Climate Change Grift: Wind Farms are Killing Whales

There are actually people that believe renewable energy is really a thing. These useless, wasteful, inefficient offshore wind farms that the government insists are not killing whales, are, of course, killing whales and driving them to extinction. You will not hear one elected Democrat or Republican utter a word about this… because of their new religion global warming. The government is lying? What a shocker.

Last week marked the 60th known whale death on the East Coast since Dec 1, 2022. This is not normal. The government says it’s not because of the wind industry’s high decibel pile driving and boat traffic in previously pristine waters. They’re lying.

The government lied when it said it had done the research proving that the high-decibel pile driving and expanded boat traffic weren’t the cause of rising whale deaths. They hadn’t done the research.

The Climate Change Grift–Destroying the Environment to “Save” the Environment

The wind industry spent years bribing the US government, scientific organizations, aquariums, and the news media to lie to the American people about their abominable activities, which if allowed to continue, will lead the North Atlantic Right Whale into extinction.

For years, the government has insisted that the increase in whale deaths off the East Coast has no relationship to the wind industry’s high-decibel pile driving and boat activity. Scientists who knew better created and helped spread disinformation about the impact of these activities around a population of just 340 whales.

Journalists working for news media corporations that are taking money directly from Orsted have been spreading disinformation— deliberate lies — that the grassroots activists trying to save the whales are “climate deniers” and secretly financed by fossil fuels.

The increase in whale, dolphin, and other cetacean deaths off the East Coast of the United States since 2016 is not due to the construction of large industrial wind turbines, U.S. government officials say. Their scientists have done the research, they say, to prove that whatever is killing the whales is completely unrelated to the wind industry. Not true.

NOAA scientists warned that “oceanographic impacts from installed and operating turbines cannot be mitigated for the 30-year lifespan of the project unless they are decommissioned.”

Under pressure from the White House, the US government has ignored its top scientist and pushed forward to industrialize the oceans and risk the extinction of the North Atlantic Right Whale.

Wind energy companies and their foundations have donated nearly $4.7 million to at least three dozen major environmental organizations. Save the Right Whales has made public a report and a database documenting the conflicts of interest they discovered.

— The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a granting organization, took up to $1 million from wind energy companies Avangrid and Shell, and then distributed it to other environmental groups. In August 2020, the National Audubon Society received a $200,000 grant from the New England Forest and Rivers Fund.

— The same year, the Nature Conservancy received a $165,218 grant from the New England Forest and Rivers Fund. The Nature Conservancy has supported offshore wind since at least 2021.

— NJ Audubon has partnered with wind farm developer Atlantic Shores, a joint venture between Shell Oil and EDF Renewables. Ocean Wind, another wind energy developer, has sponsored NJ Audubon’s World Series of Birding event multiple times. The wind industry has also made hefty donations to scientific organizations:

— Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute received a donation of $500,000 from Ørsted in or after 2018. Woods Hole has endorsed offshore wind since at least 2019.

— The New England Aquarium received a donation pledge of $250,000 in 2018 from Bay State Wind. In 2019, Vineyard Wind donated an undisclosed amount to the Aquarium. Similarly, in 2020 offshore wind developer Equinor, was cited as a donor in the Aquarium’s annual report.  The Aquarium has supported offshore wind since at least 2021.

— In October 2020, Mystic Aquarium featured an exhibit promoting offshore wind. In June 2021, Ørsted and Revolution Wind donated $1,250,000 to Mystic Aquarium to create new pro-offshore wind exhibits, but also to research the effects of offshore wind turbines on marine mammals and sea turtles.

The very pro-offshore wind NJ Spotlight News gets funding from Orsted, a Danish multinational corp. Orsted is a big player in developing offshore wind in New Jersey and further along the coast. This is how Big Wind works. All money comes with strings.

There appear to be at least two distinct mechanisms by which wind industry activities are killing whales. The first is through boat traffic in areas where that hasn’t historically been traffic. And the second is through high-decibel sonar mapping that can disorient whales, separate mothers from their calves, and send them into harm’s way, either into boat traffic or poorer feeding grounds.

Right whales communicate with underwater sound. One typical right whale vocalization used to communicate with other right whales is the “up call”. It is a short “whoop” sound that rises from about 50 Hz to 440 Hz and lasts about 2 seconds. Up calls are often described as “contact” calls since they appear to function as signals that bring whales together.

A new documentary, “Thrown To The Wind,” by Director and Producer Jonah Markowitz, proves that the US government officials have been lying. The film documents the loud, high-decibel sonar emitted by wind industry vessels when measured with state-of-the-art hydrophones. And it shows that the wind industry’s increased boat traffic is correlated directly with specific whale deaths.

The wind projects are still going forward despite urgent warnings from leading conservation groups and a top scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). But “Thrown To The Wind” exposes the reality that the U.S. government agencies, and the scientists who work for them, either haven’t done the basic mapping and acoustic research to back up their claims, have done the research badly, or found what the filmmakers found, and are covering it up.

The commitment by Markowitz to investigative documentary filmmaking led him to go out on the ocean with Rand to measure the sound of industrial wind activity. It was on that trip that Rand and his team discovered high-decibel sound emissions that appear to violate NOAA’s protective standards for marine life. When combined with the work of Linowes and Turner, correlating whale deaths with wind industry vessel traffic, Rand’s acoustic research should have far-reaching implications, including halting all industrial wind activity along the East Coast.

Again, we wonder if we can trust NOAA and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the two government agencies that have betrayed the public’s trust, repeatedly, for years, in service to powerful industrial interests. Because politics has corrupted the normal scientific and regulatory process for protecting the North Atlantic Right Whales, elected officials at the federal and state level need to conduct an investigation, issue subpoenas, and hold public hearings.

Wind energy seems to be leaving a lot of dead wildlife behind it, and nobody who advocates for renewables wants to acknowledge it. These financial conflicts of interest just make the whole thing that much more disgusting.