The United States Anti-Renewables Movement, Explained

them over a decade ago. But there are some new groups too, and they're deploying some new tactics, especially around conservation and the idea that wind turbines are bad for birds and whales. There's no science backing up these claims, but that hasn't stopped them from taking hold. Still, it's a tricky situation. We're not just talking about fossil fuel backed resistance. Here, the groups opposing these projects are not

just AstroTurf groups. Some of them are real grassroots groups comprised of citizens who are genuinely concerned about, for example, the fate of the endangered right whale and how offshore wind farms might impact it. Many of those groups are being co opted and weaponized though, by organizations that have spent the past twenty years working to block climate policy.

And then the whole issue is complicated even further by the fact that some of the companies building these wind farms either are today or used to be, fossil fuel companies. It's complicated, which is why a report out of Brown University late last year mapping the groups that are active on the east coast of the US was especially helpful. That report is called Against the Wind, and it digs into the people and organizations who are actively fighting wind energy.

It looks at how they connect to each other, who's funding what, and which talking points seem to be spreading. To unpack it all, I've got Isaac Slevin, the lead author on the report, with me today. I'm Mimi Westerbilt, and this is drilled after the break a deep dive on the Fight over Wind. Stay with us.

landfills and oceans every single year. Ninety one percent of single use plastic does not get recycled, including the stuff we put in our recycling bins. Sometimes it's hard to avoid single use plastic, but earth Breeze makes it really easy to rid your laundry room of this stuff and there's no sacrifice involved. My clothes or clean. They smell great and I feel like I did something good just by doing my laundry. Eco sheets are also dermatologists tested.

They're hypoallergenic, they're free of bleach and dyes and parabins, and they even have a fragrance free option. I love them. They make doing laundry just slightly easier too, which is always a plus. Right now, my listeners can receive forty percent off earth Breeze just by going to earthbreeze dot

com slash drilled. That's e A R T H B R e e ze earthbreeze dot com slash drilled to cut out single use plastic in your laundry room and claim forty percent off your subscription earthbreeze dot com slash drilled.

or climate denial disinformation tactics being employed. These are self proclaimed conservationists who are fighting against offshore wind because they say that it endangers bird populations and especially that offshore wind endangers the right whale which is this rare species of whale. Scientific literature says that it does not endanger the right whale. And so when we started on this project, we wanted to know where all of this is coming from.

How are these disparate local anti offshore wind groups developing such sophisticated political attacks pushing out so much rhetoric and information at a time. This projects started looking at specifically one group in Little Compton, Rhode Island, called Green Oceans. It was a rhetorical analysis of their information and misinformation about everything from right whales to the fishing industry, to the reliability of the turbines to impacts on national defense.

And what we found when we were analyzing these rhetorical tactics was that they were shared across the movement, and not just shared by other anti offshore wind groups in Massachusetts and New Jersey, but also shared by climate denial groups like the Heartland Institute, like the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow or Sea fact and that was pretty interesting

and pretty peculiar. So as an aside to that project, I began looking at different connections between these grassroots groups and those national think tanks, and of course the fossil fuel companies and the fossil fuel interests that fund those think tanks, And what we ended up with was an expansive web of anti offshore wind groups on the ground, working with backing from climate denial and right wing think tanks, many of which were bankrolled by classic fossil fuel industry

donors like the Charles Koch Foundation, like the State Policy Network, like the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers Association. So we didn't know what we were going to find. We were just looking into where all this opposition came from, and what we found was a reasonably well organized and extraordinarily well connected group of people in think tanks opposing offshore wind.

Here's a clip from a little boat ride famed whale conservationist Mark Morano took with an anti wind group in Rhode Island just to give you a little taste.

about everything else relating to education. For example, a lot of these state policy network groups have been active in the critical race theory panic recently and working against trans rights and trans healthcare. And in Delaware, the season Rodney Institute has become particularly interested in blocking offshore wind and

our research found that they're extraordinarily well connected there. So the Sesar Rodney Institute and one of their directors of policy, a man named David Stevenson, created an astro turf of fake grassroots appearing anti offshore wind group called Save our Beach Views, and this group blasted out tens of thousands of mailers containing misinformation about a proposed local offshore wind

project and raised a substantial amount of money off of it. Now, the Seesar Rodney Institute has graduated a bit from Save our Beach Views and put that group in a coalition with itself and four other state policy Network affiliates in for other states, as well as four other anti offshore

