Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Sep 18, 2023 6 tweets 6 min read Read on X
The wind industry says it isn't killing whales, but it is. New boat traffic is colliding with whales. And high-decibel sonar is separating whale mothers from their calves, sending them into harm's way. Our new documentary, which lays out the evidence, is now free to watch.
This ground-breaking documentary could save the North Atlantic right whales from extinction. Please consider getting involved and making a donation to support our work. LFG!!!

saverightwhales.org
The mainstream news media is lying about this. Why? Because the wind industry paid them millions of dollars to.

x.com/shellenberger/…
The politicians are lying about this. Why? Because the wind industry paid them to

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The environmentalists are lying about this. Why? Because the wind industry paid them to. Image
Since the passage of the 1973 Endangered Species Act, environmentalists have fought for strict protections for endangered species. They have demanded that the government apply what is known as the “precautionary principle,” which states that if there is any risk that human activity will make a species extinct, it should be illegal.

And yet here we are, on the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, watching the whole of the environmental movement — from the Audubon Society and the National Wildlife Federation to scientific groups like the Woods Hole Institute, New England Aquarium, and Mystic Aquarium — betray the precautionary principle by risking the extinction of the North Atlantic right whale.

The cause of this environmental betrayal is massive industrial wind energy projects off the East Coast of the U.S. The wind turbine blades are the length of a football field. Sitting atop giant poles, they will reach three times higher than the Statue of Liberty. The towers will be directly inside the critical ocean habitat for the North Atlantic right whale.

There are only 340 of the whales left, down from 348 just one year earlier. So many North Atlantic right whales are killed by man-made factors that there have been no documented cases of any of them dying of natural causes in decades. Their average life expectancy has declined from a century to 45 years. A single additional unnatural and unnecessary death could risk the loss of the entire species.

Surveying for, building, and operating industrial wind projects could harm or kill whales, according to the U.S. government’s own science.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has given the wind industry 11 “incidental harassment authorizations,” or permits to harass hundreds of whales, including 169 critically endangered right whales.

Scientists representing many of the same environmental groups supporting the industrial wind energy projects wrote in a 2021 letter that “the North Atlantic right whale population cannot withstand any additional stressors; any potential interruption of foraging behavior may lead to population-level effects and is of critical concern.”

Industrial wind projects “could have population-level effects on an already endangered and stressed species,” concluded the NOAA scientist Sean Hayes. What are “population-level effects?” In a word, extinction.

Why are environmental groups risking the extinction of the North Atlantic right whale with this massive industrial wind project? The ostensible reason is climate change. The project developers say they will produce emission-free electricity for 7 million homes.

But wind energy in the U.S. Northeast will often require 100% natural gas backup to provide power for people on days without wind. And yet the U.S. Northeast has in recent years experienced natural gas shortages because climate change groups led by @billmckibben and as well as Sierra Club and NRDC, have halted pipelines, forcing states to, increasingly, burn far dirtier petroleum during the winter.

And all of the same green groups have been successfully shutting down nuclear plants on the East Coast, including Pilgrim in Massachusetts in 2019 and Indian Point in New York in 2021. Unlike wind turbines, nuclear plants do not need fossil fuels as their backup.

Why, then, are environmentalists supporting wind turbine installation up and down the East Coast? It wasn’t clear to at least one conservationist. “It was strange to see environmental groups, whose focus is on protecting wildlife, seeking to industrialize critical habitats,” said @LinowesLisa of the Save Right Whales Coalition.

And so Linowes set out to investigate why that might be. What she discovered shocked her: many conservation organizations supporting the projects had taken money from the wind industry, a clear conflict of interest. “We were upset to discover that the wind industry had bought off so many environmental and scientific organizations,” said Linowes.

Wind energy companies and their foundations have donated nearly $4.7 million to at least three dozen donations to major environmental organizations. Linowes has made public a report and a database documenting the conflicts of interest she discovered.

— The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a granting organization, took up to $1 million from wind energy companies Avangrid and Shell, and then distributed it to other environmental groups. In August 2020, the National Audubon Society received a $200,000 grant from the New England Forest and Rivers Fund.

— The same year, the Nature Conservancy received a $165,218 grant from the New England Forest and Rivers Fund. The Nature Conservancy has supported offshore wind since at least 2021.

— NJ Audubon has partnered with wind farm developer Atlantic Shores, a joint venture between Shell Oil and EDF Renewables. Ocean Wind, another wind energy developer, has sponsored NJ Audubon’s World Series of Birding event multiple times.

The wind industry has also made hefty donations to scientific organizations:

— Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute received a donation of $500,000 from Ørsted in or after 2018. Woods Hole has endorsed offshore wind since at least 2019.

— The New England Aquarium received a donation pledge of $250,000 in 2018 from Bay State Wind. In 2019, Vineyard Wind donated an undisclosed amount to the Aquarium. Similarly, in 2020 offshore wind developer Equinor, was cited as a donor in the Aquarium’s annual report. The Aquarium has supported offshore wind since at least 2021.

— In October 2020, Mystic Aquarium featured an exhibit promoting offshore wind. In June 2021, Ørsted and Revolution Wind donated $1,250,000 to Mystic Aquarium to create new pro-offshore wind exhibits but also to research the effects of offshore wind turbines on marine mammals and sea turtles.

Even though NOAA’s own top experts say the impact of wind energy on the North Atlantic right whale cannot be mitigated, the draft joint strategy of NOAA and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is aimed at doing precisely that. The word “mitigation” is used 45 times in the document. But if Hayes and his colleagues are correct, those mitigations won’t be enough to prevent extinction.

Why, in the end, have environmental groups thrown their own precautionary principle to the wind? Much of it is due to their view that wind energy is needed to solve climate change. But another reason is simply that they were paid.

/END

To learn more, including about the corruption of so-called environmental groups, please visit:

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More from @shellenberger

Nov 22
The Australian PM @AlboMP wants global censorship to counter misinformation. But only free speech can counter misinformation. Please share this to affirm your opposition to his awful bill!
Was the censorship bill a head fake to jam through Digital ID? 🤔
👀 Image
Read 6 tweets
Nov 21
I am concerned about the impact of social media on children, but this bill is a Trojan horse to create digital IDs, which is a giant leap into the totalitarian dystopia depicted in "Black Mirror," and already in place in China. And @AlboMP has proven censorial and untrustworthy.
Read 7 tweets
Nov 18
Lovers of free speech just scored victories in the US, EU, and Ireland. But now we’re in pitched battles in Britain & Australia, which is at dire risk of trying to censor the entire planet. This is about all of us, so I’m flying down. Share this to show solidarity. LFG!!! Image
I am headed directly to Canberra to meet with other free speech lovers and the wise and just representatives of the Australian people, who I am confident will kill the @AlboMP governments aggressive and hostile assault on the freedom that enables democracy and all other freedoms.

Australia belongs to its people and it is up to them and their representatives to decide whether they want to remain a liberal democratic nation or instantaneously become a totalitarian one.

But it is the duty of friends of Australia to bluntly warn that @AlboMP is pushing a censorship law that would not only end free speech for Australians but also be viewed as a hostile assault on the free Internet worldwide by people in other nations, including in the US, its best ally.

x.com/shellenberger/…
@AlboMP Here is the text from the law that makes clear that the @AlboMP censorship law would apply to the entire global Internet.
Read 5 tweets
Nov 17
Trump's nominees are weird, say elites. But it was the elites' weird ideas that caused wars, addiction/OD crisis, Covid lockdowns, trans madness, censorship, and worse. Trump's nominees trigger the covert narcissism of elites who are rightly defensive at their appalling record.
Democrats act like they’re starting to get it, but they’re not. Their problems are all much worse than they realize. It’s not just that the Party is leaderless. It’s that the Party and the establishment institutions upon which it relies are discredited with half the country and are about to become more discredited with even more Americans as the truth fully comes out about censorship, Covid, weaponization of government, the transgender medical mistreatment scandal, and much else that the media and elites have lied about over the last 20 years. The media isn’t what people thought it was. It was never a reflection of reality. It was a reality distortion machine and propaganda industry in service of maintaining the narrow interests and power of a tiny group of decadent and psychologically disordered elites and their deeply deformed, dishonest institutions. Some might be reformed but others are too far gone to be saved.

x.com/RNCResearch/st…
This is the kind of unAmerican garbage that Democrats made pervasive. It will take many years to root it all out from our institutions.

