Whale deaths exploited in 'cynical disinformation' push against wind power, advocates say

Efforts to stop wind turbines off the Atlantic coast have a new mascot: the whale.

A dozen New Jersey beach town mayors and several other groups now argue offshore wind power activity could be the cause of recent whale deaths and wind projects must be stopped while scientists investigate.

But those most vocal about their concern have been silent in recent years as whale strandings surged along the East Coast. Wind energy supporters and whale advocates say these groups and politicians appear to be using whales as pawns.

A Jan. 30 letter signed by 12 New Jersey mayors and a congressman, Chris Smith, R-N.J., called for a moratorium on all offshore wind activity. Conservation advocates say the letter spreads speculation when scientists aren't convinced whale deaths and offshore wind development are connected — and there's good reason to believe they are not.

Whales and wind emerged in the headlines in January after a news conference Jan. 9 by two groups, Clean Ocean Action and Protect Our Coast New Jersey. They blamed the "unprecedented" discovery of six dead whales along New Jersey and New York coasts on early-stage geotechnical surveys mapping the sea floor for wind farms.

In Massachusetts, in 2021, the Nantucket Residents Against Turbines group, known by the acronym ACKRAT, helped announce the formation of the Save Right Whales Coalition with the stated goal of stopping offshore wind farms. One of the groups in the coalition was led by pro-nuclear power activist Michael Shellenberger and his California-based group Environmental Progress.

In New Jersey, the two groups advanced a festering concern that sound beams used in such surveys could harm whales. Conservation groups and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management generally believe that's nonsense, in part because the type of sound used for wind turbine placement is much weaker than the stronger signals regularly used for other purposes such as oil and gas exploration.

Then the mayors' letter made national news with its call for a moratorium on all offshore wind activity until federal and state agencies determine there's no connection to a series of whale deaths.

The cause has also been taken up by Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, who has aired a series of segments in which he called wind turbines DDT for whales.

Long-time whale advocacy groups aren't buying it.

“It’s just a cynical disinformation campaign,” said Greenpeace oceans director John Hocevar. “It doesn’t seem to worry them that it’s not based in any kind of evidence.”

Scientists who study whale strandings say there’s no known link between wind turbines and whale deaths, although they continue to probe what role, if any, wind development has in whale deaths.

So far, evidence for a link is little more than speculation. Experts point to the United Kingdom, which has 2,652 offshore wind turbines and where experts say autopsies have not found a connection between dead whales on their shores and the turbines off them.

Gib Brogan, a campaign director with Oceana, an international ocean advocacy group, said those opposed to wind power are using a spate of whale deaths in the area as an opportunity.

"It seems that the connection between the whale strandings and wind activities is a convenient line of opposition to development of offshore wind in the mid-Atlantic," he said.

Some New Jersey politicians opposed offshore wind power before whale death concerns

Of the 12 mayors who signed the letter, nine are Republican and one is a Democrat. In two towns, elections by law are nonpartisan. All represent small Jersey Shore beach towns.

A USA TODAY review of public statements found at least two of the mayors had spoken critically of offshore wind, a key part of the nation's renewable energy plan with a goal of producing enough electricity to power 10 million homes by decade's end.

“We’ve been 100% against this project from Day One,”  Joe Mancini, mayor of Long Beach Township, said of the several wind farms in the proposal and research stage off the New Jersey shore.

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Mancini's concerns are numerous: He says the proposed wind farms will destroy fishing and hurt tourism. The turbines are unsightly and the energy they produce is too expensive, he claims. "I don’t care how far out they put them," he said.

Instead, he supports nuclear power as the solution to creating carbon-neutral energy.

In the borough of Deal, Mayor Sam Cohen signed the letter, but when contacted by USA TODAY, he expressed concern over possible dangers to birds.

"I have no idea how these wind turbines affect whales, but I would be interested to see a study on how these turbines affect fish and wildlife," he told USA TODAY.

Don Cabrera, a signer and mayor of the borough of Wildwood Crest, said he’s opposed to “tampering with our ecosystem and ocean floor and possibly harming marine and other life.” He believes sustainable energy should come from land-based wind turbines and solar farms.

He’s also not convinced the turbines, which he says would harm his town, won’t be visible from land.

New Jersey mayors have history of silence on whale deaths

Rep. Smith, who has supported wind power, introduced a bill in 2019 to ban the use of seismic air guns, primarily by oil and gas companies. The measure aims to protect the endangered North Atlantic right whale and other marine life. He has also supported a ban on offshore oil drilling.

But a USA TODAY review of news coverage of the mayors found no history of public concern for whale deaths, despite high rates of strandings dating back to 2017.

That year, 78 whales died along the Atlantic coast of the U.S. and Canada and 59 in 2018, 2019 and 2020, NOAA data shows.

“I don’t know what to make of it that these people and these organizations that have not had a long-standing interest in whale conservation are becoming vocal opponents of offshore wind using whales as their vehicle,” Brogan said.

"Groups opposed to clean energy projects spread baseless misinformation that has been debunked by scientists and experts," said JC Sandberg, chief advocacy officer with the American Clean Power Association, a renewable energy trade group.

