As whales wash up on shore, activists call out offshore wind industry. Experts are unconvinced.

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Shelia Dean has seen the whale carcasses up close. The director of New Jersey’s Marine Mammal Stranding Center, she has been to every necropsy conducted by the organization since she took over the role from her husband last December.

At around the same time, a stretch of three months saw nearly two dozen whales stranded along the East Coast, including many near New Jersey and New York, raising concerns over what was triggering the seemingly-unusual spate of deaths.

Many had the tell-tale remnants of ship strikes — impact marks or bleeding blubber under the skin that occurs only if the whale is alive when it is hit. Others, she said, were so badly decomposed, making it impossible for scientists to discern the cause of the fatalities.

Those unknowns are being seized by activists aiming to sow speculation about the burgeoning offshore wind industry, which they claim is directly creating hazardous conditions for whales through the use of sonar surveys designed to map the ocean floor for future turbines. Those underwater sounds, they claim, are disorienting whales and causing them to wash ashore on beaches.

No evidence, however, has emerged to support that assertion.

“Everybody right away jumped on the whales being their poster child for anti-wind without any scientific basis on it,” Dean told the Advance/SILive.com during a phone interview. “It’s all about people being angry about wind. I get it... but for people to use those whales in that way, it kind of upsets me.”

FUELING CULTURE WAR

The claims have fueled a culture war amplified by conservative commentary, with prominent personalities like Tucker Carlson hosting segments like the one titled, “The Biden Whale Extinction.” Some environmental groups have even become wrapped up in the fervor, attempting to halt the offshore wind transition, the Guardian reported.

An investigation by Politico’s E&E News found some in the anti-wind push are getting financial support from national far-right and libertarian groups, some of which have notorious histories of spreading lies about climate change and minimizing the risks posed by offshore oil drilling to marine life.

The concerted effort to stymie a transition to alternative energy is not a new playbook, experts say.

Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University who has tracked the influence of a powerful network dedicated to undermining climate action, said organizations directly born out of the fossil fuel industry, along with those holding water for it, have utilized strategies to create doubt in the energy transition for years.

Like most effective disinformation, those strategies involve taking a kernel of truth, oversimplifying that information and surrounding it with fabricated points centered on gaining public attention, said Oreskes, who authored “Merchants of Doubt,” a book focused on a loose-knit group of scientists who misled the public and denied scientific consensus in a range of critical issues.

Offshore wind appears to have become a new target, she said, scattering seeds of faux-concern at a pivotal juncture in the industry.

“The problem here is that these people are presenting it as if they have a scientific argument, which they do not,” Oreskes said. “And it’s particularly egregious in this case because we have years of whale conservation in this country.”

Federal officials have said climate change is a key factor for the increase in whale deaths, since food for the massive mammals is moving closer to shore and placing the whales in danger of being struck by commercial traffic, which has increased dramatically in recent years.

Between Jan. 1 and Sept. 14 this year, there have been 63 large whale strandings along the United States East Coast, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). 

Preliminary necropsy findings from 22 of those instances have revealed blunt-force trauma or vessel strikes are either suspected or probable in 15 cases, federal officials said.

UNDERSTATING IMPACT?

Lisa Linowes, the co-founder of the Save Right Whales Coalition (SRWC), claims federal authorities are deliberately — or unwittingly — understating the impact sonar activities are having on whales, which she said could directly be tied to the recent stretch of deaths, despite a lack of evidence proving that sentiment.

In a letter sent to NOAA, Save Right Whales said it conducted an independent investigation using an acoustician to monitor in-progress sonar activity and discovered sound readings at higher levels than guidance published by the agency’s National Marine Fisheries Service.

NOAA does not have hardened rules on decibel levels for working around marine life. Instead, their guidance is issued on a project-by-project basis. Offshore wind operators are required to request incidental harassment authorizations to allow for “Level B harassment,” which NOAA considers as levels of sound that could disturb, but not injure or kill, a marine mammal.

“These predictive thresholds, which are available online, are not regulatory requirements but provide important insight into the regulatory process as developers propose and NOAA Fisheries considers approving specific measures to ensure that the project has no more than a negligible impact on marine mammal population,” said Katie Wagner, an NOAA spokeswoman.

That guidance, while not binding, “is essential,” Linowes said. “We believe, at this point, the whales are being exposed to noise levels that are quite significant.”

Wagner said NOAA would respond to the letter through appropriate channels but noted the data referenced by SRWC “have not been shared with NOAA nor has information been shared regarding how the data were collected and analyzed.”

Save Right Whales has previously called for a moratorium on existing projects, echoing sentiments expressed by Republican lawmakers, which would effectively stall a series of multi-billion dollar projects expected to help the United States rapidly tie in offshore wind to its grid in the coming years and wean off the use of fossil fuels contributing to the planet’s insidious warming.

