Another Captive Agency Weaponized Against White House Critics

NOAA launches investigation of 30-year-old carcass while allowing offshore wind titans to harm whales, including the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.

On September 4, I received a letter from Mr. Todd J. Smith, Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the National Marine Fisheries Service, United States Department of Commerce. In the letter, the agency states that they are investigating the alleged claim that I collected a specimen from a rotting carcass found on a Massachusetts beach in 1994. It claims that I may have violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

The agency sent its letter just 12 days after I endorsed President Trump on August 23, raising the concern that this investigation is yet another instance of the systematic weaponization of federal enforcement agencies against White House critics.

Here’s my response to his letter, which I sent to Mr. Smith on Oct. 8:

October 8, 2024

RE: Alleged Violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act

Mr. Smith:

This is my response to your inquiry about the unsubstantiated allegation that my collection, in 1994 on a Massachusetts beach, of a specimen from a rotting carcass may have violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act. I never collected a whale specimen in Massachusetts or transported marine mammal specimens across state lines, nor do I have such a specimen in my collection.

While I am impressed with the alacrity with which the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) launched its investigation of the fate of a 30-year-old specimen, the rapid reaction contrasts sharply with your stubborn intransigeance in addressing the apparent massacre of marine mammals by the offshore wind industry. Recently approved offshore wind farms appear to be putting several protected dolphin and whale species, including the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale, in dire crisis.

Your agency has idly watched the approval of 30 offshore wind leases from Maine to North Carolina effectively privatizing 2.3 million acres of ocean bottom, mostly on extremely productive fishing grounds and critical habitat for migratory whales and other marine mammals, including the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.

Many Americans suspect that your agency’s anemic response to this serious emergency may be rooted in its reluctance to obstruct the profit ambitions of a politically powerful cabal of energy titans including Dominion, Shell, and General Electric, and U.S. financial houses Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Wells Fargo, Citibank, J.P. Morgan, and Blackstone. These firms either directly own or are funding projects by foreign energy behemoths including Equinor (Norwegian government), Ørsted (Danish state majority-owned), Iberdrola (Spain), and TotalEnergies (France). The backing by those U.S.-based financial houses allows foreign governments and foreign-owned wind developers to collect tens of billions of dollars in U.S. subsidies and tax credits. These subsidies are provided for by the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden’s signature “environmental” legislation. In the U.S., offshore wind is an environmentally destructive boondoggle. No financial institution will fund these projects in the absence of obscene government subsidies. Offshore wind farms produce energy 300% more expensive than cheap and abundant onshore wind, which I strongly support. 

These companies, based on present offshore wind construction plans that have been approved or are in the process of being approved, will pile-drive 2,200 offshore wind turbines into the ocean floor at intervals of one mile or less across 5,816 square miles. Each turbine with blades will be approximately 1,000 feet tall, on par with the height of the Eiffel Tower.

The advent of the first wind project on Block Island and the arrival of seismic survey boats in 2016 and 2017 were coterminous with an alarming uptick in unexplained whale deaths so unusual that the NOAA Office of Protected Resources declared three Unusual Mortality Events (UMEs): one for humpbacks, one for minke, and one for North Atlantic right whales. The North Atlantic right whale has a total population of fewer than 360 individuals, so every stranding poses a threat to its total extinction.

Prior to the inception of increased seismic survey and construction activity for the wind industry, ship strikes killed 1.4 humpbacks annually from Maine to Virginia. In 2016, as the offshore wind gold rush gathered steam, 26 humpbacks stranded from Maine to North Carolina. Fifteen more stranded from January to April of 2017. Of the 20 humpback whales that were necropsied from that time period, 10 of them were ship strikes. There was no increase in shipping during this period. The only thing that changed was a flurry of offshore wind survey boats, from Massachusetts to North Carolina.

Mass deaths have increased in lockstep with expanding exploration and construction activities. In the 13 months beginning in December of 2022, there were 85 large whale strandings on the East Coast with zero entanglements. A total of 109 large whale deaths occurred from December 1, 2022, through June 6, 2024, mostly within range of offshore wind survey and construction vessels. This amounts to an average of 5.7 dead whales a month for 19 months — a record number of dead whales the likes of which have not occurred in a lifetime. Hundreds of dolphins and porpoises have also died. Only last month, a dead humpback washed ashore on Block Island in the vicinity of the Revolution Wind wind farm, and a dead fin whale landed on Cupsogue Beach on Long Island after being seen the day before floating 12 miles south of Shinnecock, while a young minke whale was found alive struggling in the surf in Montauk, only to die and then to float out to sea.

In September of 2020, 17 environmental groups conveyed to NMFS their “profound concerns” about NMFS’s systematic coddling of the offshore wind farm industry. In that letter, they discussed the 12 previous comment letters they submitted to NMFS since 2018 identifying your agency’s multiple failures in enforcing the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA). They repeatedly urged your agency to “require even stronger protections … for marine site characterization surveys required for offshore wind development” in compliance with the MMPA. Despite their urgings, NMFS has taken no meaningful steps to mitigate the massacre.

