From MasterResource

By Lisa Linowes

“The law remains clear: the Department of the Interior must ensure that offshore projects prevent unreasonable interference before approval — not simply allow harm and hope payouts will quiet objections.”

With offshore wind, a lethal tort issue lurks beneath the waves: Is it enough to pay off harmed ocean users after the fact, or does the law demand the government prevent harm in the first place? Under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA), a clear answer is being dangerously overlooked.

OCSLA, originally passed in 1953 and amended by the Energy Policy Act of 2005, governs energy development on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). Section 8(p)(4)(I) imposes a specific duty on the Department of the Interior: before approving offshore activities like wind development, the Secretary must ensure the project “provides for the prevention of interference with reasonable uses” of the ocean — including fishing, recreation, and navigation.

This is not just bureaucratic language. It’s a binding legal duty. The government must prevent offshore projects, like wind farms, from unreasonably interfering with existing ocean uses, such as commercial fishing, recreation, and navigation. The law does not say the government can simply let interference happen and pay those harmed later.

The legal framework is well established. The Department’s own Solicitor, in Opinion M-37059, makes this clear. The statute applies a reasonableness standard: if a project causes unreasonable interference, it cannot go forward; if the interference is minimal (de minimis) or reasonable, it may proceed. But crucially, offering financial compensation to harmed parties does not satisfy this duty. In fact, the very creation of a compensation scheme presumes that interference exists — it doesn’t erase it.

A Workaround?

So why, then, are developers setting up compensation funds for displaced fishermen? The answer lies in a legal workaround. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has leaned on the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which has its own framework for “mitigation.” NEPA’s regulations allow agencies to consider a range of mitigation options, including avoiding, minimizing, repairing, reducing, or compensating for environmental impacts. BOEM has treated developer-funded compensation programs as valid mitigation under NEPA, using them to support positive approval decisions for offshore wind projects.

But NEPA is only procedural — it cannot override or substitute for the substantive requirements of OCSLA. While NEPA allows agencies to consider compensation, OCSLA demands prevention when interference crosses the threshold of unreasonableness.

Moreover, BOEM itself has acknowledged the legal limits of these compensation efforts. In its Guidelines for Providing Information for Mitigating Impacts to Commercial and For-Hire Recreational Fisheries on the Outer Continental Shelf Pursuant to 30 CFR Part 585, BOEM explicitly states:

There are no existing Federal regulations that require compensation for economic loss from displacement attributed to offshore wind energy installations.

This distinction matters. While OCSLA Section 302 (43 U.S.C. § 1846) provides a statutory process to compensate fishermen for physical gear losses caused by oil and gas activities, there is no similar federal law covering lost revenue or displacement from offshore wind. Payments for lost income or access are voluntary, not legally required, and they do not fulfill the government’s statutory obligation under OCSLA § 8(p)(4)(I).

Biden Trouble Should Not be Trump’s

The Biden administration’s BOEM systematically ignored the law — approving offshore wind projects by relying on compensation schemes rather than fulfilling its duty to prevent interference. Now, President Trump, in greenlighting the Empire Wind project off New York as part of a broader effort to secure a new gas pipeline, risks making the same mistake. [1]

No deal, no matter how politically or economically tempting, gives the federal government the right to bypass OCSLA’s mandates. The law remains clear: the Department of the Interior must ensure that offshore projects prevent unreasonable interference before approval — not simply allow harm and hope payouts will quiet objections.

President Trump and his team should not follow the Biden administration down this flawed path. Upholding the law is not optional. Anything less would betray the public trust — and President Trump should seize the chance to do what the Biden administration did not: uphold the law.

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[1] For greater detail on the Trump Administration’s deal with New York Governor Kathy Hochul to okay Empire Wind in return for certification of natural gas pipelines in the state, see here.

This analysis. slightly edited, was first published by Save Right Whales Coalition and WindAction. Lisa Linowes’s previous posts at MasterResource can be found here.

From ClimateREALISM

Screen capture of the region surrounding Mokwa, Niger State, Nigeria, on Google Earth.By Linnea Lueken

A recent article, written by the Associated Press (AP) and carried by NBC, titled “Floods kill at least 111 as northern Nigeria battles climate change, dry spells and heavy rainfall,” tries to connect climate change for deadly weather disasters in Nigeria. There is little or no such connection. Torrential rainfall following a hard drought can result in flooding, but its unclear whether climate change had any connection to the rainfall or the preceding drought. More importantly, the media reports ignore known urban planning issues that contributed to flooding and greatly worsen flooding when it occurs.

