Lines of tea lights formed the large, softly flickering outline of a whale’s tail in the sand along the Jersey Shore this past October—another installment in months of protests against planned offshore wind projects in communities along the U.S. East Coast that have rallied around the slogan “Wind Kills Whales.”
This claim has been used as a talking point against wind energy by former president Donald Trump, local Republican politicians, nonprofit groups with links to the fossil-fuel industry and more than 50 Fox News segments in 2023. All have connected offshore wind development with horrific images of dead whales washing up and decaying on beaches. At a recent New Jersey campaign rally, Trump vowed to scrap the country’s offshore wind projects on the first day of a new term if he is elected again in November, declaring that “they kill the whales.”
But the current scientific consensus doesn’t back up those assertions—at all. There are “no links whatsoever between the offshore wind development activity and especially the humpback whale mortalities. None. Zero,” says Duke University marine scientist Douglas Nowacek.
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The protests and spurious criticisms come at a crucial—and financially precarious—time for the nascent offshore wind industry. Some 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy (enough to power 10 million homes and offset the annual emissions of around 18.5 million passenger vehicles) need to be deployed by 2030 to meet the Biden administration’s pledge to make the power sector carbon-pollution-free by 2035. And the warming caused by those emissions does have a demonstrable impact on whales.
That isn’t to say that building huge wind turbines in the ocean doesn’t come without any environmental ramifications. “Even offshore wind proponents such as myself recognize that walking out my front door has an impact, so of course building large-scale machines in the ocean will have an impact,” says Kris Ohleth, executive director of the nonprofit Special Initiative on Offshore Wind. She, Nowacek and other experts say the key task is to understand what the potential harms of turbine surveying and construction actually are and then mitigate them.
So what is killing whales?
Several whale species dwell in and migrate through the North Atlantic, including in waters near the coastal U.S. Though populations of many of these endangered or threatened species have considerably rebounded from the effects of 19th-century whaling, significant threats remain. More than 500 humpback, minke and right whales have been seriously injured, stranded onshore or died prematurely on or near the East Coast since 2017, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Conducting necropsies on beached whales to pin down a cause of death is made difficult by the animals’ layer of blubber and by the fact that organs can literally cook inside a stranded whale. But it is starkly clear that human activity—in the form of ships that hit whales or fishing gear that wraps around them—is often to blame. “For right whales, if you take out neonatal mortality, every documented mortality in the last 25 years of a right whale has been at the hands of some human cause—ship strike or entanglement,” Nowacek says. “Every single one of them.” The New England Aquarium recently reported that a female North Atlantic right whale known by the name Shelagh had become tangled in fishing gear for the fifth known time.
Such findings aren’t surprising, considering the fact that the waters these whales swim through often overlap with major Atlantic Coast shipping routes. Vessels traveling at speeds of more than 10 knots can cause the worst damage, including hemorrhages, torn muscles and broken bones, says Andrew Read, director of the Duke University Marine Lab and a member of the Marine Mammal Commission, which helps federal agencies protect the animals. “Just imagine a human being standing in the street, being hit by a truck,” he says. “It’s pretty massive trauma there.”
Since 2008 NOAA has tried to enforce a 10-knot speed limit for vessels 65 feet or longer, and it is now working to expand this regulation to smaller boats. But 84 percent of vessels traveling through NOAA-designated slowdown regions with vulnerable whale populations still exceeded that limit between 2020 and 2022, according to a report from the conservation nonprofit organization Oceana.
There are "no links whatsoever between the offshore wind development activity and especially the humpback whale mortalities. None. Zero."
Rising ocean temperatures can spur whales to follow prey into new environments, sometimes putting the animals directly into shipping lanes. For example, researchers have noticed that about 40 percent of North Atlantic right whales (which are endangered) are now spending their summers in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, west of Newfoundland—an area with heavy shipping and fishing. This species had rarely been sighted there before. Scientists say the whales were likely trailing tiny crustaceans called copepods, which were seeking cooler waters because climate change has warmed traditional habitats such as the Gulf of Maine and the Bay of Fundy, between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
Can offshore wind development still harm whales?
There is a broad consensus among scientists and federal agencies that although offshore wind facilities are not responsible for the recent whale mortality spike, further development could still pose a risk to marine life in general—and both East and West Coast projects are planned in some areas that are whale habitats. The biggest of these risks is vessel strikes because construction requires more boats in the ocean.
