's say let's say all you remember earlier
Speaker 1: I said to that that I'm primarily interested in one thing.
Speaker 1: I'm primarily interested in, not in anything.
Speaker 2: That would pass up. Okay, let me put this way.
Speaker 1: My primary interest when it comes to conservation is sacrificing
Speaker 1: the least amount of acres of productive wildlife habitat. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: that's my primary Like I'd be like, my primary objective
Speaker 1: is saving productive wildlife habitat, whether it's a cattle ranch,
Speaker 1: whether it's a.
Speaker 2: Brushy ditch. I'm with you. Okay.
Speaker 1: If my whole thing was like, I'm a whale guy,
Speaker 1: top to bottom, all I care about is whales, would
Speaker 1: I be like real sweating it about these wind farms.
Speaker 2: I don't think so. It's been in the news a
Speaker 2: lot that allegedly offshore wind development is harming marine mammals.
Speaker 2: We're experiencing an unusual mortality event for whales on the
Speaker 2: East coast. Is it right whales or what does it happen?
Speaker 2: The North Atlantic right whale is an endangered species. There
Speaker 2: are something like three hundred and fifty animals left in existence.
Speaker 2: Humpback whales have also experienced unusual levels of mortality over
Speaker 2: the past eight years. It's extremely difficult to pin down
Speaker 2: the cause of mortality for a whale. One reason is
Speaker 2: you usually don't observe the whale until several days at
Speaker 2: least after it's perished. When they wash up dead, they
Speaker 2: were probably they probably expired many miles from the beach
Speaker 2: and various states of decomposition by the time they hit shore.
Speaker 2: A knee cropsy has performed on every stranded marine mammal
Speaker 2: where it's possible to do so, and that includes North
Speaker 2: Atlantic right whales, it includes humpback whales in pursuit of
Speaker 2: clues to what might have caused the death of the animal.
Speaker 2: The majority of these animals bare signs of vessel strikes.
Speaker 2: Some of them bear signs of recent vessel strikes. And
Speaker 2: it could be blunt force trauma, it could be propeller marks,
Speaker 2: it could be broken bones from blunt force trauma. But
Speaker 2: good luck determining what vessel hit that whale because of
Speaker 2: time and space. So and how long is this going? Back?
Speaker 2: For the unusual mortality event was declared in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2: It started in twenty sixteen. But there's no evidence that
Speaker 2: any offshore wind development. It was Trump that year you
Speaker 2: killed my SoundBite. There's no evidence that any offshore wind
Speaker 2: development has resulted in the death of even a single whale. Okay,
Speaker 2: but I mean you asked me how deep we want
Speaker 2: to go. We don't need to go terribly deep.
Speaker 1: But was there like a signific can increase in offshore
Speaker 1: wind development in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2: Well, remember, at the beginning of this part of the conversation,
Speaker 2: I told you it's only twenty four turbines in the ocean,
Speaker 2: and half of them were just built. So in twenty
Speaker 2: sixteen there were zero. Twenty sixteen there were zero. There
Speaker 2: was survey activity going on at the time, and it
Speaker 2: has been claimed that some of these survey boats, the
Speaker 2: survey gear could have disrupted or disturbed these whales in
Speaker 2: some way. Most of the doing seismic surveys, they're doing
Speaker 2: surveys with gear that is far quieter and a much
Speaker 2: higher frequency than the seismic surveys that are done for
Speaker 2: oil and gas. So this geotechnical and geophysical survey gear,
Speaker 2: most of it is actually outside the range of hearing
Speaker 2: of these whales.
Speaker 1: It's but blunt fords trauma you're talking about. They're physically
Speaker 1: getting banged.
Speaker 2: Up, yep. Okay, boats are hitting them.
Speaker 1: So it's not no one's speculating that it's the noise
Speaker 1: of the seismic survey that's it's being speculated, and I
Speaker 1: don't want to add any fuel to this fire.
Speaker 2: It's being speculated that the survey noise could have disrupted
Speaker 2: the normal activities of the whales instead that then eventually
Speaker 2: resulted in put.
Speaker 5: Them in different channels like commercial channels that they disorient from.