A heavy rain storm in Nigeria caused flooding which reportedly killed at least 111 people in and around the town of Mokwa. AP reports that the “Nigerian Hydrological Services Agency did not immediately say how much rain fell after midnight Thursday in the town of Mokwa in the state of Niger more than 180 miles west of Abuja, the capital of Africa’s most populous nation.”

AP goes on to claim that this part of Nigeria has “been experiencing prolonged dry spells worsened by climate change and excessive rainfall that leads to severe flooding during the brief wet season.”

While the AP insists that climate change is primarily responsible for the tragedy, history and data undermine any such connection. Damaging floods have been common throughout Nigeria’s history. Nigeria has a dry season, during which drought is common, and a wet or rainy season complete, with monsoons and flooding in low lying areas and villages and towns alongside rivers and streams.

In a 2018  BBC article, titled “Why does Nigeria keep flooding?” the authors point in part to a rising trend in average annual rainfall as part of the reason, true. But rising average rainfall doesn’t necessarily mean that individual rain events are more extreme. Hard data on severe rainfall and flooding in Nigeria is sparse. However, plenty of places experiencing increased average annual rainfall have not experienced increased flooding, so what gives in Nigeria?

The BBC explains that Nigeria’s three main hydroelectric dams are partially to blame for downstream flooding, but also that the “uncompleted Zungeru dam, in Niger state, which is part-funded by the Chinese government, is also believed to be affecting areas once free from flooding.”

They go on to quote local experts who said that Nigeria’s population is rapidly expanding, and that with it, urbanization and everything that comes with it is increasing as well, “and the lack of proper town planning can make flooding worse in urban areas.” The BBC quotes one expert as saying that town planning “is very weak.” The BBC continues by saying that rapid development is “almost always unregulated, with people building on floodplains, reducing the surface areas for water to travel, and without constructing drainage systems.”

The BBC reports that people often rebuild in areas that already had disastrous floods, with the same lack of care for water handling.

Flooding is not unprecedented for the area covered by the AP/NBC story, nor should it come as a surprise to anyone. Mokwa, the town devastated by the recent floods, sits a few miles north of the Niger river. Surrounding the bend of the river in that region are interesting features that identify the area as a major floodplain. First, a wide greenbelt along the river hints at the frequent deposit of river sediment well inland in multiple areas. But one will notice something else as well – tendrils of hard greenery which reach north from the belt, one of which appears to terminate in . . . Mokwa.

These are most likely seasonal creek beds that lay at lower elevations in the landscape, which can both be drainage features from the land surrounding them, feeding to the river, but can also become swollen when the river itself overflows. Water from upland, where much of the town infrastructure is, is going to want to flow into that low area. Increased development in and around Mokwa has resulted in more non-permeable ground and surfaces—that is, ground that has been covered in foundations and asphalt or packed earth that water cannot soak into, so it flows on top instead.

It is notable, too, that in another BBC article covering the recent disastrous flood, the locals interviewed did not blame the flooding on climate change or the recent rainfall. BBC says that residents “told BBC News they believed the floodwater was not caused by the heavy rainfall they had experienced,” and that the Mokwa District Head said that the rain could not have been the primary cause of the flooding, because the rain had “subsided” already when the flooding started. Instead, he blames a local reservoir. If water had indeed been released from a local reservoir, the geography indicates the water would flow right through the town to get to the creeks which feed the river.

There is no way to tie this particular flood event to climate change, only a sustained long-term trend would suggest such a connection.

Nigeria has a long history of floods and, as explained in the Queen’s Gazette, “Nigeria’s flooding is mainly human induced with poor urban planning practices and inadequate environmental infrastructure being contributing factors.” Whether or not rainfall is increasing in Nigeria, the easiest and most effective way prevent disastrous flooding from happening again would be to invest in water handling infrastructure, where possible.

“Unlike some natural disasters, rainfall flooding can be controlled with proper planning and provision of necessary infrastructure,” reinforces the Queen’s Gazette. Where improving infrastructure is impossible for one reason or another possible, people should, at a minimum, avoid living in known flood plains, naturally prone to such events, and especially not be rebuilding there in the aftermath of experiencing a flood.

In order to emphasize a speculative climate connection, the AP and NBC completely ignored glaring urban infrastructure issues that other outlets have rightly recognized as being the main factors in Nigeria’s recent floods. Based on the limited data that exists on flooding and drought in the country and across the region, the recent drought and flood were not historically unusual, in fact both conditions are endemic to the country during its dry and wet seasons, meaning there is no climate change “fingerprint” in evidence.