wind groups across the East Coast. So this is a Rodney Institute has emerged as a major player in this movement, and you'll see David Stevenson pop up in congressional hearings talking about offshore wind and fundraisers for some of these local anti offshore wind groups. The Texas Public Policy Foundation is a climate villain in all regards. Way beyond the context of offshore wind, they have been working to advance, particularly natural gas nationwide. This is particularly odd considering how

reliant Texas is comparatively on wind power. But still, the Texas Public Policy Foundation is heavily opportunistic and jumps at every chance it can get to disparage renewable energy of

all kinds. A great example was during the freeze in Texas a couple of years ago, when they ran with the false narrative that wind power was collapsing and causing unreliability in the grid and causing people to freeze, when in fact it was due to natural gas and the fossil fuel industry not being able to cope with the low temperatures. And so the Texas Public Policy Foundation found a way to oppose an offshore wind project called fine Ear to Wind by funding a lawsuit to attack it.

But the Texas Public Policy Foundation didn't sue themselves. They sued on behalf of six plaintiffs, all of which are

fishing industry groups on the East Coast. All six of these groups are also members of the Responsible Offshore Development Association or RODA, which does a lot of research and coalition building in opposition to offshore wind So from thousands of miles away, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, also a State Policy Network affiliate, has found itself embedded, I should say, has embedded itself in this fight that frankly only concerns it because of its ties to the fossil fuel industry.

Policy Network affiliates in their states is really substantial. There's this phenomenal Jane Mayer article from I believe twenty thirteen about how the State Policy Network works, like ikea straight from the mouth of the State Policy Network CEO or president at the time, who's still the State Policy Networks CEO or president, that SPN works to equip all of these local think tanks with the information and the strategies that they need to fight prescribes battles in their state legislatures,

and TPPF and CRI are both doing that in their respective states. So it's always going to look a little bit different whether you're talking about direct lobbying of legislators or filing lawsuits or setting up AstroTurf groups. That's where the IKEA assemblages look a little bit different from state to state, but it's all coming from the same catalog.

And I think that remembering that is incredibly important when you're looking at how this seemingly disparate network of offshore wind opponents, but also disparate network of public education opponents, of public healthcare opponents actually share a lot of tactics and share a lot of strategies because it's no accident that they are coming from the same playbook sponsored by the State Policy Network.

of offshore wind for some reason or another. Some of them have like their own, you know, legitimate to them at least reasons for not wanting these projects, but then they get sort of like co opted into this whole effort. And I'd love to have you talk about that, because it's complicated, and that complexity gets flattened out when we talk about.

pristine views in Nantucket. She's appeared at events hosted by Green Oceans, which is the offshore wind group anti offshore wind group. In Little Compton, Rhode Island. She was wearing a whale costume at a public hearing that Green Oceans disrupted, and Green Oceans also has used a lot of that

same rhetoric in terms of legitimate claims. It's important to remember, I think it's important to remember first that there are valid reasons to be worried about industrialization of natural resources, of these massive imported steel turbines popping up in protected waters or waters that are essential to certain endangered species. The conservationists have gotten really good at blocking projects in general, fossil fuel projects on those grounds, and I think you

see an extension of that here. I don't believe that people like Mary Chalk are lying about their love for whales or lying about their love for environmental conservation, and you can see that firsthand in a lot of their Facebook groups. There's a ton of information and misinformation that's communicated through antiofshow in Facebook groups, and it's sometimes dozens of articles and photos every single day of whales that

have washed up on coastlines across New England. So I think that's the more legitimate side of at least legitimate worry. It's always important to note here that there actually isn't a connection, has proven scientific connection between offshore wind construction and environmental conservation. That is something that I think is important to note because this isn't an AstroTurf movement, This isn't people like Mary Chalk haven't been placed by the

fossil fuel industry to stir up something big. Another aspect that I think is important is property values. A lot of the people in Green Ocean's leadership have extremely expensive ocean front properties and would be seeing the turbines often dozens of miles out. If you look at the renderings in a recent lawsuit from the Newport Preservation Society about offshore wind, you can see actually how stunningly far out they would be and how they'd be really difficult to see.

So even though that doesn't translate, it translates pretty rarely into rhetoric about actual property values. I think that's where a lot of that legitimate concern comes from, of like, hey, hired to the coasts, or I wanted to live in a space and see certain things that are important to me spiritually, important to me culturally, and massive offshore wind turbines are not those. And yeah, so that's that for I can talk about the fishing industry if you want to.

I think they're super interesting in all of this.

those about whales. It's still a really weird alliance because, according to Noah, fishing gear entanglement has caused sixty five percent of documented right whale deaths, injuries, and morbidity since twenty seventeen. In other words, the biggest enemy to those who proclaim to love right whales is the fishing industry, who they've struck an alliance with and opposition to offshore wind. But there are legitimate reasons for fishing communities to be concerned.