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“We have always worked alongside the environmental community to protect marine life and follow rigorous standards when developing projects. The recent whale strandings are tragic, but there is no evidence that these incidents have anything to do with offshore wind activity," he said.

The dispute has made for strange bedfellows.

The Jan. 9 news conference featured Clean Action Ocean, a 39-year-old group founded to fight beach dumping, as well as Protect Our Coast New Jersey. Founded in 2021, that group’s money is managed by the Caesar Rodney Institute, which has received funding from the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers.

Conservative organizations or oil and gas interests appear to be using whales as pawns in efforts to undermine offshore wind projects, said Leah Stokes, a professor of political science at the University of Santa Barbara.

The tactic has been used to fight the land-based wind installations, the Inflation Reduction Act and now offshore wind power, said Stokes, whose book “Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States” researched anti-wind-power networks.

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“They’re taking those legitimate environmental concerns and trying to manipulate the conversation by using topics that matter to the environmental movement,” she said.

The same tactic is used when those opposed to wind energy focused on bird deaths, which isn’t their actual concern, she said.

“Folks may have other reasons they don’t like turbines, such as home prices or their own financial interests, but they’ll mask it in arguing it’s about protecting bird species,” she said.

In Massachusetts, a lawsuit backed by Nantucket residents is ongoing

ACKRAT, the Nantucket group, filed a lawsuit on Aug. 25, 2021, in U.S. District Court in Boston claiming the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management — the lead agency in permitting the Vineyard Wind 1, the 62-turbine offshore wind farm 14 miles south of Nantucket and the first utility-scale project in the country — failed along with other federal agencies to do an adequate environmental review of its impact on the marine environment, particularly its effect on right whales.

The lawsuit is ongoing.

When ACKRAT held a press conference in 2021 in front of the Statehouse in Boston to announce it was suing the federal government for permitting a wind farm south of the island, media outlets noted the presence of David Stevenson, a former Trump transition team member and the director of energy and environment for a libertarian think tank.

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“They are not part of our organization,” Amy DiSibio, an ACKRAT board member, said at the time of Environmental Progress and Stevenson’s group, the Caesar Rodney Institution.

“There have been some coalitions formed where people interested in whales have some interests that go beyond the whales but our lawsuit is purely environmental and focused on the whale,” she told the Times in 2021.

DiSibio said Stevenson and the Delaware-based Caesar Rodney Institute, helped with publicity, advice and some money. Stevenson also recently founded the American Coalition for Ocean Protection, which was fundraising to create a permanent wind energy exclusion zone along the East Coast out to 33 miles.

It’s a familiar tactic, said Michael Gerrard, a Columbia Law School professor of environmental law and the director of the Center for Climate Change Law.

“We have a long history of industry opposition to environmental regulation and to clean energy projects. The lawyers bringing these cases always want to find the plaintiffs who are the most sympathetic and have standing to sue,” Gerrard said. “For that reason, it’s desirable to find groups like fishermen to be the face of the litigation.”

The Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, for instance, counted fishermen and wealthy waterfront landowners as supporters in multiple lawsuits against the Cape Wind project, and had backing from fossil fuel interests in William Koch, owner of Oxbow Carbon LLC, who is listed as a member of the alliance's board of directors. He also owned a home in Osterville on Nantucket Sound.

Cape Wind had unsuccessfully proposed to build the nation’s first offshore wind farm with a 130-turbine project in Nantucket Sound. In 2017 it surrendered its federal lease on the project.

Whale deaths a problem, but no evidence connects them to wind, experts say

The East Coast is in the midst of a seven-year whale die-off that caused the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to declare an Unusual Mortality Event — an in-depth scientific investigation — for humpbacks in 2016. Two other unusual mortality investigations for whales began in 2017, one for minke whales and one for North Atlantic right whales.

Since Dec. 1, seven dead humpback whales and one sperm whale have been seen along the New Jersey shore, and eight other humpbacks and two North Atlantic right whales washed up along the coast between New York and North Carolina.

Both a humpback that washed ashore in Manasquan, New Jersey, on Monday and a right whale found dead on Virginia Beach on Feb. 12, showed internal evidence of vessel strikes, NOAA said. At least three of the January whale deaths have been attributed to vessel strikes.

It's not clear this is an outsized number compared with past years.

“It is too soon to speculate about this year being higher than any others,” Allison Ferreira, NOAA spokeswoman, said.

Greenpeace's Hocevar isn't concerned.

“There’s no evidence that we’ve seen implicating wind turbines and the deaths of whales on the East Coast," he said.

So far, the United States has only two in operation, with a total of just seven turbines. Another two are in the construction stage, one off New York and one off Massachusetts.

Longer-term, there are 10 projects are in the environmental review process, meaning it will be years before construction is allowed to can begin.

“While the climate deniers and the right-wing pundits are tilting at windmills," Hocevar said, "most of us are focused on the real threats to whales ­— climate change, entanglement with fishing gear, ship strikes and plastic pollution.”

Information from the Cape Cod Times was used in this report.

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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Whale deaths and offshore wind power: 'Disinformation' explained