A bad idea is emerging in the “renewables” world, namely that projects can buy their way out of destroying natural habitats. The wind and solar projects still destroy the natural habitats they are built on but they fund a magic wand that somehow supposedly creates new compensating habitat someplace else. Not really.
The fallacy here is that every acre in America already has a habitat. You can change an acre’s habitat from one form to another but not create one. It is a zero sum game.
There is a long standing, highly specialized development offset program that helps make the point. This is wetlands protection under section 404 of the Clean Water Act. Wetlands are deemed to be so special that filling one in for development can be offset by creating one someplace else.
But if you convert dry land to wetland you have destroyed the dry land habitat. So the amount of habitat destruction is not reduced, just the amount of wetland destruction.
The supposed renewables habitat destruction offset does nothing like the 404 program. The renewables developer simply pays to have habitat created someplace else which is impossible. For reference these programs are often called Biodiversity Offsetting which sounds nice.
Such a program might create habitat somewhere that matches that destroyed by the renewables project but that requires destroying the present habitat of the offset site. For example creating a woodland by destroying a grassland. Or vice versa, bulldozing a forest to create a grassland. This might even mean destroying farmland.
Clearly this is nonsense. It is a form of indulgences, which means paying for sin, in this case the sin of habitat destruction. Because solar and wind certainly destroy the habitat they are developed on.
It gets even worse with offshore wind, which has actually been proposed. Suppose a 100 square mile offshore wind array destroys a fishery. There is no way to go someplace else and create an equivalent fishery. Fisheries are found not made.
Nor is this offshore wind offset impossibility limited to fisheries. Wind turbines are projected to create wake effects that reduce the productivity of downward marine feeding grounds. This depletion can adversely affect the entire local food chain. We cannot simply go elsewhere and increase productivity.
Note that floating wind is even worse in this regard. An array of giant floating turbines requires an immense underwater web of mooring lines. This web might simply fence out the larger marine animals, rendering their habitat uninhabitable.
Which brings us to what is likely the worst case when it comes to the impossibility of offsetting habitat destruction on land or sea. The case is that of endangered species occupying the renewables development site. If their habitat is destroyed by development one cannot simply move them to some other newly prepared site far away. Nor can one build a distant habitat and expect them to come to it.
Which makes floating wind’s destructive impact on endangered species habitat the worst of the worst case. In particular there is the recent federal leasing of floating wind sites off of Maine and Massachusetts in the Gulf of Maine. The Gulf is designated as critical habitat for the desperately endangered North Atlantic Right Whale. The critical habitat lost from floating wind development cannot be offset, period.
In summary all that supposed habitat destruction offsets for renewables development can do is create the fiction that the destruction is okay. As with indulgences the sin has been paid for but only on paper.