I mean, there's a first strictly financial reason of needing a livelihood and relying on fisheries and relying on fishing grounds to produce certain kinds of fish at certain times of year, and also the cultural aspect of things. I mean, some of these fishing communities and fishing leaders are third

fourth generation, potentially going back even farther. And so the idea of simply switching industries because a Danish energy company wants to put up wind turbines is unfathomable and fundamentally disrespectful. But we've seen some of these grassroots conservation style groups pick up that fishing rhetoric and forge those fishing alliances after making a lot of less maybe politically relevant arguments or certainly true arguments. So the fishing industry has become

a very helpful tool. You could even call them a front for people who want to block offshore wind for other reasons, and that's everyone from those conservationists to the fossil fuel interests. I have no reason to think that the Texas Public Policy Foundation particularly cares about New England fishing communities. But if the fishing communities are going to get up in arms about offshore wind, than the Texas Public Policy Foundation can swoop in and fund a lawsuit about it.

these anti offshore wind advocates feel. That their situation is that the strangest of bedfellows can be made, can come together so that these projects can be shot down, even when it's people who are responsible for hurting and killing whales. Whatever it takes to get these turbines out.

They got up and handed out leaflets at the door to make sure everyone knew the truth about offshore.

My co author in this co wrote that report too, and like, we know that this is the whole issue, that fossil fuel money is everywhere and we need to combat it everywhere, and just saying nah, no you is actually really counterproductive and not about actually creating the systems we need to be sustainable and as an academic institution to spread truth and facilitate free inquiry, but it's just about scoring points. But to go back to your I think this also relates to your earlier point about Steve

molloy and people just wanting to win. They're in their entire There's such a media ecosystem, a standalone media ecosystem around anti offshore wind. They have at least a dozen Facebook groups with thousands of members each where you can just scroll through and read about wales dying, about turbines leaking.

There'll be the occasional win. You know, a lawsuit in France that mandates that turbines have to be taken down to protect whales, or instead giving up on a couple of its projects in New Jersey and so you can celebrate alongside people and I don't know if you need to know what you're celebrating for. Then there's of course Fox News and the Murdoch media empire, and so people like Mike Dean, who appears in our map, go on Fox News and are put on national television talking about

the impacts on Wales. This has also been happening with Sky News in Australia. There's this whole international element with Australia that we haven't even begun to analyze yet, where we're seeing a lot of the same tactics and a lot of the same media GoSystem happen. And once you're in this mindset that you can only trust a small subset of people who are speaking truth to power, it's really hard to get in and wrestle that idea away.

And that's so not unique to Offshore Wind. Combating the right wing media ecosystem is often a very personal issue, and we just read these heartbreaking articles about people's parents and grandparents completely falling victim to it. That's so persuasive because it teaches you that you can't trust anybody else. So even when you have your elected officials, your university scientists, your scholars, your journalists coming out and saying that right whales are going to be okay and that we need

wind turbines for a just transition. They don't seem to trust them, or at the very least they don't seem to find their articles they're persuasive enough to sort of lay down their arms. I don't know. We have this website called like realofshore wind dot com or something that like that that's like looks like kind of wary that. Yeah, it's awesome, Like it's a designed like one of these sort of scammy yes. Yes, yeah, so we're going to see.

But it's like, I feel like the solution, other than you know, winning political battles, you know, in terms of like changing hearts and minds, it might just be the same tactics that we need to bring a lot of our people back.

I can't confirm that there are talking points being passed around, but you can clearly see in for example, the white paper put out by Green Oceans that they are citing Steve Molloy and they are citing sea Fact and so whether or not somebody is hand delivering that misinformation and those polished talking points to them, we're still getting there.

So when our report came out and I saw in the Green Oceans Facebook group something that a comment like, oh looks like we're in this network of fossil fuel industry interests and climate deniers who knew, I was thinking, well, yeah, I mean, I'm sure you don't think of yourself as being in that indus tree, but you are plainly borrowing from their talking points because you find them persuasive and they've made their way to you. So absolutely there's there's

tons of shared rhetoric and shared talking points. It just remains to be seen how explicit this network is, how much people in it know that they're in it.

expenditures renewables. So I think that's the difference, and maybe that's a way to break through the media ecosystem.

