Wind farms are not killing whales

The claim that ocean wind farms kill whales is one of the most strained and far-fetched false statements from climate deniers.

For an unrelated project, I had the misfortune of having to endure about 15 minutes of a Joe Rogan show with JD Vance as the guest. Pardon my French, but it was an intolerable shitshow of lie, after lie, after lie by two guys who are — unfortunately — very well spoken and articulate rhetoricians.

Then at one point they came out with something I’d never heard before: that wind farms are killing whales. Huh??? Apparently they both learned this from their liege, Donald Trump, in a previous JRE podcast where Trump vomited his verbal diarrhea all over Rogan’s face, who lovingly bathed in it. Since then, it’s become a popular talking point for climate deniers to attack wind power.

Attend a moment of their fondling:

Rogan: One of the things Trump talked about that a lot of people probably weren’t aware of was the damage these wind turbines are doing to whales.

Vance: I had no idea until I watched your podcast with him.

Rogan: I knew a little bit about it, but I didn’t read about it until after I talked to him, and it’s a real problem.

Vance: It’s a very real problem.

I thought If this is actually a thing, I sure haven’t heard of it. It didn’t take much research to learn that no, of course it’s not a thing.

When all this came out, oceanographers at many ocean institutes got deluged with questions from reporters. NOAA put out a white paper stating “There are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities.”

What’s happened is some climate deniers have pointed to some whale beachings, and falsely claimed they were killed by offshore wind farms. It’s never been true, and whale beachings happened long, long before there were offshore wind farms.

When whales are killed by human activity at sea, there are two usual causes: ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear. Oceanographers have hypothesized only two ways that offshore wind farms could pose a danger to whales, and then only during their construction phase:

1. Strikes from construction ships. When a wind farm is being built, there are a lot of ships on site. They might hit a whale, although I couldn’t find any reports of this happening yet in the long history of offshore wind farms. As they represent an insignificant percentage of all the ships on the sea, they hardly seem like the gravest threat.

2. Noise from pile driving. Pile driving is incredibly loud underwater, and marine mammals in the vicinity could easily be deafened, though not otherwise injured and certainly not killed. For this reason, the pile driving is usually done in the season when the whales’ migratory patterns have them far away. Also, some newer wind turbines float at anchor, no pile driving needed.

And for both of these reasons, offshore developers continue employing and improving technology to detect nearby marine mammals so that pile driving can pause and ships can slow when there is a danger. This is required by laws such as the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

It is ironic that both of these hypothesized dangers to whales are exactly the same associated with the construction of offshore oil rigs. I don’t see Trump or Vance wringing their hands for the poor whales impacted by that — could it be that saving the whales is not their true motivation?

Woods Hole also posted an interview debunking this ridiculous nonsense that goes into pretty good detail, and you can check it out here for the full story.

But the real kicker for me in their conversation was the next hairball Vance choked up, that offshore wind farms aren’t possible because turbines don’t work in salt water: