EGN NEWS DESK
A couple of years in the past, Roberts was a part of a workforce that modeled attainable pathways to decarbonization in Rhode Island and located that just about two-thirds of its electrical energy may very well be equipped by offshore wind, essentially the most viable possibility within the densely populated state. After watching wind misinformation mount, Roberts switched gears and, together with his college students, produced a report analyzing opponents’ ways. The report discovered that whereas wind foes circulated voluminous research, white papers and regulatory feedback that seemed like rigor, they relied on pretend consultants and cherry-picked or misrepresented information — mainstays of the bigger climate-denial motion.
Take the evolution of the narrative that wind generators are killing whales. Conservative tabloids in Britain started falsely reporting a hyperlink greater than a decade in the past, typically referencing findings from Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. In 2011, one of many college’s researchers protested when The Daily Telegraph cited his research linking naval workouts to whale strandings — as a way to declare that wind farms “posed a good higher menace” to whales. The newspaper issued a correction, however the identical declare, with the identical quotation, continued circulating nonetheless. In 2016, it was picked up by Paul Driessen, head of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. Driessen’s weblog publish on whale deaths, citing the debunked article, is now marshaled as proof by U.S. opponents of offshore wind.
University of Rhode Island marine scientist Robert Kenney tried to right the file in 2017, when a Daily Caller article linked the loss of life of a humpback whale to the primary U.S. offshore wind farm. “Whales themselves are louder than generators” — in contrast to ultraloud naval sonar — Kenney and a colleague defined in a revealed response. Plus, the Daily Caller piece had misstated the beginning of a collection of humpback strandings to make the whales’ loss of life price seem 3 times as excessive. “The solely factor in the entire article that was true was that there was a dead whale,” Kenney says.
Kenney’s analysis has tracked the decline of the critically endangered North Atlantic proper whale. Since 2011, the whales’ deaths — largely from ship strikes and entanglements in fishing gear — have outpaced births. The handiest protections would contain stricter laws on business fishing, in response to Kenney. But, he says, “the fishing trade fights tooth and nail each step of the method.”
It’s suspicious, then, that the fishing trade is now one of many loudest voices decrying the supposed risks that offshore wind poses to proper whales. In 2021, six business fishing associations sued the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, alleging that its approval of a wind farm off the coast of Nantucket violates the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The authorized muscle behind the case was offered freed from cost by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing assume tank. The group, which doesn’t touch upon its donors, has obtained at the least $4 million from fossil gasoline pursuits.
Amplified by fossil-fuel-backed teams and Fox News, the claims about whale deaths have derailed assist for offshore wind in communities like Long Beach, New York, the place many residents thought their group would welcome a proposed wind farm. Long Beach sits on a skinny strip of land on the south shore of Long Island, an space devastated by 2012’s Superstorm Sandy. In the storm’s aftermath, the town got here out in staunch opposition to a proposed liquefied pure fuel terminal off its shoreline. Residents packed public conferences and staged beachfront rallies. When then-governor Andrew Cuomo arrived within the metropolis in 2015 to announce his veto of the fuel venture, a crowd of 200 individuals burst into applause.
During the previous yr, a vocal group of locals mounted a mirror-image marketing campaign in opposition to a proposed offshore wind farm whose belowwater cable would make landfall in Long Beach earlier than carrying energy to some 1 million New York houses. “I’m all for inexperienced vitality, imagine me. I recycle each little factor I can,” mentioned one space resident at a public listening to earlier than New York’s utility regulator final October. Then she continued, “I’m vehemently against this whole venture — the whales washing up that by no means used to scrub up earlier than.”
Wind opponents started exhibiting as much as practically each metropolis council assembly. “There weren’t that lots of them, however they have been very organized and really loud,” says Ellen Gluck Feldman, an environmental planner who has lived in Long Beach for nearly 4 a long time. She watched in dismay as the town council got here out in formal opposition to the venture final summer time, leaving its path ahead unsure.
Gluck Feldman had thought that renewable vitality could be a comparatively straightforward promote in a group intimately conversant in local weather calamity. “We must be the primary ones to step up and do it due to what occurred with Sandy,” she says. “We must be the primary ones to say sure, we’re on board. And as an alternative, we mentioned no. It simply boggles the thoughts.”
In many elements of the nation, the ways honed by anti-wind campaigners are actually being deployed in opposition to photo voltaic.
In late November, residents of Knox County, Ohio packed a 1,000-seat theater to get pleasure from snacks and free alcohol and study a photo voltaic venture proposed for his or her space. The catered city corridor was hosted by Knox Smart Development, an anonymously funded LLC integrated lower than three weeks earlier. The audio system included Steve Goreham, a coverage adviser for the Heartland Institute whose newest guide forecasts a “coming renewable vitality failure.” Attendees have been instructed on how they may voice their opposition to the state regulator now reviewing the photo voltaic venture.
Kathy Gamble attended the city corridor to cross out data on behalf of Knox County for Responsible Solar, a group she based to assist residents’ rights to make use of their land as they select, together with for renewable vitality growth. The photo voltaic scare ways are straining native relationships to the breaking level, she says. “Landowners are afraid to confess that they’ve land within the venture.”
A principally rural space exterior of Columbus, Knox County occurs to be dwelling to the Ariel Corporation, a main producer of methane fuel compressors. Gamble suspects that its CEO, Republican megadonor Karen Buchwald Wright, is behind the brand new anti-renewables group. Around the identical time because the city corridor, in response to Gamble, residents started receiving copies of Goreham’s guide with a handwritten be aware from Buchwald Wright. (Neither Knox Smart Development nor the Ariel Corporation responded to a request for remark.)