Speaker 2: Right, and so a couple more things on the vessel
Speaker 2: strikes an offshore wind every offshore wind construction vessel and
Speaker 2: survey vessel is required and they do carry protected species observers,
Speaker 2: trained individuals who are looking for whales, dolphins, sea turtles,
Speaker 2: any protected species. All of those that I just mentioned
Speaker 2: are obligate air breathers. They got to come to the surface.
Speaker 2: If and when a protected species observer sees a marine mammal,
Speaker 2: they have the authority to up down the operation of
Speaker 2: that vessel, whether it's the survey gear, whether it's the engine,
Speaker 2: whether it's all the above, or divert course or pull
Speaker 2: it way back to neutral or whatever. Most vessels that
Speaker 2: are transiting or fishing or doing anything in the ocean
Speaker 2: do not have protected species observers on board. The argument
Speaker 2: could therefore be made that offshore wind vessels are less
Speaker 2: likely to strike marine mammals because of the presence of
Speaker 2: these trained individuals who are looking for protected species with
Speaker 2: the express purpose of reducing negative interactions with vessels.
Speaker 3: While you're thinking, Okay, how much how much wind does
Speaker 3: it take to spin a turbine? Turbine? Gosh, I don't
Speaker 3: know why you got that in my head.
Speaker 1: Now take that turbine right off the top.
Speaker 2: Of your head. I hear both ways all the time.
Speaker 2: They stop spinning below about five miles an hour. They
Speaker 2: could spin at that, but there's a break that stops
Speaker 2: them from spinning because it's a net loss of electricity
Speaker 2: to spin the blades. At that low level, they also
Speaker 2: shut down. I think above fifty five or sixty they
Speaker 2: just start spinning too fast and that not gonna work.
Speaker 1: My kids like YouTube compilations of wind turbines falling apart and.
Speaker 2: Very very popular.
Speaker 1: I'm going to ask you a really complicated question. I'm ready,
Speaker 1: and you might have to do one of those things
Speaker 1: where you defer to your colleagues.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm ready for that too.
Speaker 1: In discussing the border wall, oh God, to return to Trump.
Speaker 1: In discussing the border wall, I would often bring up, Okay, one, I.
Speaker 2: Believe we have a border crisis.
Speaker 1: The border wall makes me uneasy because of the wildlife impact.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, mountain lions.
Speaker 1: Jaguars, mulitary analyope, whatever that. If you make an impenetrable
Speaker 1: barrier YEP, basically separating.
Speaker 2: Cutting the bottom third of our.
Speaker 1: Continent offp and you make an impenetrable land barrier isolating
Speaker 1: our portion of the continent from the rest of North America,
Speaker 1: Central America, South America from travel, and you look at
Speaker 1: the long, deep history of wildlife movements as well as
Speaker 1: the short history of the need for wildlife to move around.
Speaker 2: I get uneasy.
Speaker 1: People then go, well, your job hasn't been taken by
Speaker 1: an immigrant.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: I'm like, be that ad as it may. This is
Speaker 1: a thing to think about, Okay, it's a thing to
Speaker 1: think about, the same way if I said we're gonna
Speaker 1: go on family vacation and someone said, but that costs
Speaker 1: a lot of money, I would say, correct, that's a
Speaker 1: thing to think about in considering this though, We're gonna
Speaker 1: go on family vacation recognizing that it costs money.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: With whales, are you so confident in our need to
Speaker 1: do this that you would say, I get it, it
Speaker 1: sucks for whales, but we need to do this anyways.
Speaker 2: Are you there in our need to build offshore wind. Yeah?
Speaker 1: Would you be like, yeah, you know what, It's just
Speaker 1: like how we're blocking off jaguars, Like in pursuit of
Speaker 1: border security, we're going to kind of say goodbye jaguars
Speaker 1: in our country. Would you be like, would anybody say,
Speaker 1: in pursuit of alternative energy, goodbye the northern right whale.
Speaker 2: I believe that the people who are best suited to
Speaker 2: answer that question no, No, you don't think you think
Speaker 2: you know I'm going with this video are the ones
Speaker 2: who are involved in that decision making process. They are
Speaker 2: the scientists, the marine mammal scientists who have dedicated their
Speaker 2: careers to understanding the biology of these animals. They're the
Speaker 2: people who are doing Marine Mammal Protection Act consultations for
Speaker 2: the environmental impact statements for these projects. And if they
Speaker 2: thought the answer was no, if they thought the answer
Speaker 2: was building out offshore wind is going to drive a
Speaker 2: species to extinction, they would not play ball. You don't
Speaker 2: think so, No, these people, these people.
