Porktown
Do a bit of research on any of the items that I noted. Look at what organizations support each side. Local sportsmen clubs on one side and national/international “environmental” groups on the other. Most of these national groups have absolutely no ties to the areas that they are trying to eliminate “human disruption”, but are just fine supporting disruption if a project benefits their “values”.
I don’t have that $500k boat and don’t even pay for the charter boats that go out far enough to be affected by these speed limit regulations. The date range of these restrictions would be during the winter, which I’d never plan to ever be on a boat hitting these restrictions. But I do know that whale & small craft incidents are extremely rare, seeing multiple studies and reports. This doesn’t affect me, so the value thing doesn’t apply. Just an example of a far left organization that has deep financial ties to the Democratic Party is assaulting the sportsmen for very little reason. To note, boats that are working on the wind farms are exempt to this restriction. To further the hypocrisy point.
I dont have time to read up on all the stuff you listed, so I picked this to start with.
I presume you are talking about the speed restrictions for right whale breeding territory, right?
So first of all I couldnt find anything about wind farm vessels being exempt from these speed restrictions, although
this article seemed to provide a relatively unbiased take on wind farm construction vs protection of right whales during breeding ground. The Feds are pushing the wind farm developers to go as far as to monitor the impacts of underwater noise during constructions which could affect whales' ability to use sonar, and at least one wind farm developer cited in the article (Vineyard Wind) "agreed to boat-speed limits, a strict time frame for pile driving (it only happens when right whales’ main migration through the area is over), and the presence of marine observers, who search for right whales and stop construction if even one is in the area." So if you found info that suggests wind farm development is somehow exempt from anything then I would ask you to share it. Generally speaking, wind energy has been the target of all kinds of right wing attacks because fossil fuel interests are heavily invested in the republican party. I would take ANYTHING reported second hand about wind energy with a grain of salt, and make sure that info is fact checked.
The main threats with right whales are collisions with boats and entanglements in nets from commercial fishing.
The NOAA has some data here. The main cause of death is boats. The main cause of injury (not necessarily resulting in death) is entanglements in nets. No you can say that vessel strikes are "rare" however there are only about 360 right whales left, and if 15 of them have been killed by boats in the last 8 years, thats just over 4% of the entire population, which is not an insignificant number considering how dangerously small the population already is. To put that into perspective, the population of pittsburgh is about 300,000 people. If 12,000 (or roughly 4% of the population) people in the Pittsburgh area were killed by collisions with garbage trucks in the last 8 years, would you say that collisions with garbage trucks were "rare"? As far whatever studies or reports you saw that indicate the vessel strikes are "rare" I would be happy to take a look at them, but my initial thought here is "rare" can be a subjective term in this context, and the issue here is the actual number of dead whales, not how often they occur.
I'm also not sure which "far left organization with deep ties to the democratic party" is behind this. As far as I can tell there is no monied interest in preventing the extinction of a certain species. Conservation groups dont lobby congress because their ability to make money is threatened, their motives are pretty clear. But there is alot of money in the commercial fishing and sport fishing industries, and those industries have deep "financial ties" to elected officials as well.
Now if somebody wants to make an argument that the commercial fishing industry is not being held to the same level of accountability as the sport fishing industry, then I might be inclined to agree. Instead of saying "what about wind farms" maybe the charters should be saying "what about the commercial fisherman". And the reason for that difference is pretty obvious - the commercial fishing industry has MUCH deeper pockets, therefore much more influence.
But if this example is supposed to illustrate that conservation efforts are threatening a sport fishing industry, so there is a simple direct clash between conservation and sportsmen. Ok, I get that. But I still think that they way you portrayed the conservation efforts is inaccurate, and what the debate really comes down to one group of people valuing one thing and another group valuing something else.
And something else to think about - If a big oil company or some commercial fishing operation came along and did something that wiped out a population of the sport fish along a portion of the atlantic coast, how fast do you think these same charters who are fighting these speed restrictions would turn into "enviro-nazis"?
There are huge volumes of water and vast areas of land in this country that support sport fishing and hunting opportunities, and these places only exist because conservationists protected them in the first place.