Passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in the U. S. has spurred a huge amount of investment and progress in the renewable energy space, not just in the U.S. but in other countries as well. Which in turn has driven a big uptick in anti-renewables activism, especially when it comes to offshore wind projects. In a lot of cases, the people showing up to fight wind farms, both on land and offshore, are the same people who were fighting 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. Or the fact that, in many cases, industrial-scale renewable projects are owned and operated by oil majors. That’s a particularly tough one because a lot of climate activists have been pushing oil majors to invest in renewables for years, but at the same time those companies have behaved in such bad faith that now a lot of environmentalists and climate advocates just don’t trust them. Many of those groups with legitimate concerns, though, are being co opted and weaponized by organizations that have spent the past 20 years working to block climate policy. They don’t really care about the whales so much as they do about blocking the energy transition away from fossil fuels.

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 U. S. was especially helpful. That report is called “Against the Wind,” and it digs into the people and organizations who are actively fighting wind energy on the east coast of the U.S., which may sound niche but those folks are having an enormous influence on renewable energy projects across the country, and have even sparked some copycats in Australia. Longtime PR guy-turned-nuclear advocate Michael Shellenberger has been pushing the myth that offshore wind kills whales for longer than most. A short documentary he made, featuring interviews with members of a group called the Save Right Whales Coalition, which Shellenberger’s organization Environmental Progress helped to create, has been sited by multiple anti-wind groups, as well as rightwing media folks, in Australia as proof that the construction of offshore wind farms is harming whales. No peer-reviewed science has backed up this claim; marine scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and elsewhere have conducted multiple studies and so far have found that fishing boats are the primary cause of whale deaths. Warming oceans aren’t helping much either.

The Brown report looks at how various anti-wind groups connect to each other, who's funding what, and which talking points seem to be spreading. To unpack it all, I talked to Isaac Slevin, the lead author on the report.

Prefer to listen to this interview? You can play the podcast episode right here:

Amy: What were you hoping to find when you set out on this research?

Isaac Slevin: So over the last couple years, we've witnessed a huge rise in opposition to offshore wind across the east coast. And this isn't the first time that's happened. There was a wave of opposition to offshore wind a decade ago. There's always been the skeptics about it. But what was really interesting about this recent wave is their focus on conservation.

This isn't your run of the mill climate denial movement 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.

And this project 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 Constructive Tomorrow, or CFACT.

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 gonna 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 and think tanks opposing offshore wind.

Amy: We've been tracking these groups a little bit too, and one thing that really jumps out is just how much what I like to call lone wolf climate denier dudes, folks like Mark Morano at CFACT or Steve Milloy, who works not just for Heartland, but also the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Cato and really a whole host of organizations working against climate policy over the last couple of decades... how much guys like that have really jumped into this fight. 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.

Amy: Isaac, can you tell me who slash what is the Cesar Rodney Institute? And then what is their relationship with the Texas Public Policy Foundation?

Isaac Slevin: so the Cesar Rodney Institute is a State Policy Network affiliate based in Delaware. The State Policy Network is this. sprawling collection of libertarian right wing think tanks. There's at least one in all 50 states. And the State Policy Network serves to back these think tanks' lobbying efforts and political efforts on the state level.

Um, that has to do with climate, and it also has to do with just 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 Cesar Rodney Institute has become particularly interested in blocking offshore wind. And our research found that they're extraordinarily well connected there. So the Cesar Rodney Institute and one of their directors of policy, a man named David Stevenson, created an astroturf, a 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 Cesar 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 four other states as well as four other anti offshore wind groups across the East Coast.

So Cesar 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 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 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 Vineyard 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, um, I should say has embedded itself in this fight that frankly only concerns it because of its ties to the fossil fuel industry.

Amy: Is there any sort of official relationship between Texas Public Policy Foundation and Cesar Rodney? What did you find there?

Isaac Slevin: Our map did not connect them other than having people in common. So they're both State Policy Network affiliates, but that's about it. I mean, they have similar supporters. Well, I mean, the fact that they're both the premier state policy network affiliates in their states is really substantial. There's this phenomenal Jane Mayer article from I believe 2013 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 Network CEO or president, that SPN works to equip all of these local think tanks with the information and strategies that they need to fight prescribed 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 You know, 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 health care opponents actually share a lot of tactics and share a lot of strategies because it's no accident that they were coming from the same playbook sponsored by the state policy network.

Amy: I want to talk about the local people who get involved in this for one reason or another and I feel like it starts to get complicated when we talk about these people because some of them genuinely just don't like the idea of offshore wind for some reason or another.

Some of them have their own legitimate to them at least reasons for not wanting these projects, but then they get sort of co opted into this whole much broader effort. And I'd love to have you talk about that a bit, because it's complicated and that complexity gets flattened out when we talk about this stuff a lot.