Speaker 1: Just counter that with how many species are going to
Speaker 1: go extinct. If we're if we change the climate faster
Speaker 1: than wildlife can adapt to it, how many species are
Speaker 1: going to go extinct?
Speaker 2: Anyways, there's a value judgment that is made when you're
Speaker 2: making that statement on which species are more important than others.
Speaker 2: That part of this process of the buildout of renewable
Speaker 2: energy is consulting with the people who are best qualified
Speaker 2: to make those determinations, and those determinations are being made,
Speaker 2: and it has been determined that the build out of
Speaker 2: renewable energy is unlikely to drive these animals to extinction. God,
Speaker 2: so that's where we are.
Speaker 1: Is the ESA, The Environmentals and Danger Danger Species Act
Speaker 1: is the Danger Species Act. That's got to be powerful
Speaker 1: enough inapplicable to federal.
Speaker 2: Waters, right definitely, as is the Marine Mammal Protection Act,
Speaker 2: which they go hand in hand. Got got so.
Speaker 1: If there was like a real demonstrable risk of extirpation
Speaker 1: or extinction, yeah, or.
Speaker 2: You would have you would have it would have got
Speaker 2: shut down, or even the loss of a single animal
Speaker 2: in the case of the North Atlantic right, Well, if
Speaker 2: it was suspected that any of these activities would result
Speaker 2: in the loss of even a single animal, it would
Speaker 2: have been shut down.
Speaker 8: And when it comes to it, like when it comes
Speaker 8: to the essay, I think you know, everyone's where like
Speaker 8: the US fish widlifts Servius sort of manages it and
Speaker 8: oversees it. But the other party is Noah Noah Fisheries, right,
Speaker 8: Like they're the ones who decide on all the ocean stuff.
Speaker 8: So they are like directly overseeing that. Probably more there's
Speaker 8: like equipped to make calls on that than maybe the
Speaker 8: US fishal Wildlife Services on terrestrial things even.
Speaker 2: Definitely the protected species division of no Offiicieries are the
Speaker 2: ones who make those determinations. And again, these are dedicated people.
Speaker 2: They've dedicated their careers, their lives to understanding the biology
Speaker 2: of these animals to the extent of the science and
Speaker 2: that horizons are growing being pushed every day on the
Speaker 2: extent of marine mental science. And they're the ones making
Speaker 2: the calls. They're the right people to make the call.
Speaker 1: They could have a built in bias, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, Like, hear me out, this is going to
Speaker 1: put you in a bad situation. No, no picture this.
Speaker 1: I wonder, this is like psychology st science. I wonder
Speaker 1: if you task those same individuals, Let's say you had
Speaker 1: an alternate universe, and you task those exact same individuals
Speaker 1: with determining whether an oil development was appropriate in this area.
Speaker 1: I wonder what answered those exact same individuals.
Speaker 2: That have given you. But there is there has been
Speaker 2: offshore oil development development, and that people who administer the
Speaker 2: Marine Mammal Protection Actor involved in all of that too.
Speaker 3: Shit, you, the alternate universe exists.
Speaker 4: I am.
Speaker 5: To weigh into this, like I shouldn't. I think there's
Speaker 5: so many people that want to point to this particular
Speaker 5: project and be like, that's what's.
Speaker 3: Killing the whales. Don't.
Speaker 5: Don't look at what's going on over here, that's what's
Speaker 5: killing the whales, which people are those There is some
Speaker 5: nasty shit going into the oceans at increasingly large amounts
Speaker 5: every single day. And when we're doing these nekruptcies on
Speaker 5: all sorts of marine wildlife, like you're pulling out pounds
Speaker 5: and pounds of shit, garbage, yeah, plastic, yeah, And and
Speaker 5: some of that is a societal shift.
Speaker 1: So mountain mountain dew is like, listen, it's not us.
Speaker 1: I shouldn't point out mountain dew. The plastic bottle companies.
