Just hours after his inauguration on Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order halting new federal leases for offshore wind projects. He cited, as one reason, the impact offshore wind may have on marine life. “If you’re into whales,” Trump said, “you don’t want windmills.”
Whale experts say the facts show otherwise. Here’s what you need to know:
Trump has repeatedly said offshore wind is making whales “crazy” and “batty.” What do scientists have to say about that?
It’s not entirely clear what Trump is referring to with those terms, but most experts say they believe his concerns have to do with noise. To build a wind farm, noise is unavoidable. The offshore wind industry primarily generates underwater noise through High Resolution Geophysical (HRG) surveys prior to construction, to better understand the seafloor, and later, through pile driving to install turbine foundations.
Years of research show that loud underwater noises can disrupt a whale’s ability to navigate the ocean, find prey, avoid predators, and communicate with one another. In more extreme scenarios — and when at close range — loud noises can damage whales’ hearing.
But that’s not what’s happening here. In fact, a lot is known about how whales respond to HRG surveys and pile driving:
- According to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, there’s no evidence that HRG surveys have previously — or will in the future — injure or kill marine mammals or sea turtles. HRG survey sounds only affect small areas, and they often emit very high frequency sounds. “The so-called HRG surveys … most of them are well outside the hearing range of any marine mammal, let alone the large whales,” said Doug Nowacek, who studies the link between acoustic and motor behavior in marine mammals at Duke University. He also leads the WOW (Wildlife and Offshore Wind) Project.
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Pile driving, meanwhile, does produce significant underwater noise. But offshore wind developers are required to use noise minimization and mitigation techniques. For example, they must only conduct pile driving in seasons where whales have migrated into different waters; they have to hire protected species observers and use infrared cameras (plus acoustic monitoring when possible) to make sure whales haven’t wandered into the area; and several developers have used bubble curtains, which rely on perforated hoses that produce bubbles around a construction site, reducing noise.
Meanwhile, seismic airgun arrays, which are not used in renewable energy development but by the oil and gas industry, emit high levels of noise pollution. “We have several examples from around the world of animals changing behavior significantly in the presence of seismic air guns,” Nowacek said. “They’re much louder than the sources used in wind energy areas — much, much louder.”
“Offshore wind construction only started in the last couple of years. What happened before that? We still had dead right whales on the beach. So we can imagine a world in which offshore wind construction is halted and we will still have dead animals. Only, in addition to that, we will be worsening the climate crisis. We will not be replacing fossil fuel energy production with clean energy production.”
Pile driving itself hasn’t been shown to produce lasting consequences. Nowacek tagged several fin whales during pile driving near South Fork Wind, New York’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm. “We saw no dramatic responses,” he said. “A couple of the tagged whales did move south a few miles. But let’s keep in mind, these are highly migratory, highly mobile species.”
Nowacek added that his team is still tagging whales before, during, and after pile driving at other offshore wind farms — using high-resolution, short-term tags attached with suction cups, and also satellite transmitting tags, implanted into the skin and blubber of the animals — to collect more data. So far they haven’t found any significant, or even subtle, impacts of pile driving on fin whales’ behavior.
Researchers in Europe have also explored what happens after marine mammals move away from loud sounds, Nowacek said.
“Harbor porpoises are way more sensitive to this kind of stuff than most other whales and dolphins. Porpoises don’t like it when there’s pile driving, and they bugger off,” he said. “But within a couple of months, they’re basically repopulated at the same density in that area. So the short term part of construction is not necessarily what we want to do, but at the same time, it’s short.”
After construction, couldn’t offshore wind farms still produce noise that harms whales?
Once construction is finished and the wind farms are operating, experts believe the sound risks to whales are much reduced. (They are still keeping an eye on other potential impacts to whales, including entanglements in abandoned gear, collisions with offshore-wind affiliated boats, and changes to the hydrology near turbines.)
Bioacoustics experts from the University of Rhode Island found that the level of sound produced by the Block Island Wind Farm turbines is so low that just 50 meters away it can’t be detected above background noise unless there’s no wind blowing and no boat passing in the vicinity.
That’s why, given all of the evidence, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says: “There are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities.” Meanwhile, many other industries like shipping, the military, bridge and pier construction, and oil and gas extraction routinely create a noisy environment for whales.
“[Critically endangered] right whales and other whales are exposed to a lot of noise in the ocean, all the time,” said Mark Baumgartner, a marine ecologist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He researches best practices for offshore wind construction and operation as it relates to mitigating noise and collision risks for whales.
Eve Zuckoff
But why are so many whales washing up dead?