If you heard a distant wailing this week, don’t worry—it was just The New York Times realizing their beloved carbon capture techno-fantasy is, once again, face-planting in the real world. In a recent Climate Forward newsletter piece titled “Carbon Capture Comes Back Down to Earth”, Times writer David Gelles practically had to mop his keyboard with tears over the news that the carbon removal market—once projected to be a trillion-dollar juggernaut—is now wheezing toward irrelevance.

Not that we mind. After all, here at Watts Up With That, we never bought into the carbon panic to begin with. CO2 isn’t a pollutant—it’s plant food. But watching the climate-industrial complex flop around trying to vacuum molecules out of the sky is pure entertainment.

From “The Next Big Thing” to Layoff Bingo

Just a few months ago, the hype machine was at full throttle. Bill Gates was investing. Google, Amazon, and Airbus were snapping up “carbon credits” like trendy NFTs. McKinsey—ever the oracle of bad ideas—declared carbon capture a $1.2 trillion market by 2050. One venture capitalist even called it “the single greatest opportunity I’ve seen in 20 years.” You almost have to admire the brazenness of the grift.

Fast-forward to now: 24 government grants worth $3.7 billion have been scrapped, Climeworks axed 22% of its staff, and permit applications have tanked. The “market” is imploding because—brace yourself—no one wants to fund something that doesn’t work.

Meanwhile, Climeworks’ headline-grabbing Iceland plant managed to remove only a sliver of its projected CO2. Naturally, the execs blame “ramp-up issues.” Of course they do. It’s never the technology’s fault—it’s always “early days” or “transitional challenges.” You’d think they were launching a moon mission, not running industrial shop vacs for the atmosphere.

The Laws of Physics Want a Word

Let’s be crystal clear: carbon capture is a thermodynamic clown show.

Pulling CO2 from ambient air—where it exists at a wispy 0.04%—is like trying to find a particular grain of sand on a beach… using tweezers… while blindfolded. It takes more energy to remove CO2 from the air than was released burning the fossil fuel in the first place. And even then, you still have to compress it, transport it, inject it underground, and pray it doesn’t leak back out.

This isn’t cutting-edge climate tech. It’s an energy-intensive Rube Goldberg machine designed to appease green investors, virtue-signaling corporations, and bureaucrats allergic to basic physics.

Bonus: It Boosts Oil Production!

Now here’s the kicker: the CO2 some of these companies do manage to capture is often used for enhanced oil recovery. That’s right—after spending billions to “fight climate change,” the carbon is injected into wells to squeeze out even more oil.

And yes, Occidental Petroleum—the same company running a giant DAC project in Texas—openly touts this as a feature, not a bug. The Times, ever reverent, quotes CEO Vicki Hollub promising that the project will help achieve “energy security” and “produce vital resources and fuels.” Translation: we’re going to burn more hydrocarbons and call it green.

The NYT’s Tiny Violin Section

What really makes this article sing is the melodramatic tone. The author laments layoffs, canceled subsidies, and a “retrenchment” in the industry like it’s some noble cause under siege.

And when the DOE finally did something rational—canceling $3.7 billion in vaporware grants—the Carbon Capture Coalition, which is about as unbiased as a pharma lobby, called it a “major step backward.” For whom? Rent-seeking climatepreneurs?

Even Climeworks now admits they’re going into “consolidation mode” and focusing on “efficiency.” Translation: the gravy train is slowing, so it’s time to pretend we’re tightening belts while keeping the PR spigot open.

Final Thoughts: Not Our Problem

Let’s be honest: the entire carbon capture craze was never about saving the planet. It was about:

1. Making rich people feel less guilty about flying private.
2. Giving bureaucrats a talking point.
3. Creating a new market for companies like Microsoft to “offset” emissions without changing a single behavior.

The NYT can whimper all it wants about Trump pulling the plug, but the real villain here is reality. Physics doesn’t care about good intentions, ESG scores, or narrative arcs. It just keeps tallying the kilowatt-hours.

So while The Times continues wringing its hands over CO2 removal dreams deferred, we’ll be here pointing, laughing, and perhaps warming ourselves with the comforting glow of all that wasted taxpayer cash being vaporized in yet another doomed climate gimmick.

Coming Soon:

• Direct Air Capture vs. a Leaf: Guess Which One Works Better
• Climate Grifters, Part VII: Where Are They Now?
• Bill Gates’ Carbon Unicorn: Anatomy of a Bad Idea