Speaker 5: Plastic bottle companies, but I mean that's just like a
Speaker 5: small layer of things, right. But I think we've learned
Speaker 5: over and over again in the conservation world, like it
Speaker 5: is so rare to point to one thing and be like, oh,
Speaker 5: that one thing is the thing that did it.
Speaker 4: But it's also interesting that that, like for the longest time,
Speaker 4: like pointing the finger at fossil fuel, whether it's from
Speaker 4: the ESA or just pollution in general or whatever, like
Speaker 4: that was like just the way things were. But now
Speaker 4: you have this environmentally friendly energy source that's having to
Speaker 4: contend with the same right attractors that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, and every kids movie it's big oil
Speaker 1: is a bad guy.
Speaker 2: Is there gonna be a I don't know that.
Speaker 8: Give me an example.
Speaker 2: I don't I don't watch kids.
Speaker 9: Okay, there's there's the avatar basically just about a guy
Speaker 9: that's a big There's like a big guy that like
Speaker 9: he's a scientist and he gets turned into a bigfoot.
Speaker 8: What's the oils relationship?
Speaker 2: That one? He goes to Alaska to fight big oil.
Speaker 1: Big oil is a very common villain in kids movies.
Speaker 1: I'm wondering if there will be if there would be
Speaker 1: a future Pixar or whatever Disney movies in which Big
Speaker 1: Wind is where Big Wind is the villain, you know,
Speaker 1: because Big Oil has served as like you know, like
Speaker 1: Kurt Vonnegut, was it, Kurt Vonnagut. Yeah, Kurt Vonnegut said,
Speaker 1: when the Third Reich designed their uniforms, it's like they
Speaker 1: knew they would always be the bad guys in movies.
Speaker 1: And uh, and like big Oil has served as sort
Speaker 1: of the Big Oil has served as the global villain
Speaker 1: for for decades. It's interesting to see if the whale
Speaker 1: community is after Big Wind. It's just a real ship.
Speaker 4: Like Environmental is fighting environmentals and kind.
Speaker 2: Of I think you, I think you would find that
Speaker 2: the whale community may actually be at least somewhat the
Speaker 2: big oil community.
Speaker 1: M Oh, there's people that might not like where this
Speaker 1: is going.
Speaker 4: They're whale decoys.
Speaker 5: Well look at oh yeah, the green green whale decoys.
Speaker 3: I mean conco.
Speaker 5: Phillips does a hell of a lot for the old
Speaker 5: prairie chicken and the sage grouse.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, I think, well as they maybe. I think
Speaker 1: I heard something about that a different podcast being that
Speaker 1: in Dangerous Pieces are I mean, well, in dangers pieces
Speaker 1: are bad for business, yeah, right, like an industry. I
Speaker 1: mean if you're a long playing If you're a long
Speaker 1: playing player in an industry, generally and dangerous piece has
Speaker 1: become a headache. And so as much as you can
Speaker 1: head that off, yep, that's smart money, I think. But
Speaker 1: to head off something that's going to wind up shutting
Speaker 1: your industry down.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: This particular discussion, right is like, are we going to
Speaker 5: be fifty years down the road and be like Jesus,
Speaker 5: I wish we would put all that smart time energy
Speaker 5: money into uh, nuclear energy at that point in time.
Speaker 2: That's the last thing I want. There's two last things
Speaker 2: I want to ask, right.
Speaker 5: It's like, should we have just gotten more efficient with this.
Speaker 6: Federal government past them?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I think that, like eighty ninety plus, I think that.
Speaker 1: Uh, I think we're missing the boat. I think we
Speaker 1: should be doubling down on nuclear. But I want to
Speaker 1: ask you a question. Can you tell me through the
Speaker 1: Nature Conservancy what's your mandate?
Speaker 2: I know the Nature.
Speaker 1: Conservancy's work through. Remember I've been pounding on this idea
Speaker 1: of habitat protection. I know the Nature Conservancy as a
Speaker 1: major player and habitat protection and also a very even keeled.
Speaker 2: Other than me.
Speaker 1: No, it's organizationally, Yeah, yeah, really good about access. Don't
Speaker 1: go out of your way to mess with hunters and
Speaker 1: fishermen and like, really focused on habitat.