Isaac Slevin: For sure. Yeah, thank you for asking that question, because I do agree that it's something that gets lost. A good place to start would be Mary Chalk. She's a co founder of the Save Right Whales Coalition and co director of Nantucket Residence for Whales, which was formerly known as Nantucket Residence Against Turbines.

And she was particularly interesting in our early research because of her conservation based rhetoric, um, talking about whales and pollution, 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 mean, 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 are lying about their love for environmental conservation, and you can see that firsthand in a lot of their Facebook groups.

There was a ton of information and misinformation that's communicated through anti offshore wind Facebook groups, and it's sometimes dozens of articles and photos every single day of whales that have washed up on coasts, 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, a proven scientific connection, between offshore wind construction and environmental conservation. That is something that's, 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. Um, a lot of the people in Green Ocean's leadership have extremely expensive oceanfront 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, I retired to the coast. 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. Yeah, so that's that for I can talk about the fishing industry if you want to. I think they're super interesting and all of this…

Amy: I would love to hear that. What's interesting to me about the fishing stuff is that, of course, they’re also being deeply impacted by climate change and have been feeling those effects for a while now.

Isaac Slevin: Totally. So these self proclaimed conservationists have ended up in an alliance with a lot of players in the fishing industry, both opposing offshore wind, the conservationists for claims about whale conservation and the fishing industry for worries that offshore wind construction will disrupt where fish are and what kinds of fish are in which places, as well as fish migratory patterns.

Those concerns are a lot more founded than those about whales. It's still a really weird alliance because according to NOAA, fishing gear entanglement has caused 65 percent of documented right whale deaths, injuries, and morbidities since 2017.

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 in opposition to offshore wind. But, there are legitimate reasons for fishing communities to be concerned. I mean, there's the first strictly financial reason of needing a livelihood and relying on fisheries and fish, 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 even 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, uh, maybe politically relevant arguments or certainly true arguments. So the fishing industry has become a very helpful tool. You can 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, then the Texas Public Policy Foundation can swoop in and fund a lawsuit about it.

Amy: I actually saw something recently from, Steve Milloy

Isaac Slevin: His articles have popped up everywhere.

Amy: Defender of the Whales, Steve Milloy.

Isaac Slevin: It's so preposterous. People at CFACT and the Heartland Institute who have been blocking climate policy and conservation policy for decades, who've made a whole career out of it are now being. used as defenders of the whales in the face of industrialization.

And it's kind of preposterous when you think about it, but also, you know, and I want, as much as I want to be cynical about it. I think it's also worth remembering that this is how dire 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 herding and killing whales. Whatever it takes to get these turbines out of there.

Amy: Was there anyone working on conservation solutions that didn't rule out offshore wind?

Isaac Slevin: I mean, it's hard to know what to do. We are trying a few different things. So there was a hearing in little Compton in March or April that included. Professor timmons roberts talking about the role of the fossil fuel industry. It included a marine biologist from the University of Rhode Island who talked about whales.

It was put on by. a local state representative to give it a sense of, you know, legitimacy and, and place for dialogue , um, and Green Oceans wasn't having it. You know, they protested, they got up and handed out leaflets at the door to make sure everyone knew the truth about offshore wind. So.

Amy: Do you think it’s become combative to the point where people are just dug into their sides of the debate and not really even that interested in solving the issue anymore?

Isaac Slevin: Yeah, I do. I mean, the Climate and Development Lab published a report about the misinformation tactics that Green Oceans has used in its literature, and they attacked the CDL on Twitter. We put out this report and we're getting attacked on Twitter for us being the ones sponsored by the fossil fuel industry. I will say a funny note on that Save LBI, save Long Beach Island cited a Brown Daily Herald article saying that Brown takes 20 million from the fossil fuel industry. Myself and Will Ketra, my coauthor in this, co wrote that report too. And, like, we know this is the whole issue, that fossil fuel money is everywhere and we need to combat it everywhere.

And just saying, nuh uh, 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 change and free inquiry. It's just about scoring points. But to go back to Steve Milloy and people just wanting to win, 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 whales 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 Orsted 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 whales.

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 ecosystem 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, 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 because it's so persuasive and 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 persuasive enough to sort of lay down their arms. I don't know, we have this website called like real offshore wind. com or something that kind of mirrors the look and feel of the anti-wind sites and we’re trying to get information out that way. So we're, we're going to see if that helps at all, but it's like, I feel like the solution, other than, you know, winning political battles, in terms of changing hearts and minds, it might just be the same tactics that we need to bring a lot of our people back from being controlled by that media ecosystem.

