Scientists, advocates, and the media are at odds over the cause of whale deaths along the Atlantic Coast.
Former President Donald Trump said recently that “windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before.”
His comments, made at a campaign rally in South Carolina, were quickly ground through the fact-checking mills of legacy media outlets such as The Guardian and the BBC.
“They’re washing up ashore. I saw it this weekend, three of them came up. You wouldn’t see it once a year. Now they’re coming up on a weekly basis,” President Trump said.
The Guardian called his allegation a “lengthy and largely baseless attack on wind turbines for causing large numbers of whales to die, claiming that ‘windmills’ are making the cetaceans ‘crazy’ and ‘a little batty.'”
The BBC lamented that clips of the former president’s speech had exceeded 9 million views but that his “claims are not backed up by evidence.”
President Trump also said only one whale had been killed off the coast of South Carolina in the past 50 years, but now the numbers are increasing.
The BBC responded, citing a 2015 South Carolina Department of Natural Resources document stating that since 1993, there have been six humpback whale strandings.
The BBC quoted Rob Deaville with the Zoological Society of London’s Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme, who said whale deaths are caused by the fishing industry and ship strikes.
“To talk about wind farms being a problem takes away discussion around the very real threats that are a problem for those species,” Mr. Deaville told the BBC.
He said that there’s been no conclusive link between whale deaths and wind farms in the UK.
Andrew Read, commissioner of the U.S.-based Marine Mammal Commission, told The Guardian that “there’s no scientific evidence whatsoever that wind turbines, or surveying for wind turbines, is causing any whale deaths at all.”
Although there are broader concerns over industrializing the ocean, he said whale deaths are caused by vessel strikes, entanglement in fishing gear, and warming of the ocean caused by climate change.
“The population of humpback whales, in particular, is recovering from being hunted and they are coming closer to the coast to feed on prey, which means they are being hit as they come into shipping lanes, or being caught up in nets,” Mr. Read said.
He said people protesting ocean-based wind turbines are being manipulated by “fossil fuel interests,” who are threatened by so-called clean energy.
Whales and Turbines
In August, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported to The Epoch Times that there had been 65 large whale deaths along the East Coast since December 2022. Three dead whales washed ashore in one week in Fire Island, New York; Long Branch, New Jersey; and Long Beach, New York.