Instead of calling an immediate moratorium on offshore wind development, government regulators continued to permit lethally deficient Incidental Harassment Authorizations (IHAs) that allow the wind farm industry to “take” Atlantic whales by the drove. Your reckless dereliction of your statutory obligations to protect these magnificent creatures has resulted in up to 108 vessels conducting geophysical survey activities over more than 10,000 survey days from 2017 to 2022. Independent analysis of your own data suggests that these activities have already resulted in more than 113,000 instances of “taking” of marine mammals, including 402 North Atlantic right whales, 647 endangered fin whales, 53 endangered sei whales, 93 endangered sperm whales, 494 humpback whales, 329 minke whales, and 12,493 harbor porpoises. These are all noise-vulnerable marine mammal species.

Newer analysis conducted in 2023 predicted that when NOAA’s currently authorized offshore wind activities were combined with then-proposed and yet-to-be-authorized offshore wind activities, the impacted number of marine mammals would rise astronomically to over 630,000 animals. Industry proposals included up to 996 requests for Level B harassment takes of critically endangered North Atlantic right whales. That number is now almost triple the population size of the species, suggesting that the species may go extinct as a result of your hand-sitting. NOAA has approved just one project off the coast of New England that, on its own, will “take” 126 North Atlantic right whales.

On January 9, 2023, after six large whales had stranded on New Jersey and New York beaches in as many weeks, five grassroots environmental groups demanded a federal investigation into the whale deaths.

They also submitted a letter to President Biden demanding:

“an immediate investigation into the marine mammal mortalities from Cape May, NJ, to Montauk Point, NY, and/or beyond, be conducted by qualified scientists including those of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and a halt to all current lessees’ offshore wind energy development activity within the Atlantic Ocean from Cape May, NJ, to Montauk Point, NY, including assessment, characterization, and construction-related activities until an investigation has been conducted.”

Instead of vigorously investigating these mortalities and taking steps to end this massacre, your agency has bent over backwards to enable the slaughter to continue. NOAA has protected the offshore wind industry — with its strong connections to the Democratic Party — by refusing to conduct basic science that might link the slaughter to industry activities. This strategic lethargy in conducting vital and obvious studies allows your agency, and by extension, the wind industry, to conveniently claim, as Benjamin Laws did on January of 2023, “There is no information supporting that any of the equipment that’s being used in support of wind development for these site characterization surveys could directly lead to the death of a whale.”

I offer just one of many examples of this species of agency sandbagging: The fin, humpback, minke, sei, and right whales that are now dying in droves are all part of the Mysticetes family of whales that all hear in low frequency. Yet your agency has stubbornly refused to collect direct hearing data from large whales to determine whether offshore wind survey boats and seismic survey machinery are emitting sounds within this hearing profile.

Here is another example: In the Gulf of Mexico, NOAA requires immediate survey shutdowns in the event of live mammal strandings or millings within 50 km of oil and gas survey activity. In deference to powerhouse offshore wind titans, NOAA has ignored those long-standing IHA rules for offshore wind in the Atlantic, despite the fact that the Gulf of Mexico surveys use the same equipment as the Atlantic surveys and NOAA permits the same levels of marine mammal impacts for both. 

Furthermore, only Atlantic offshore wind surveys are expected to impact multiple endangered whale populations, and only in the Atlantic have energy development activities coincided in time and space with unprecedented whale deaths. This suggests that federal agencies should be providing more protections for impacted marine mammals in the Atlantic, not less. Yet NOAA continues to turn a blind eye, inexplicably applying weaker Marine Mammal Protection Act standards for Atlantic wind farms than for identical High-Resolution Geophysical (HRG) surveys in the Gulf of Mexico. The Marine Mammal Protection Act does not allow for differential application to the same activity; it is designed to protect mammals, not foreign energy companies and their Wall Street financiers.

Your agency has also stonewalled the issuance of uniform necropsy protocols that might point a finger at offshore wind. It’s obvious that the standardized protocol should include early examination of ear damage in dead whales. Despite the pleadings of the environmental community, you have refused to recommend this procedure. This step is so fundamental that it suggests a deliberate dereliction. In fact, your agency actually allows what partial or full necropsies of dead whales do occur to be conducted by Marine Mammal Stranding Network partners that have been funded by offshore wind companies and even maintain offshore wind executives, lobbyists, and third-party contractors on their board, ensuring that no “investigation” taken by such NOAA partners is objective.

In addition, commercial fishermen complain that the areas around the turbines — the Atlantic cod’s critical spawning grounds — have been emptied of fish. This outcome is consistent with your agency’s early warning that the turbines may cause the collapse of the cod fishery.

You sent the investigatory letter to me on September 4, just 12 days after my August 23 endorsement of President Trump, raising the issue that this investigation is yet another salient in the systematic weaponization of federal enforcement agencies against White House critics. 

You acknowledge that you launched your investigation publicly on August 26, at the urging of the Center for Biological Diversity, a formerly effective NGO that now functions as a subsidiary of the DNC.

Your enthusiasm in launching an investigation based upon an unsubstantiated anecdote of a specimen collected from a rotting corpse three decades ago compares unfavorably with your abject failure to stop, much less investigate, the ongoing slaughter of whales by politically connected energy companies and financial houses that number among the Democratic Party’s biggest patrons. Your agency’s systematic insouciance is likely to result in the permanent extinction of the very species you are charged with protecting. Please let me know the steps that you plan to take to avert this agency-sanctioned calamity to Atlantic whale populations.