Speaker 2: That is us. So our mission is to protect the
Speaker 2: lands and waters upon which all life depends. Okay, lands
Speaker 2: and waters. We are primarily a land protection organization. Got
Speaker 2: four thousand staff of four thousand dedicated individuals globally, about
Speaker 2: four hundred scientists, including myself. We work on virtually every
Speaker 2: ecosystem on the planet, and we work in the ocean.
Speaker 2: We have one hundred and twenty five protected one hundred
Speaker 2: and twenty five million acres. We currently protect one hundred
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five million acres of land worldwide. In this country,
Speaker 2: we own two million acres. We have conservation easements on
Speaker 2: another four million acres. We've transferred ownership of fifteen million acres.
Speaker 1: That's the number I wanted to focus on because what
Speaker 1: that explained, What that just tell people what that.
Speaker 2: Means, transferred ownership of fifteen million acres to agencies, federal
Speaker 2: and state agencies, meaning you're making public land.
Speaker 1: You guys manufacture public land.
Speaker 2: We are making public land. And if Mike, oh.
Speaker 1: Well, I've always i've always, I've always loved you guys mission,
Speaker 1: I should have gotten that up up top.
Speaker 10: Anyway that after you beat them up a little bit, Well,
Speaker 10: I want to I want to point out that you
Speaker 10: guys had on this podcast, asked a colleague of mine
Speaker 10: named Nelis Johnson who lives here in Bozeman, had dinner
Speaker 10: with him last night.
Speaker 2: On episode two sixty one, there's no such thing as
Speaker 2: a free lunch YEP with Renewable Energy talked. It covered
Speaker 2: a lot of ground on that episode, including a deeper
Speaker 2: dive into what the nature concernacy is and what we
Speaker 2: do so go ahead and dial wow.
Speaker 8: Yeah, usually we got to like work that in.
Speaker 2: But your guest.
Speaker 1: Comes now, I wish I would have started out with that,
Speaker 1: that's okay, And before we get into why, I want
Speaker 1: to just hear a sort of not necessarily your take,
Speaker 1: but sort of someone who's who's focused on energy, like
Speaker 1: why not nuclear? But first, uh, walk me through the
Speaker 1: steps of I guess we should have done this up top.
Speaker 1: How How did your mandate get directed? How does your
Speaker 1: mandate get directed into sort of like watching this project
Speaker 1: and making sure this project's done effectively?
Speaker 2: Which project.
Speaker 1: Your involvement in offshore wind?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Okay, so let me head off the nuclear thing.
Speaker 2: I'm not equipped to address that. So you can bring
Speaker 2: Nell's back on if you want to talk about the
Speaker 2: nuclear thing. He's a much better guy. So the Nature
Speaker 2: Conservancy is heavily involved in the buildout of renewables in
Speaker 2: the United States and elsewhere. We recognize that offshore wind
Speaker 2: is an area where we can make a lot of
Speaker 2: gains in terms of the amount of electrons that are
Speaker 2: flowing into people's homes. We also recognize that just like
Speaker 2: any energy source, building out offshore wind may does have
Speaker 2: ecological impacts, and that we want to be involved. We
Speaker 2: want to be at the table to help minimize those
Speaker 2: impacts on nature to result in the best outcome for
Speaker 2: nature and people. And so I've worked for the Nature
Speaker 2: Conservancy for two years, a little over two years. I
Speaker 2: was involved in offshore wind from the day I started.
Speaker 2: I'm a fish guy, though as a grad school to
Speaker 2: study fish. So that's the angle from which I approach
Speaker 2: renewable energies in offshore wind in general. And I've mentioned
Speaker 2: a couple of times this project I was working on
Speaker 2: last Sunday under the wind Turbines off Virginia tagging project.
Speaker 2: This is a project that's funded by the federal government,
Speaker 2: funded by no officieries, aka funded by the taxpayer. So
Speaker 2: thanks everybody. And we have a couple goals of the project,
Speaker 2: but essentially we're looking to understand to better understand the
Speaker 2: impacts of offshore wind construction activity on some species of
Speaker 2: economically important fish. And I'm happy to get more into
Speaker 2: that if we have time. But that's that's my involvement
Speaker 2: in offshore wind. I sit on a variety of advisory
Speaker 2: panels research advisor for a couple of organizations that are
Speaker 2: consortiums of folks thinking about offshore wind working on offshore winds.