This winter in particular, there was an unusually high number of dead whales found around Cape Cod in a very short period of time — and it’s not yet entirely clear why.
“What we do know is that coastal marine mammal dynamics have been very different this year,” Sarah Sharp, a veterinarian for the International Fund for Animal Welfare wrote in an email. “Humpbacks are in [Cape Cod] Bay in higher numbers than normal in the fall/winter (this population is increasing and changing habitat use patterns), [North Atlantic right whales] are showing up early in larger numbers, dolphin species have been near-shore in very large numbers and continue to be.”
“Most of our dead minke whales appear to be dying due to infectious diseases, some humpbacks have shown evidence of blunt trauma, some entanglement, so I think the answer is that there are many different factors at play right now in our near-shore marine ecosystems and it may take a little time to tease it all out,” she wrote. “We have not found any evidence that these deaths are being driven by offshore wind development.”
In the recently published paper, “Evaluating drivers of recent large whale strandings on the East Coast of the United States,” scientists Lesley Thorne and Dave Wiley also found “no evidence that offshore wind development contributed to strandings or mortalities.” Instead, they wrote, entanglements in rope and fishing gear and vessel strikes (that is, collisions with boats) are whales’ primary killers, and climate change has exacerbated the problems.
Warming waters have shifted or decimated food sources like zooplankton and small fish, forcing whales to find new feeding areas and migration routes where there are sometimes no protections like slow boat zones or seasonal management of fisheries. The result for North Atlantic right whales has been devastating; after barely surviving centuries of whaling and then rebounding, the species’ population has fallen to just about 370. They’re now the most endangered whales in the world.These issues have been dogging whales long before December 2016, when Block Island Wind Farm, the first offshore wind farm off the U.S. East Coast, began construction on its first foundations.
“Let’s look back,” Baumgartner said. “Offshore wind construction only started in the last couple of years. What happened before that? We still had dead right whales on the beach. So we can imagine a world in which offshore wind construction is halted and we will still have dead animals. Only, in addition to that, we will be worsening the climate crisis. We will not be replacing fossil fuel energy production with clean energy production.”
Eve Zuckoff
Should we at least slow offshore wind development until more questions about impacts on marine life are answered?
The consensus from whale experts is a fairly unambiguous “no.” Baumgartner and Nowacek agreed that, at this point, the best way to protect whales and other species is to pursue offshore wind development while collecting as much data as possible, as quickly as possible. That’s true for studying impacts on a range of species, including birds. More specifically, Baumgartner said, he hopes regulators and scientists will continue working together to adjust best practices for marine life as each offshore wind farm is erected. That will allow him and others time to address research gaps.
If we wait any longer, Nowacek said, the risks posed by climate change will only grow. “The push of rapid changes from climate change are way more threatening to these animals than a little bit of pile driving, and, you know, a couple extra vessels,” he said.
So why have myths about offshore wind and whales taken such deep root across coastal communities, government, and beyond?
This is a complicated question that taps into the psychology of humans, and the complexity of mis- and disinformation campaigns.
In recent years, grassroots organizations that oppose offshore wind have popped up across Massachusetts, Delaware, New Jersey, and elsewhere, citing concerns about whales. Since then, reporters and researchers have explored links between the groups and fossil-fuel interests.
In December, 2023, researchers from Brown University released a paper that linked 18 of these groups — through funding, membership, legal representation, and more — to think tanks and conservative donors who are known to block climate policy in support of fossil-fuel interests.
“We found some evidence of a planning memo from 2012 that really laid out the game plan that they would use local groups that appear entirely local, but are being fed information from a centralized set of think tanks,” said Dr. Timmons Roberts, who led the report and studies disinformation around climate change at Brown University.
The false information often spread by these groups has been challenging for scientists to easily refute, but not because it’s true, Baumgartner said.
Eve Zuckoff
“If someone said peanut butter caused cancer, you would say, ‘Well, there is no evidence of that,’ and they would say, ‘Okay, well, peanut butter makes people smoke, and it’s the smoking that causes cancer.’ And then you’re faced with having to disprove that people eating peanut butter makes them more likely to smoke,” Baumgartner said. “Same thing with ‘pile driving makes the whales batty.’ There is no direct evidence of that, so then the argument becomes that pile driving makes whales more susceptible to ship strikes and fishing gear entanglements. … Disproving this is nearly impossible, but that doesn’t make it a plausible hypothesis any more than peanut butter causes cancer.”
Ultimately, Baumgartner and Nowacek concluded, well-meaning concern about whales and offshore wind is understandable. But vessel strikes, entanglements and climate change should be the main focus. If they aren’t, whales will continue to die.
This post was originally published on here
