Fact checking Donald Trump: Are whales dying because of windmills?

By F D Flam

President-elect Donald Trump has used saving whales, of all things, as a reason he has promised to shut down all US offshore wind energy projects when he takes office. He claims windmills make noise, “causing them to die in numbers never seen before” and it’s “driving them crazy.” He lamented the fate of whales just days before the election on the Joe Rogan show.

It’s a theory that’s been touted repeatedly on Fox News and pushed by outfits that sound like environmental groups but receive funding from the fossil fuel industry. It’s tempting to label this as misinformation. However, some scientists worry that constructing massive wind farms can disturb sea life, including whales, which depend on sound to communicate and navigate.

It shouldn’t take too much nuance to acknowledge the potential for harm from the wind industry while also dismissing the absurd idea that whales will benefit in any way from replacing wind energy with more fossil fuel extraction. Fossil fuels are not only dirtier but their extraction and transport create far more underwater noise.

But with Trump’s election, some power companies are already pulling back on plans. TotalEnergies SE said this week that it had halted a project to build enough offshore windmills to supply energy to 3 million people. Still, it will be difficult for Trump to keep his pledge to kill all offshore wind development on “Day One.” Experts say expanding offshore wind aligns with Trump’s economic and energy-independence goals.

Scientists have a range of views on the potential harm of wind energy production. Josh Axelrod argued in Scientific American that the practice isn’t what’s killing whales, and others have asserted there is no evidence that wind power is tied to the creatures’ deaths.

But the absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. Years of research into underwater noise shows an ever-increasing industrial din is toxic to whales and many other life forms. Some scientists worry that noise drives whales to shallow water, where they become stranded on beaches or wash up dead.

Others have advocated that the US adopt noise mitigation measures, which are mandatory in Europe. I heard that view at a recent meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. There, Michael Stocker, an expert in bioacoustics, talked about the impact of offshore wind on whale deaths.

Stocker, founder of the California-based group Ocean Conservation Research, said he was asked to investigate a string of whale deaths off the coast of New Jersey in late 2022 and early 2023. The deaths coincided with 11 surveys using sound waves to map the sea floor in preparation for wind farm construction. Most of the dead whales showed signs of injury from ship strikes, but he wondered whether the noise from so many concurrent surveys contributed by compromising the animals’ vigilance.

He’s not convinced we know enough about the effects of constructing the massive farms to be sure they’re safe. The surveying is just the beginning, he said, followed by months of much louder pile driving.

But the surveys and even the pile driving associated with wind turbines are faint compared with the seismic surveys used to prospect for offshore oil. These surveys involve blasting the oceans with air guns to map deep beneath the sea floor, and the sound carries for hundreds of miles.

Wind farm surveys and construction “are a teeny, weeny little impact compared to the absolutely monstrous, hellacious impact of seismic air guns,” said David Haskell, an evolutionary biologist who wrote about underwater noise in his book Sounds Wild and Broken. “We're creating an acoustic hell for many marine creatures.”

It’s so hellish, he told me, partly because these animals’ bodies are mostly water. The sound travels through water, so the noise goes through their bodies. Whales use sound to communicate, and some species use echolocation to detect prey and make out their surroundings in murky or dark water. “Noise pollution is totally messing with the main way in which they sense the world, including each other,” he said.

Shipping is the most relentless source of underwater noise, and about half of shipping is devoted to moving fossil fuels, Haskell said.

Noise has an impact on all kinds of marine creatures and can even kill some small organisms, said Carlos Duarte, a biologist at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and lead author of a 2021 paper in Science titled The soundscape of the Anthropocene ocean. Ships create booming underwater noise because their propellers cause cavitation — the implosion of bubbles. That can be reduced by a factor of 10, he said, by switching to electric ships.

Whales got some relief when shipping dropped following 9/11. Scientists monitoring the animals’ stress by measuring hormones in their waste saw the levels plummet dramatically.

Duarte said April 2020 was also a good month for marine life due to the pandemic-related lockdown period. Although underwater noise was reduced by only 20 per cent, whales, orcas, sharks and sea turtles began returning to areas they had long abandoned.

It’s also possible to mitigate the noise from pile driving during wind turbine construction by creating a sort of curtain made of bubbles, he said. The noise from the pile driving bounces off the surrounding bubbles, so most of it is reflected rather than reverberated through the ocean. This is the process required in Europe, he said.

Biologist Erin Meyer-Gutbrod, who studies the nearly extinct right whale, said that as threats go, wind farms are minor. The species numbers just 372, and most die from getting caught in fishing gear, being hit by boats, and losing food sources as the climate rapidly changes.

But Stocker, the acoustics expert, worries we don’t know all the unintended harm that could come from the rapid increase in offshore wind production. “It’s disingenuous for the fossil fuel guys to shed mock turtle tears over whales,” he said. But he couldn’t rule out the wind farm surveys as a factor in the whale deaths off the New Jersey coast. “Until we start talking about using less energy, I think we're blowing smoke,” he said.

It would be a mistake to react to Trump’s misguided concern with overconfident assertions that offshore wind power is automatically harmless to marine life. The crucial point is that it can be made reasonably safe, while there’s no safe way to implement a “drill, baby, drill” strategy and continue to power the world with massive amounts of fossil fuel.

If we really care about whales, even wind power should be subject to continued study and noise mitigation.