Gamble is unfazed by these ways. The dark-money group in Knox County is simply the most recent of its form to pop up in Ohio, the place fossil gasoline and utility firms have launched a few of their most brazen assaults on renewable vitality. Last yr, the Empowerment Alliance, a separate group linked to Buchwald Wright that runs adverts attacking wind and photo voltaic, efficiently lobbied for state laws categorizing methane fuel as inexperienced vitality.
In 2019, Ohioans weathered a $9.5 million promoting blitz in favor of one other disastrous vitality legislation. The stress marketing campaign had been orchestrated by a entrance group for FirstEnergy, a bankrupt utility on the middle of the state’s largest-ever corruption scandal. The utility firm constructed a sprawling community of dark-money teams — and spent some $60 million on outright bribes — to grease the best way for the state’s bailout of two ageing nuclear crops. The 2019 laws additionally gutted renewable vitality requirements and left taxpayers on the hook for ongoing coal subsidies benefiting FirstEnergy that may whole practically $2 billion by the top of this decade.
While the corruption on the coronary heart of Ohio’s disastrous vitality coverage has been uncovered, the shadow it solid over the state’s local weather future stays. Ohio utilities rank among the many worst within the nation for the quantity of electrical energy generated by renewables, and the state’s setback necessities for wind generators are 10 instances higher than these for oil and fuel wells. Large-scale photo voltaic tasks just like the one in Knox County might present a path ahead — however provided that they’ll make it by an approval course of that’s more and more stacked in opposition to renewables.
Three years in the past, laws cosponsored by Republican state consultant Bill Seitz handed counties the facility to veto renewable vitality tasks — and to proclaim themselves off-limits to wind and photo voltaic altogether. Communities lack any equal energy to reject new fossil gasoline tasks. At least 10 counties within the state have since enacted such bans. And even in counties that haven’t handed such measures, the Ohio Power Siting Board has nonetheless begun rejecting new renewable tasks, citing the presence of group opposition as proof that they don’t adequately serve the general public curiosity.
That’s a stark departure from precedent, in response to Karin Nordstrom, an lawyer for the nonprofit Ohio Environmental Council. In 2019, the board accredited a controversial methane fuel pipeline over the protest of communities in its path. Treating group opposition as a ample foundation for denial seems to be a customary utilized solely to renewable vitality, Nordstrom says. It’s “inappropriate” to not take into account a venture’s impression on local weather change as a part of the general public curiosity.
Fossil gasoline pursuits have a historical past of covert intervention in Ohio’s renewable vitality siting. In one now-infamous instance, coal producer Murray Energy was unmasked in 2018 as the cash behind a yearslong lawsuit in opposition to a proposed Lake Erie wind farm. That was after an obvious entrance group for the coal trade — going by the identify of Campaign for Affordable and Reliable Energy — tried unsuccessfully to intervene immediately in a number of renewable vitality siting instances. Murray Energy was additionally a main backer of the corruption-tainted 2019 nuclear and coal bailout.
Even after the astroturf anti-wind scheme was uncovered in native media, an lawyer for Murray Energy, John Stock, continued to signify teams combating renewable vitality tasks till the coal firm’s 2019 chapter. At least two of Stock’s instances have been then taken over by Jack Van Kley, a Columbus lawyer who has since helped speed up denials of renewable tasks in Ohio. In the previous 4 years, Van Kley has helped kill at the least three different renewable vitality tasks, and he’s at the moment representing intervenors in 4 photo voltaic instances earlier than the siting board. Last summer time, The Plain Dealer noticed a reference to an “impartial particular person” chipping in $10,000 towards Van Kley’s price within the assembly minutes of one of many townships he’s representing.
Van Kley mentioned in an electronic mail that he has by no means represented or been paid by fossil gasoline firms; his purchasers pay his charges. Other than the assist they get from landowners who profit financially, in response to Van Kley, the tasks “are nearly universally opposed.”
In Madison County, Ohio, a photo voltaic proponent named John Boeckl has tried to counter that narrative. Boeckl researches photovoltaics for the close by Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and his land is a few hundred yards from the proposed website of the Oak Run Solar Project, which might change into one of many largest photo voltaic tasks constructed so far nationwide. With the assistance of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center, Boeckl filed testimony on behalf of the venture. He says that the objections he has heard from space residents boil all the way down to scare ways: “They’re taking away all our farmland, and we’re going to be consuming soy.” The rhetoric echoes strains in regards to the lack of farmland circulated by new fossil-fuel-linked teams just like the Empowerment Alliance, in addition to older ones just like the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. In truth, Oak Run Solar might break new floor in agrivoltaics, the follow of co-locating crops and photo voltaic panels, which may enhance some crop yields and cut back the quantity of water wanted for irrigation.
Local opponents have additionally raised issues in regards to the waste generated by photo voltaic panels; final yr, researchers on the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Colorado School of Mines warned that such claims could also be slowing photo voltaic deployment, regardless that decarbonization “represents a substantial discount in mass and toxicity of waste.” At current, they discovered, as a lot poisonous coal ash is generated globally in a single month as photo voltaic panels are anticipated to supply within the subsequent 35 years.
Van Kley can also be representing residents in search of to intervene within the photo voltaic case in Knox County, which banned massive wind farms in 2022 and is now contemplating a photo voltaic ban. Knox Smart Development has extra city halls deliberate and is circulating data from the Buckeye Institute, the Ohio affiliate of the Koch-backed State Policy Network.
In the face of well-financed opposition, Gamble feels outgunned. “You can hardly activate a laptop on this space with out seeing their adverts,” she says. But she’ll maintain having conversations along with her neighbors, and she or he plans to make her opinions recognized at siting board conferences when hearings get underway this spring. “I plan to stand up and say my piece there,” she says, regardless of the dimensions of the opposition. “I do know that I simply plan to maintain on doing what I do.”
