Just one more reason why I regard Trump as an enemy of life on Earth. These seismic tests sound every 12 seconds or so, and, in some cases for weeks or months at a time, with a range of 2500 miles. "Incidental" deaths will be tolerated.
http://www.masslive.com/politics/index.ssf/2018/11/trump_administration_approves.html
WASHINGTON - The Trump administration is preparing to take an important step toward future oil and natural gas drilling off the Atlantic shore, approving five requests from companies to conduct deafening seismic tests that could kill tens of thousands of dolphins, whales and other marine animals.
The planned Friday announcement by the National Marine Fisheries Service, a division of the Commerce Department, to issue "incidental take" permits allowing companies to harm wildlife is likely to further antagonize a dozen governors in states on the Eastern Seaboard who strongly oppose the administration's proposal to expand federal oil and gas leases to the Atlantic. Federal leases could lead to exploratory drilling for the first time in more than half a century.
....Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee who will probably take over as chair in the next Congress, blasted the administration's decision to permit acoustic testing as "an alarming sign of [its] indifference to the fate of coastal communities and marine life, including the endangered north Atlantic right whale."
He bemoaned the timing of the announcement shortly after the climate report's release, saying, "there is nothing this administration won't do for the fossil fuel industry, including destroying local economies and ruining endangered species habitats."
According to one model prediction in a 2014 study released by the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management in 2014, nearly 2.5 million dolphins would be harassed or possibly killed by acoustic sound blasts each year in the middle and southern Atlantic, and nearly half a million pilot whales would be impacted.
Fewer than two weeks ago, the National Marine Fisheries Service pleaded with commercial fishermen to be careful not to harm Atlantic right whales after an unprecedented 20 deaths in 2016 and 2017 reduced their numbers to a mere 400 in the wild.
.....The Obama administration denied six permits for seismic testing weeks before Trump took office in 2017 out of concern for wildlife and fisheries. "In the present circumstances and guided by an abundance of caution, we believe that the value of obtaining the geophysical and geological information from new air-gun seismic surveys in the Atlantic does not outweigh the potential risks of those surveys' acoustic pulse impacts on marine life," said Abigail Ross Hopper, BOEM's director at the time.