Bill Thompson’s fight against offshore wind farms was once limited to the small US state of Rhode Island where he lives. Today he is part of a global movement.
In April, Thompson, who is director of the activist group Green Oceans, received an email from an anti-offshore wind group more than 10,000 miles (16,000 km) away called Responsible Future (Illawarra Chapter). They were seeking advice on how to fight projects off Australia’s southeast coast. In August, he received another request, this time from the French group PIEBIEM, which is fighting projects in Brittany.
“It’s always nice to know that other people think the same way as you,” he told Reuters.
These groups are among a dozen or more local activist organizations in the United States, Europe and Australia that told Reuters they have begun sharing tactics, arguments and other resources in their collective fight against offshore wind – a development they hope will transform what was once a disorganized collection of local activists into an increasingly sophisticated global network.
Several groups opposed to offshore wind farms say governments and wind turbine developers such as Orsted, Avangrid and Shell downplay the environmental damage caused by the projects while touting the renewable energy source as a solution to climate change.
In most cases, the groups are seeking advice from offshore wind opponents on the U.S. East Coast, citing their years of success in slowing or curtailing large-scale projects, eroding public support for the technology and winning over conservative politicians like former President Donald Trump, whose administration supported offshore wind but now vehemently opposes it as a Republican presidential candidate.
Offshore wind power is a burgeoning industry in the U.S. and a key pillar of President Joe Biden’s plan to combat climate change. But plans to install turbines along the entire U.S. coast have been challenged by rising costs and supply chain issues, and have drawn multiple lawsuits over concerns about the industry’s impact on tourism, property values, fisheries and marine habitats.
Reuters reports how the groups’ global collaboration poses a new challenge for the industry, allowing new opposition groups to quickly capitalize on years of work by others. In many cases, it also helps spread viral, politically influential but sometimes false arguments, such as that turbines kill endangered whales and do nothing to slow global warming.
“It’s a huge problem and I don’t think the industry has understood A) what’s happening and B) what to do about it,” said Ben Backwell, CEO of the Global Wind Energy Council, a Lisbon-based trade group.
Opposition groups say they are only at the beginning.
“We would like to go further, for example with joint statements and better media coverage to alert public opinion,” said Eric Sartori, secretary of PIEBIEM, which stands for Preserving the Environmental Identity of Southern Brittany and the Islands against Offshore Wind in French.
A group from the US West Coast told Reuters this month it will form a national anti-offshore wind organisation. Other groups, including Responsible Future (Illawarra Chapter), said they had discussed forming a global coalition, particularly as the rest of the world strives to catch up with China, Britain and Germany, the top producers of offshore wind energy.
ONLINE BEBRÜTET
PIEBIEM’s Sartori said he contacted Green Oceans and another group in Nantucket after seeing images on social media platform X of broken wind turbine blades washing ashore in Massachusetts this summer.
Sartori said Green Oceans’ Thompson helped him by, among other things, providing him with a quote from a U.S. government agency saying offshore wind has no climate benefit.
That quote – “offshore wind projects are expected to have no collective impact on global warming” – now appears on PIEBIEM’s website alongside photos of fiberglass shards littering the Nantucket shoreline.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management told Reuters that the quote was part of an environmental analysis of a project and that the second half of the sentence – which cannot be found on PIEBIEM’s website – states that wind projects “can make a positive contribution to a broader combination of measures to reduce future impacts of climate change”.
BOEM routinely states in its environmental assessments that wind energy alone will not change the course of global warming, but can help when combined with other measures.
In other groups, posts range from skepticism about whether wind turbines can withstand high winds to fears that they could block ocean views, but the most common claim is that offshore wind development threatens whales.
This claim caught fire in the United States in early 2023 after several groups in New Jersey and New York blamed the industry for a spate of whale deaths, attracting the attention of conservative media.
The claim is now being repeated by opponents around the world, including in France and Australia.
The U.S. government considers the claim to be unfounded and attributes most human-caused whale deaths to shipping accidents and entanglements in fishing gear.
A clean energy trade group, the American Clean Power Association, said it is countering opposition by conveying the benefits of offshore wind, such as economic growth and energy independence.
“Misinformation undermines trust, creates confusion and divides communities at a time when we need more American energy,” an ACP spokesperson said.
EXPERT SUPPORT
Green Oceans has secured the support of Spanish marine biologist Josep Lloret, who has raised concerns about the potential environmental damage of offshore wind turbines in the Mediterranean, and hosted a talk by Texas journalist Robert Bryce, who is skeptical of the energy transition.
Other groups take advantage of their work.
“The beauty of Green Oceans is that they have scientists behind them, so we can look at the papers they say are factual and see that they have been peer-reviewed,” said Jenny Cullen, President of Australia’s Responsible Future (Illawarra Chapter).
“It wasn’t Charlie who used ChatGPT to find BS.”
This tactic is already helping to turn an industry that encountered little resistance in its early days in Europe decades ago into a political hot potato.
In New Jersey, where opposition to offshore wind farms is arguably stronger than in any other U.S. state, support for the industry was only 50% late last year, down from 80% four years earlier, according to a Stockton University poll.
Trump has also joined the movement and promised to stop offshore wind projects if he regains the presidency in November.
His administration promoted offshore wind power as part of its “America First” agenda several years ago and held a record auction for offshore wind turbines in 2018.
Trump’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
In Australia, which is a new destination for offshore wind developers, the main opposition party has also thrown its weight behind the movement and public opposition has grown – reaching 18% in September, up from 12% a year earlier, according to polls by Freshwater Strategy.
In France, a Senate committee recommended in July that the target for offshore wind turbines be cut, saying the technology is expensive and immature. The nuclear power plant is already lagging behind its neighbors in renewable energy and has also fallen behind the targets set by the European Commission.
Parallel to their successes, opponents of offshore wind energy face accusations that they are supported by right-wing interest groups linked to the fossil fuel industry.
A 2023 study by researchers at Brown University highlighted links between U.S. groups and conservative think tanks, including a case in which the Delaware-based Caesar Rodney Institute supported a lawsuit by a Nantucket group, ACK4Whales, against the Vineyard Wind project.
Amy DiSibio, a board member of ACK4Whales, said her group is non-partisan and has distanced itself from the fossil fuel think tank. A New Jersey group, Protect Our Coast NJ, said the same.
“It takes the wind out of our message,” said Robin Shaffer, president of Protect Our Coast NJ, in an interview.