When asked about the broader implications of that proposed delay, Linowes, who has served as a senior research fellow of the conservative think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation, which is reportedly backed by oil and gas companies, said Save Right Whales is “not really engaging on that.”

“The question of energy policy in this country is a big question,” she said.

Asked about her former title, Linowes said mentioning the link is an easy target for advocates of offshore wind, before claiming she has never taken money from the fossil fuel industry and has no allegiance to it.
Scientists overwhelmingly agree alternative energy sources like offshore wind will be needed to limit the worst impacts of human-induced climate change. The debate is not isolated to Save Right Whales; other groups have levied similar concerns, though experts widely disagree with the methodology of the arguments and have offered fervent pushback to the claims.

‘IT’S CONTEXT DRIVEN’

Dr. Christopher Clark, a former research professor at the Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at Cornell University and chief marine mammal scientist for the U. S. Navy studying the impact of sonar in the 1990s and 2000s, said many protests to offshore wind sonar techniques are often not based in scientific understanding and disregard a range of other impacts threatening whales.

Observations have found that while whales are aware of some sonar activity, they have not been detrimentally affected by the underwater sound, said Clark, who was contracted by Vineyard Wind to advise the company on its work based on the best available scientific evidence and his decades of work within the field.

“We now know that it’s context driven,” said Clark, describing how people can tolerate loud restaurants but may have different experiences with sound while walking on a hike or trying to find their way home. 

“What you learn from that is, not surprisingly, that animals — whether it’s a fish, a dragonfly or a humpback whale — have evolved very sophisticated mechanisms for perceiving their environment,” Clark said. “Because those that didn’t aren’t around.”

Rather than being solely concerned about the specific sonar activities, which he said simply are not strong enough to cause a whale to be put in danger, the ocean should be looked at as an entire ecosystem — with noise from sources like commercial shipping as elsewhere being considered in a holistic way. Not considering those impacts will cause advocates to “miss the real reality.”

Clark said companies and advocates should “remain vigilant and be concerned about things that you do in the ocean that might actually be detrimental to ocean life and whales,” but added what’s being claimed by groups opposing offshore wind is “nonsense.”

Far more dangerous to whales are the dangers posed by climate change, he said. The ocean is undergoing a dramatic transformation that underscores the impressive need to shift away from the use of fossil fuels. Meanwhile, onerous restrictions posed to the offshore wind industry, according to Clark, are making it difficult for projects to progress at the pace needed to avoid the worst impacts of warming.

“When you are putting three visual observers on a boat to see if there’s anything that could possibly be associated with turtles or whales — and they’re looking for sargassum weed — you’re going, ‘you’re going to chance the course of this boat’s activity of bringing people out to install this turbine based on seeing sargassum weed?’” Clark quipped, referencing a source of food for whales.

Given the current understanding of sonar from offshore wind surveys not posing a significant threat to whales, he believes slowing down the pace of offshore wind could have wider implications to all marine life.

“We either move as rapidly and efficiently and responsibly as we can toward harvesting renewable energy, or we don’t,” Clark said. “And if we don’t, we’re just going over the edge of Niagara Falls.”

Ørsted, one of the companies aiming to create wind farms off the East Coast, said none of its contracted vessels have experienced whale strikes during its U.S.-based offshore wind survey or construction activities, according to spokeswoman Meaghan Wims.

Additionally, mitigation measures that include strict vessel speeds, lookout vessels, mandatory observers and noise-reduction technologies like bubble curtains — a noise insulation measure — and a ban on driving wind turbine foundations during the spawning of Atlantic Cod are some of the protective steps being taken to minimize impact to wildlife, Wims said.

“The offshore wind industry is subject to the most stringent level of protections for marine mammals and protected species,” Wims said. “Every aspect of our surveys, construction, and operations are reviewed by multiple agencies and subject to protective conditions, including vessel speeds, time of year restrictions for construction activities, and dedicated observers.”

N.Y. PROJECTS

New York’s next major offshore wind projects were delayed earlier this summer after the state’s Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) said it would allow developers to change their bids — but only if it’s cheaper than their initial proposal.

Awards were expected to be released in the spring but were pushed back after new tax credit eligibility guidance was issued by the Internal Revenue Service in light of President Joseph Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

While the state is calling for cheaper options, the rising costs of building offshore wind farms has caused developers to back out of plans elsewhere in the U.S., reports said. In New York, the developers of all four offshore wind projects contracted by NYSERDA filed petitions in June with the Public Service Commission for additional funding, threatening the viability of the efforts, Politico reported.