but because nobody else is coming to their aid. Megan Lapp, who's big in fishing policy on the East Coast. She's a fisheries liaison for a company called Sea Freeze in Rhode Island, even said this when she was asked about how she feels about the Texas Public Policy Foundation backing her lawsuit, and she said something along the lines of

we need all the help that we can get. So it's not exactly a plea for plead to be gentle, but to get people credit for backing their communities again for a lot of reasons that actually aren't based in science. For you know, there's a lot going on there that isn't particularly savory. But we shouldn't just write this off and treat it like a bunch of misinformed old people with way too much time on their hands. They are responding to prievances that are real and imagined, but ultimately

are powerful motivators for political action. I spend a lot of time in climate activist circles, and I think constantly about how dire climate change is, and how evil the fossil fuel industry is, and about how nobody is going to protect us but us. And I'm seeing a lot of these sentiments shared in this network against offshore wind, and disentangling that is going to be really difficult. Lea.

Stokes put out a phenomenal article this fall about the term energy privilege, which showed how the communities that are blocking offshore wind are disproportionately white and wealthy, and they have energy privilege in that they're perceived harms which are potentially decreased property values, which are polluted quote view sheds, in other words, visibly seeing offshore wind turbines from their homes.

Those harms are such small potatoes, honestly, almost embarrassingly small potatoes compared to the day to day experience of the predominantly black Latine and indigenous communities that foot the bill of the fossil fuel industry, those communities that experience oil refineries that lower life expectancies and give children debilitating asthma that results in extraordinary hospital bills that are given communities

rare cancers through polluted air and water. So it's also important to not lose sight of what we're fighting this for, and there's balance there. We don't want to be sacrificing fishing communities like that's not fair to anybody. And that's what a just transition means. It means protecting and making safe and communities that are going to have to foot the bill of a renewable transition, But it also doesn't mean entirely caving to them so that we preserve a

fundamentally racist and lethal status quo. So that's one thing that you know, when I was wrapping up this project and trying to make sense of this all, and you know, balance certain sympathy that I feel with also an unshakable belief in the power of renewable energy, in the urgency of renewable energy, to remember what's happening, what has to happen, so that these predominantly white and wealthy communities can avoid offshore wind and it's debilitating.

You know, we also see them as enemies of progress sometimes, right, I Mean, And that's not entirely fair either, because we're all looking out for our self interests in different ways, and we just make different decisions to decide what that self interest is right, and steamrolling them is not good

for our democracy or good for our discourse. I mean, a great way to unleash a national or international lion of anti offshore wind opposition would be to call them climate deniers over and over again, or say that they don't have free will, or say that this is all some AstroTurf project of Charles Kochan friends.

having the refinery down the street kind of problem. There's all these really interesting use cases where like, like in Pennsylvania, for example, a bunch of conservative communities ended up coming around to the idea of rice of nature and like embedding that in their town charters because all of a sudden they were like, wait a minute, Like so if my neighbor decides to go for a lease, but I don't and my water gets fouled, like I can't do anything about it, and I don't benefit from the lease.

That's not fair.

There was a special election a couple months ago. There's a good E and E news article about it. But that is not playing well overall. And so it also is going to be interesting to see what happens when they lose. I mean, you know, they can keep suing to death, but are they going to move on? Like is this going to be a new anti wind conspiracy group? Like is this going to be like a sustained movement? Are they going to kind of go home? A lot

of them are really old and retired. Are you familiar with Gordon g He's the president of West Virginia University, the one gutting them right now. Yes, yes, So his ex wife is one of the major players in green oceans in Rhode Island, Constance g She's in our map. And that's kind of, you know, apropos of nothing. But it's like, Okay, people who are substantially wealthy and have been their whole lives, it seems, and are now living in

these beautiful places. What's their real long term political game here?

They have successfully convinced certain municipalities to pass resolutions opposing offshore wind, like Little Compton, Rhode Island, but when it comes to Boham, for example, they're not winning because while agencies like Boham take into account community input, there's a whole host of other factors that the anti offshore wind movement can't address and hasn't been able to address. So

you know, they're not an inconsequential in numbers. I mean you can there are these photos of all these protests with the hold hands along the beaches in New Jersey, and there's not not a lot of them. But I don't think they have their hands and the right levers of power. I mean, they have this one kind of random Congressman Jeff Andrew in New Jersey. They've gotten through a little bit to Jared Golden, who's a Democrat from Maine.

But in terms of actual decision making capability, it's pretty weak. I mean it's pretty weak. So right now, I'm not super worried, but with offshore wind industry on the back foot, and with all of these lawsuits in the works, I wonder if the industry and advocates will get beaten down. I just don't entirely see that happening.