Speaker 2: Some of them involve stakeholders, some of them involved developers, fishermen,
Speaker 2: city council members from some coastal jurisdiction where they're going
Speaker 2: to bring powers or things like that. There's a lot
Speaker 2: of What I like to say is we take a
Speaker 2: field to table approach. At the Nature Conservancy. We're in
Speaker 2: the field, we're doing the science, but we're also at
Speaker 2: the table. We're at the policy making table. We're weighing
Speaker 2: in on things like the environmental impact statements. We're working
Speaker 2: behind the scenes to identify research needs, research priorities. Sometimes
Speaker 2: we're out there collecting data in pursuit of those research
Speaker 2: needs and priorities. Well, it's got something.
Speaker 7: I have a thing to add. The other week, the
Speaker 7: House in the Senate released final twenty twenty four fiscal
Speaker 7: spending bills, and appropriators allocated this from an article. Appropriators
Speaker 7: allocated Z point twenty five billion to the Department of Energy,
Speaker 7: about one point eight billion above the fiscal twenty twenty
Speaker 7: three enacted level. And there is a ton more going
Speaker 7: to nuclear research and developments. So it looks like it
Speaker 7: includes one point sixty nine billion for nuclear energy research
Speaker 7: and development, which is about two hundred and twelve million
Speaker 7: more than where it is now.
Speaker 2: That'll be the next show. Why not nuclear?
Speaker 3: Why not nukes?
Speaker 2: I'd listen.
Speaker 5: I want to point out the biggest mistake I made
Speaker 5: the show is the easy layup of instead of run
Speaker 5: to DMC, it's run to TNC.
Speaker 2: Oh I heard that one.
Speaker 5: Yeah, such a bummer when you said that.
Speaker 1: For some reason, my kids have gotten willing to clean
Speaker 1: in their shoes, which is driving me insane.
Speaker 2: Cleaning their shoes the like, washing their crocks with a
Speaker 2: scrub brush.
Speaker 4: It's a stranger.
Speaker 2: I don't even know about this.
Speaker 1: And I made a joke beause like you guys think
Speaker 1: you're like run DMC because never had.
Speaker 2: Their whole thing. It was like those super white shoes.
Speaker 4: Was like, oh my god, they have no idea what
Speaker 4: you're talking about.
Speaker 1: Of course, where would a nine year old get the
Speaker 1: idea that he needs to clean his crocs off?
Speaker 3: Does that?
Speaker 2: It blows my mind?
Speaker 6: I don't know either. Did they do that to their sneak?
Speaker 3: I don't I don't understand. When they come in from
Speaker 3: the field, aren't you like clean your ship?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: No, no, they're like cleaning them cleaning, like not cleaning
Speaker 1: them off like mud.
Speaker 3: Like they want to go to school with fresh.
Speaker 2: No, not fresh fresh crops. It's insane.
Speaker 1: Steve also declared that your crocks look new.
Speaker 8: Steve also declared this morning in the parking lot that
Speaker 8: he doesn't like states who have too many license plates
Speaker 8: off up and Tannis specifically said, he said, you can
Speaker 8: learn a lot about a state, but kind of a
Speaker 8: license plate.
Speaker 2: How lin plates? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I said, there's an inverse correlation my native state, the
Speaker 1: greatness of a state and how many license plates it offers.
Speaker 2: My native state, Maryland leads the nation and the number
Speaker 2: of license plate they are got something like eighty, something
Speaker 2: like eighty license plate. I don't support that.
Speaker 8: My last thing I have is we got to get
Speaker 8: to trivia. Everyone's running the one you can.
Speaker 1: Stay for trivia?
Speaker 2: He is, yeah, what are you to throw him a
Speaker 2: bone about?
Speaker 8: The first guests who's ever asked like, hey, are we
Speaker 8: gonna play trivia? So yeah, you know, I think he'll
Speaker 8: do well.
Speaker 2: I appreciate you coming on. We were we were all
Speaker 2: over the place. It's great.
Speaker 1: We're talking about tech. We were talking about uh, theory, philosophy.
Speaker 4: We didn't get to Barrow trauma, which we're talking about.
Speaker 6: Maybe you can hit that for like two minutes in trivia.
Speaker 2: Got two minutes, we'll hit it in trivah in trivia?
