Steve Milloy: Green Activists would rather Save Windmills than the Whales

Reader-submitted content. The following is written by Steve Milloy, and published with permission from the Daily Caller. This is part of the Mirror’s continued series on radical environmentalist hypocritical attempts to destroy the environment while supposedly wanting to save it.

Save the whales. Once upon a time, that used to be the favorite mantra of environmental activists. Today, not so much. These days, it’s more chic to be into giant offshore wind turbines. And if dozens upon dozens of whales must be killed to make way for turbines along with their new mantra, “save the planet,” well, that’s just the price we must pay. Or so goes the current thinking among the green set.

Scores of whale and dolphin carcasses have washed up along the East Coast in recent months, and particularly on New Jersey and New York-area beaches where no fewer than nine whales have washed ashore just since December. The evidence is not yet incontrovertible, but the deaths coincide with sonic testing in conjunction with massive wind turbine projects. Seismic testing can “injure and kill marine wildlife” such as whales and dolphins holds, according to one environmental group. The Natural Resources Defense Council once went all the way to the Supreme Court in a bid to stop the U.S. Navy’s seismic testing.

The Biden administration has committed itself to transitioning America’s entire electricity grid to wind and solar, seemingly at any cost. Supportive of that goal, its National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration attempted to dispute the link. “At this point, there is no evidence to support speculation that noise resulting from wind development-related site characterization surveys could potentially cause mortality of whales, and no specific links between recent large whale mortalities and currently ongoing surveys.”

NOAA’s claim is ridiculous, but even more absurd, it’s being backstopped by Greenpeace which dismisses the link between seismic testing for offshore wind projects and the whale and dolphin deaths as a fossil fuel industry-funded “right-wing disinformation campaign.” 

This past Saturday – Earth Day – an airplane towing a banner emblazoned with “SAVE-WHALES-STOP-WINDMILLS.ORG” flew above Atlantic City, New Jersey beachgoers. The message, sponsored by the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and the Heartland Institute, serves notice of the whales’ plight and the joint complicity of the Biden administration and high-profile environmental groups.

NOAA is taking public comment on a massive 100-tower turbine project just 10 miles off Atlantic City’s beachline called Atlantic Shores Offshores Wind, a partnership of foreign-owned wind companies. If approved, the permit would sanction the killing of up to 42 whales, 2,678 dolphins and 1,472 seals.

Beyond being a self-contraction of previous denials, NOAA’s permit is a license to kill, and it includes 13 species of whales specifically protected under the Endangered Species Act. The administration’s exception is spectacular in its hypocrisy with its inclusion of the North American right whale, because that’s the very same species that federal regulators are using as a weapon to destroy lobster and groundfishing industries in order to make way for the offshore wind industry in Maine.

Of course, there are many projects like Atlantic Shores, and as we are finding out, each of them permits the killing of whales, dolphins, and seals at each step of the project. So it goes. If endangered species and threatened industries must be sacrificed on the process of saving the world, it would be worth it.

But cooler heads know that isn’t true and that all the windmills in the world cannot impact climate for good or ill. We are left with the choice then: Save the whales – or sacrifice them as an offering to an administration which, in its supreme arrogance, believes that humankind can act as a thermostat upon the Earth’s temperature.

Steve Milloy is a Senior Legal Fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute. He previously served as an EPA transition team adviser for the Trump administration.

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