Read 5 tweets
Nov 16
The media says Trump's nominees are dangerous, but they're not. Their positions and priorities are well within the mainstream. The threat they pose isn't to the American people, it's to the pathocrats who created and worsened our border, public health, and foreign policy crises. Image
Over the last few years, the American people have come to believe that our establishment institutions are at least partly responsible for a series of self-inflicted wounds. Our health and medical establishment either failed to address or enabled declining life expectancy, a mental health crisis including an addiction epidemic, and a botched response to Covid. Our military and foreign policy establishment unnecessarily started and prolonged war and conflict in the Middle East and violated civil liberties at home in the name of fighting terrorism. And liberalized migration laws have depressed working-class wages, swamped the ability of cities to absorb the new migrants, and created a humanitarian disaster on the border.

Given all of that, the President-elect Donald Trump’s nominations make sense. As Border Czar, Thomas Homan will take strong action to close the southern border and deport criminals. National Director of Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard will bring greater skepticism to foreign military entanglements and calls to restrict civil liberties for national security. And Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will stand up to the corporations that most everyone agrees have put self-interest before the public’s interest on everything from drug safety to food quality.

We shouldn’t be surprised that some of them hold views that many of us disagree with. The main criticism of Trump’s nominees is that they have dangerous and fringe views. Homan said he would deport whole families. Gabbard said the Russian-backed Syrian dictator was not America’s enemy. And Kennedy espouses marginal and unsubstantiated views on everything from nuclear power to 5Gs.

But Homan has made clear his focus will be on deporting criminals, not families, whatever one thinks of Gabbard’s position on the Syrian conflict, it’s obvious from the context that she made her remarks in service of her loyalty to the US, not Russia, and Kennedy has said, repeatedly, that he won’t ban vaccines.

And throughout history, most real reformers and innovators have held fringe views and have had aspects of their personalities that are problematic. In most cases, those flaws or idiosyncrasies proved to be a small price to pay for their willingness to overcome the many obstacles required to achieve serious reforms of deeply entrenched institutions. This is true not just of Homan, Gabbard, and Kennedy, but also of Defense Secretary and Attorney General nominees, Pete Hegseth and Matt Gaetz, respectively. The accusations the media has made against the two men are so far unsubstantiated by the available evidence.

And none of the allegedly wrong views or bad deeds of Trump’s nominees outweigh the potential of the nominees to reform the institutions that are directly responsible for the invasion of Iraq, prolonged occupation of Afghanistan, entanglement in foreign conflicts, corporate capture of the FDA, the weaponization of government, Covid school closures, authoritarian and gratuitous Covid vaccine mandates, unhealthy diets, the addiction crisis that kills 100,000 Americans per year, the humanitarian disaster along the border, and the mistreatment of children with pseudoscientific transgender medicine.

Strong leaders committed to reforming America’s military and foreign policy establishment, its public health, food, and medical establishments, and its immigration and border security establishment are precisely what the American people wanted when they voted for Trump. If those nominees pursue destructive agendas in lieu of doing their jobs, we will be the first to call them out for it. But the establishment has no ground on which to stand...

Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning reporting, read the rest of the article, and watch the rest of the video!
Read 4 tweets
Nov 15
Over the last decade, Democrats & the media said that those of us who opposed DEI, racial quotas, and open borders had gone “far right.” We hadn’t. Rather, Democrats and the media had gone far left. We are only now emerging from 10+ years of extreme, psychopathic gaslighting. Image
Make no mistake: it was the mainstream news media that induced the mass psychosis that radicalized Democrats into believing that the US had somehow become *more* racist, against all available evidence. Image
The media did this. The mass brainwashing came from college-educated elites in control of the most powerful propaganda machine in world history. They got Democrats to believe the ludicrous view that their fellow Americans had somehow become secretly racist, practically overnight. Image
Read 13 tweets

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