Politico reported last week on a proposal to "develop offshore wind at a depth and scale never before attempted in the world"--and to do it in a place that has seen little public investment in recent decades: Humboldt County, California, population 136,000. After noting the region's boom-and-bust cycle and high poverty rate, journalist Wes Venteicher describes the project:
The offshore wind proposal, driven by the Biden and Newsom administration efforts to dramatically increase renewable energy, would erect dozens of turbines three times the size of that smokestack with blades as long as a football field in an area of the Pacific Ocean nearly 10 times the size of Manhattan.
He then turns to some of the projects challenges, including the region's recent history of boom-and-bust, resulting in low per capita incomes:
[T]he project faces a host of major challenges. They include not just the obvious economic and bureaucratic hurdles but also a widespread distrust of outsiders in a region where indiscriminate logging engendered deep resentment and where an illegal marijuana industry created a counterculture haven in the fog-shrouded mountains.
The region is still recovering from mistakes of the past. International wind developers are pitching their projects just as many residents celebrate the removal of Klamath River dams the Yurok Tribe and the fishing industry fought for decades. The structures destroyed rich salmon habitat to export hydropower even as many native people lived without electricity.
It has to be done right. Because we have to avoid being in the same position we are now 50 years from now. I’ve spent most of my life fighting the dams. I do not want to leave my children a fight to remove offshore wind.
Humboldt Bay, now marred by rotted docks and contaminated soil, was home to 250 sawmills in 1950. By the 1970s, over half of California’s fish were being pulled from the bay. The county’s famously high-quality illegal cannabis took over after that, snaking across tens of thousands of acres in the hills. The plant’s skunky odor still wafts through Eureka, but legalization made it much less lucrative.
The land — which now hosts two seaweed farms, an oyster hatchery and temporary storage for freshly caught hagfish — would be transformed into an industrial terminal with up to 650,000 square feet of building space, lights mounted 150 feet in the air and giant cranes that crawl through the water on tank treads.
[L]eaders such as Yurok Tribal Court Judge Abby Abinanti worry how the expected influx of construction and manufacturing labor, some likely to occupy temporary “mancamps,” will affect vulnerable people such as native women who already go missing and are killed at higher rates than other groups.
“Our concern is that these camps end up elevating those kinds of statistics unless preventative efforts are made,” said Abinanti.
She also wants to make sure women have the same access as men to the new jobs through training.
A recent post about Humboldt County is here, with links to other posts from that part of the world embedded.
Postscript: On Oct., 16, 2023, CalMatters published Part I of a two-part series on the Humboldt wind farm, by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Julie Cart.
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