In order to mitigate these risks, South Fork Wind, an offshore wind project developed by energy companies Ørsted and Eversource, agreed in 2022 to apply NOAA’s 10-knot rule to almost all project-related vessels, regardless of size. The project was completed a few months ago, resulting in the country’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm. And California (along the eastern Pacific gray whale population’s migration route) is requiring any vessel conducting offshore wind survey and transit activities to adhere to the limit.
Federal law requires turbine developers to bring along trained third-party wildlife spotters called Protected Species Observers while approaching areas known for possessing marine animals. When visibility is low, PSOs use infrared cameras to detect marine mammals and instruct vessel captains to slow down or stop if needed.
Energy companies are also examining how to reduce the sounds of surveying and building, which can cause whales to avoid an area (though so far there is no evidence that such sounds physically hurt the whales, Nowacek says). The noisiest pieces of equipment used are called “sparkers” and “boomers,” units that are towed by a vessel just beneath the water’s surface to scan the seabed for turbine sites. Sparkers release an electrical discharge and boomers create an acoustic pulse in the water; both produce sounds within whales’ hearing range.
But for comparison, those acoustic sources are about 1,000 times quieter than the seismic arrays used by the petroleum sector, Nowacek says. “Seismic surveys for oil and gas are the loudest sound that humans put into the water regularly,” he adds. Sound pulses from these arrays need to be loud so they can travel hundreds of kilometers downward, deep enough under the seabed to locate oil and gas deposits, versus just the top 50 to 100 meters needed for offshore wind surveys. But “even for those oil and gas industry arrays, there’s no direct documentation of an animal dying at the hands of one,” Nowacek says.
After surveying, developers start piledriving or hammering turbine foundations into the seabed—another process that can cause acoustic disruptions. Equinor, an energy company that holds leases for major projects in New York State and California, described a series of precautions it takes to address that problem: it won’t piledrive in the Atlantic, for example, between January and April, when there is the largest concentration of right whales in the area, says Jennifer Dupont, head of technical environmental affairs at Equinor. The company also has “shutdown zones,” areas in which construction is halted if a PSO notices a whale entering the area. And engineers sometimes use bubble curtains (bubbles released by perforated air hoses that are laid on the foundation in concentric rings) to absorb construction noises.
Nowacek and Read both agree such measures are sufficient. "All those mitigation methods are proven and will work," Read says. Nowacek says that PSOs, shutdown zones, bubble curtains, speed limits, and more will virtually always work to prevent mortality and serious injury in whales.
As plans for offshore wind installations have taken shape, a number of local nonprofit organizations have popped up along the Atlantic Coast to help organize protests and launch legal challenges against specific wind projects on the basis of their purported threat to whales. Some of these lawsuits have already been shot down by the courts. Researchers with the Brown University Climate and Development Lab have combed through tax records and linked many of the involved groups to politically conservative donors such as the Charles Koch Foundation and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers trade association, both of which have opposed renewable energy efforts.
Politicians have also used the specter of whale deaths to oppose offshore wind energy projects in their district. The Republican State Leadership Committee ran a five-figure ad in New Jersey last summer pegged to the issue: “Hunted to near extinction, they rebounded against all the odds. A new peril lurks beneath the waves: offshore wind.... Save the whales. Dump New Jersey Democrats.”
American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, the Republican State Leadership Committee and the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Scientific American. When asked about the network’s coverage for this article, a Fox News spokesperson pointed to examples of Fox News anchors stating that there is no link between offshore wind development and whale mortalities. And a spokesperson for the Charles Koch Foundation told Scientific American, “Our work is too often misrepresented. The grants mentioned in this study were used by organizations for criminal justice reform, child welfare, health care, education, and poverty alleviation. To assert otherwise is unequivocally false.”
Misinformation around this issue perplexes and dismays many whale researchers and conservationists (despite the attention the publicity might bring to a species’ plight) because there are simply no data to back it up. “It’s interesting from my perspective—somebody who’s worked my whole career on whales—to see whales get so much attention in such an odd manner,” Read says. “I like the fact that whales are getting attention, that people are thinking about them and their conservation. I don’t like the fact that people are being told things that are not true.”