Amy: That's super interesting. The Australia connection makes me wonder, too, because you know, State Policy Network and Heartland and a lot of these larger groups in the U.S. are part of the Atlas Network, which is also quite active in Australia.

Isaac Slevin: Oh yeah.

Amy: Have you seen these ideas just sort of floating through that whole conservative think tank ecosystem more broadly?

Isaac Slevin: Yes. The research on offshore wind opposition and Atlas is really, really new, like in the last few months. And so there's a lot we don't know yet. What we do know is that members of ATLAS, just like members of SPN, are using, I mean, almost identical rhetoric. 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 Milloy and they are citing CFACT.

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 or a comment like, oh, it 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 industry, 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.

Amy: That's so interesting.

Isaac Slevin: But some of these conservationists totally see themselves as fighting the fossil fuel industry. The difference, of course, being that the fossil fuel industry is spending single digit percentages of its annual expenditures on renewable energy. And even then lying about it. Shell is spending, what? 1.5 percent annually on renewables after they got caught for calling natural gas expenditures, renewables. So I think that's the difference. And maybe that's a way to break through the media ecosystem.

Amy: That’s interesting that there's this idea that oh, we're, we're also fighting, oil majors because not only are they not spending that much, but their presence in the renewable energy space is creating opposition too

Isaac Slevin: Yeah. That's huh. I hadn't thought about that of like. I don't know. I mean, because there's all of the discourse about, like, to what degree do we allow the fossil fuel industry to pivot, right? Like, we can't trust them as actors, as reliable honest actors, but also they have all of this capital.

Amy: Yeah, and technical expertise; that always gets lumped into it too.

Isaac Slevin: Maybe we should just go completely invest in these startups or in particular transitioned oil majors like Orsted. But I don't know. I think I don't buy that because you'd still have all of the arguments about fishing and about whales, regardless of which company is setting up the turbines.

Amy: Right. Like the fishermen don't really care that it's BP.

Isaac Slevin: I just pulled up one of the tweets I've gotten in response. This is from Mike Dean, who is on Fox News, and he says, “Wow, give them a few more semesters, and they might find out the fossil fuel industry, BP, Shell, Equinor, Orsted, EDF, are the ones actually building the offshore wind projects these grassroots groups are opposing. Genius.”

Amy: That's so interesting. But it also just makes this problem really hard to solve. Okay, last question: What were some of the things that you found in the course of doing this research that were surprising to you? What kind of jumped out to you as being like, Whoa, was not expecting that? Or that you really hope people will pay attention to?

Isaac Slevin: I think it's really important. I mean, what we've just been talking about, um, how earnest a lot of these groups are in seeing themselves as conservationists, seeing themselves as defending their fishing communities and fighting against these fossil fuel majors. This isn't like the AstroTurf climate denial movements of the past. A lot of this actually is organic and finding allies, not because they love right wing climate denial think tanks, 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, to plead to be gentle, um, but to give people credit for backing their communities, again, for a lot of reasons that actually aren't based in science, um, 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 grievances 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, is going to be really difficult.

Leah 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 their 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 Latina 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 and that are giving 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 gonna 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 and the urgency of renewable energy, you remember what's happening.

And what, what has to happen so that these predominantly white and wealthy communities can avoid offshore wind. And it's debilitating.

Amy: Yeah. I mean, that's the thing getting that message to land with people in a way that doesn't put them on the defensive. But also, the entire history of America is not one in which we have incentivized or rewarded people for doing anything for the common good.

And we kind of need people to get there for the renewable transition to happen, but we haven't done that culture work, we haven't actually fixed the social contract in a way that would lay the groundwork for people to do that. And now we've got to do all that work really fast,

Isaac Slevin: What I want to do is lead by example, like, it's clear that we need a politics of pluralism that we don't have, I mean, all of this movement is, you know, fishing, like the fishing industry versus the offshore wind projects, the community groups versus the university professors, we also see you know, them as enemies of progress sometime, right? I mean, and that's not entirely fair either because we're all looking out for our self interest in different ways and we just make different decisions to decide what that self interest is.

Amy: Right.

Isaac Slevin: 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 Koch and friends.

Amy: Right. Or accuse them of being, like, white elitists. You know? Especially when you have this weird coalition there, right, of, like, working class fishermen and then people who have oceanfront estates

Isaac Slevin: But there are also just some difficult decisions, right? Like we do need to build these things really quickly. We do have scientists on one side of the debate.

Amy: There are going to be some trade offs. That's the thing. I feel like we're really allergic to being like, yeah, there are some trade offs. Let's talk about it and figure out what are the impacts that we can live with

Isaac Slevin: right.

Amy: And how do we equitably distribute them?

As opposed to what we've been doing, which is just ignoring the impacts and letting them fall on the most marginalized people in our society. You know, it's not like energy hasn't had impacts before