As offshore wind finally starts getting the policy support it needs to grow, we've been watching and waiting for signs that the fossil fuel industry is setting up front groups to sabotage its growing competitor. We expected to find innocuous-sounding groups making surface-level arguments to pretend their opposition is rooted in care about animals, not fossil fuel profits.
What we did not expect was for one such group to pop up and make its debut hand in hand with two of the most-discredited climate disinformation operations around, Heartland and CFACT.
But that was the case this week, when the tobacco-funded Heartland Institute, disgraced ever since its backfired "Unabomber" billboard campaign a decade ago, teamed up with Marc "Climate Lockdowns are coming so we should storm state capitols like Jan 6th" Morano's CFACT, to announce a new effort to consider filing a lawsuit to block an offshore wind project as part of the "American Coalition for Ocean Protection."
With press releases from both Heartland and CFACT, the ACOP effort is not exactly starting from a clean slate, and reporters immediately began mocking them. Chris D'Angelo from HuffPost, for example, quickly noticed that "the very green-sounding 'American Coalition for Ocean Protection' appears to be little more than an anti-wind org, run by a former Trump EPA transition team member."
Specifically, that would be David Stevenson, who used to be a DuPont executive, but is now the executive director of the Caesar Rodney Institute, a Delaware-based "free market" industry front that's argued in favor of offshore energy production — so long as it's oil drilling.
And it's not like the arguments Stevenson is making now, against offshore wind, wouldn't apply just as much to offshore oil. They're not claiming that offshore wind farms are in any way inherently dangerous for right whales, but instead just that the increase in boat traffic will lead to collisions and inconvenience for the whales.
Which might be true! And if it is, it's also definitely true for offshore oil drilling, which also has additional impacts of, you know, heating and acidifying the oceans in which right whales live, and disrupting their habitats and food chain in myriad ways — and that's just when things are going well and oil rigs aren't leaking or exploding.
And that's exactly the sort of thing that will be in the Environmental Impact Statement that the anti-wind coalition is looking to comment on and sue over. But here's the funny thing: There was no reason for them to announce this! They could have just quietly submitted their comment, under the coalition's name, and it would have made just as much of an impact on the regulatory process as this public fanfare.
What it wouldn't have done, though, is given professional fossil fuel promoters an excuse to attack a fossil fuel competitor in the media … if any reporters were naive enough to fall for their press release in the first place.
Which, thankfully, it doesn't seem there were. Heartland and CFACT's reputation preceded them, marking the effort as a fraud like how the aviator shades and polished jackboots on the supposed hippie at a concert gives them away as ACOP.
