Greenies befuddled at how teeming reefs full of sea life spring forth from old abandoned oil rigs

It's not easy being a greenie lefty these days, what with nature refusing to cooperate with the leftist "narrative" about the environment and mankind not belonging in it:

Such as on the matter of offshore reefs. Which are the best ones for producing teeming sea life?

According to The Guardian, it's old abandoned oil rigs, such as the ones found off the coast of Santa Barbara:

...When they reached the ageing structure, named Holly, they lowered a car-sized remote- controlled vehicle under the waves.

There, they saw hundreds of thousands of juvenile rockfish finding shelter amid the hulking metal structure, alongside waving white anemones, clusters of mussels, and silver jack mackerel.

The seasoned marine biologists have been observing this remarkable spectacle for years. Holly, which was put out of use in 2015, is one of 27 oil rigs built off the coast of California decades ago that have become hotbeds of biological activity.

While not natural structures, their platforms have been embedded into the muddy seabed long enough to become part of the ocean environment, providing a home for creatures like mussels and barnacles, which in turn attract larger fish and sea lions that find safety and food there.

After two and a half decades of studying the rigs, Bull says it’s clear to her: “These places are extremely productive, both for commercial and recreational fisheries and for invertebrates.”

In other words, they found under the rigs a paradise wonderland of teeming sea life, each life form bringing in more life forms until a whole community of sea life like an Octopus's Garden became the result.

This phenomenon is observed with every old abandoned oil rig, in California, but also in the offshore waters of Louisiana.

Economist Humberto Fontova has written a whole book on all the good eatin' to be had from fishing in those waters off Louisiana, blessed by all those abandoned oil rigs, which draws only the best fish to them, ultimately for our dining enjoyment.

Florida, he once told me, with all its environmental laws against such abandoned rigs, has no fishing industry to speak of, because it has no abandoned rigs.

Well.

It sounds like some "experts" have gotten into the act in that state.

The Guardian goes on to note that this is freaking out the left which has found itself at odds with ... science. And scientists.

Now, as California and the US shift away from offshore drilling and toward greener energy, a debate is mounting over their future. On one side are those who argue disused rigs are an environmental blight and should be removed entirely. On the other side are people, many of them scientists, who say we should embrace these accidental oases and that removing the structures is morally wrong. In other parts of the world, oil rigs have successfully become artificial reefs, in a policy known as rigs to reefs.

For Milton Love, a scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was on the boat with Bull, it’s a matter of ethics. He first encountered the rigs as an undergraduate student in the late 1960s when he was working as a commercial fisherman and collected fish off the rigs for a public aquarium, just as the platforms started to be installed. “There were a lot of fish,” he says. “That stuck in my mind.”

Science has a way of creeping up on them and sledgehammering them:

According to a 2014 study they co-authored, the rigs were some of the most “productive” ocean habitats in the world, a term that refers to biomass – or number of fish and how much space they take up – per unit area. The research showed the rigs to be about 27 times more productive than the natural rocky reefs in California.

Now the left has to decide whether it wants abundant sea life, with all the polar bears and sea lions that can support, or if it wants just ... water, where nothing actually lives.

Some of them actually root for the dead water over the delectable ocean ecosystems:

But environmental groups don’t see a win. They cite the visual pollution of rigs on the ocean horizon and say that the plan lets fossil fuel companies escape paying for the end of life of their dirty products. Some called the plan “rigs to grief”. Linda Krop, chief counsel of the non-profit Environmental Defense Center, says her group has been involved in the issue of rigs since 1996, when Chevron was required to remove four platforms. The company did, but it left behind piles of junk on the ocean floor in the form of 20ft-tall toxic debris mounds.

Krop says her group’s preference would be to have “as clean an environment at sea as possible”, adding that full removal would allow the ecosystem to return to its original function.

Which shows us up close how insane the left is. If abundant sea life isn't their goal, what is? 

Image: National Portrait Gallery, via Picryl / public domain

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