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Fossil-Fueled Front Groups' Disinfo Spins Up NIMBY Opposition to Offshore Wind [1]

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Date: 2023-02-09  

Is there currently a "nasty fight between environmental groups" over right whales, as a recent Washington Times headline suggests? Or is there a nasty fight between environmental organizations and fossil fuel-backed NIMBY groups opposed to offshore wind?

The first would be a surprising story of conflict within a normally united advocacy space. The second is an all-too-familiar rerun of the well-known disinformation playbook.

As you may guess, The Washington Times story falls into the latter camp, as it turns out that there's less fun, dramatic in-fighting between environmentalists than there is an attempt to convince reporters as much to distract from the fossil fuel ties that are polluting the debate.

Environmentalists aren't opposing offshore wind development over the risk to right whales for a very simple reason: There's literally no evidence that offshore wind development is the reason for any of the recent whale strandings! Instead, federal investigations have put the blame on the usual suspects: vessel strikes and entanglements in fishing gear. Those are the threats that the real environmentalists are worried about and that the Not-In-My-Back-Yard and fossil-fueled groups all seem to ignore in favor of yelling about wind.

And an even bigger threat is that fossil fuel pollution is warming the climate, causing ocean temperatures to rise and disrupting marine ecosystems. In fact, a 2021 study pointed to climate change as the cause of increased right whale deaths!

This is why the opposition to offshore wind isn't coming from any long-established green groups but rather from fossil fuel-affiliated spokespeople or citing their materials . For example, groups with anodyne names like Protect our Oceans NJ, Save Long Beach Island , and Nantucket Residents Against Turbines ( ACK RATS ) are involved in lawsuits to block offshore wind, brought by the American Coalition for Ocean Protection . The coalition is actually backed by the Caesar Rodney Institute, a think tank led by David Stevenson, a former member of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team.

Stevenson's not the only disinfo expert at work on the issue. The polluter-funded Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) is financing a lawsuit that challenges the Massachusetts Vineyard Wind project and is also based on fishing and wildlife concerns.

That's not to say that everyone opposed to offshore wind is always an industry shill. NIMBYs have bedeviled development projects of all shapes and sizes, and we want to be very clear that public input is an absolutely vital tool for protecting marginalized communities from further environmental racism.

But what we're seeing here is that the fossil fuel industry is so pervasive that even when people aren't deliberately working for the industry, their opposition relies on the industry's disinformation. If not for Fox News clips, TPPF papers, and other products, grassroots NIMBYs would run out of content to share and imagined impacts to get mad about. If not for the industry's outsourced disinformation and public relations machine, those local voices would never be planted in prominent news stories.

And if not for the teams of lawyers earning fossil-fueled salaries, small local NIMBY groups certainly wouldn't have the financial resources to bring lawsuits.

So while not everyone opposed to offshore wind is doing it solely because they work for the fossil fuel industry, the industry's disinfo producers are certainly working for all of them!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/9/2152010/-Fossil-Fueled-Front-Groups-Disinfo-Spins-Up-NIMBY-Opposition-to-Offshore-Wind

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