Speaker 1: Sure, Oh yeah, can you intro with Barrow Trauma.
Speaker 8: We'll see what the schedule looks like.
Speaker 1: Thanks for coming on. It was probably frustrating for you.
Speaker 2: No, it's great, happy to be here. It felt like
Speaker 2: a PhD defense all over again.
Speaker 1: But I get it, man. I mean it's like, yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: in developing alternative energy, it's like everything is again, everything's
Speaker 1: going to be a little bit painful. It's just like
Speaker 1: where you can get the least amount of pain in
Speaker 1: the biggest amount of gain.
Speaker 3: Well, so you would love it, Steve, right, if we
Speaker 3: if you could just do a clean trade, uh, and
Speaker 3: just what we're already developing for fossil fuels, if we
Speaker 3: could just trade it out and do the win.
Speaker 1: Be like and it'll be even more energy and great,
Speaker 1: let's stop talking about it.
Speaker 2: And I just want I just want to remind the
Speaker 2: public that it's important to be involved. And there's a
Speaker 2: public comment period open right now, and you might bring
Speaker 2: something to the table that hasn't been said before. Because
Speaker 2: one of my favorite quotes, Mark Twain quote I think
Speaker 2: is a fresh set of eyes finds more beings, finds
Speaker 2: more beans. Yeah, you need more eyes on this situation,
Speaker 2: more fish, and sell the damn T shirts out.
Speaker 6: Well, you're supposed to be wearing it if.
Speaker 2: You want a sweet T shirt.
Speaker 11: Okay, shirt like this is all very complicated? Is this
Speaker 11: still like warranted? Just walk around going hey, make sure
Speaker 11: you turn your lights off. Definitely all complicit.
Speaker 4: Due half my day at home is spent walking around
Speaker 4: turning lights off and.
Speaker 1: Shut them all off, and five minutes later I come
Speaker 1: out there all back on again.
Speaker 2: Turn your lights off and don't get balloons for your
Speaker 2: next birthday party. I saw I say balloons every time
Speaker 2: I go off short every.
Speaker 6: Year can Texas.
Speaker 1: You can go to the top of the highest mountain
Speaker 1: on Earth. There's probably a birthday balloon sitting there.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of complaining balloon, a lot of complaining
Speaker 5: about federal overreach.
Speaker 3: But I mean, I think there's a room for more.
Speaker 1: A band of broad scale balloon band a sea turtle bait.
Speaker 8: Right there, except for you know who you're going to
Speaker 8: piss off, big buck white tail. A lot of them
Speaker 8: will say that if you find a balloon in the
Speaker 8: woods that tells you what the wind drafts are doing,
Speaker 8: then that's where a big buck would like to bet.
Speaker 3: Guys, thinks to phil Off.
Speaker 12: Got a botber in the water, toastuck in the mud.
Speaker 3: It's a perfectly for sitting soaking up the sign. Dad
Speaker 3: came up and asked me.
Speaker 12: Baby's wishful thinking, Yes, son, are you getting manny?
Speaker 3: I said, no, I'm just fishing boat. Just lost the
Speaker 3: anchor and the breeze.
Speaker 4: It's blowing slow, so.
Speaker 12: I'm just out here sending snagging.
Speaker 3: Some trees and getting the stone jogged around and a
Speaker 3: can of.
Speaker 12: Worms in the sun drinking down.
Speaker 4: Sure, got a few hours to my I said, that's
Speaker 4: what fishing for.
Speaker 12: Turning around and a candle, words and sign creeping down
Speaker 12: the shore. Got a few hours to myself.
Speaker 4: That's what fishing for.
Speaker 12: Well, maybe you're on the water casting from.
Speaker 4: The shore, time just seems.
Speaker 12: To fly by. Maybe you want it, always seems your
Speaker 12: last cast is really the first of many, whether catching
Speaker 12: the fish, catching the buzz beat's not catching eddie. Some
Speaker 12: folks they don't understand and know just what they're missing
Speaker 12: because you don't. There's the the be out here fishing
Speaker 12: turn around and a can of worms in the sun,
Speaker 12: creaking down the short got a few lives to my settling.
Speaker 3: That's what fishing for.
Speaker 8: I got a few lives to my symblings.
Speaker 12: That's what fishing is for.