Open Letter to Whale Conservation Groups with Conflicts of Interest
Open Letter to Whale Conservation Groups with Conflicts of Interest
Peter de Menocal, President and Director, Woods Hole Oceanography Institute
Vikki N. Spruill, President and CEO, New England Aquarium
Elizabeth Turnbull Henry, President, Environmental League of Massachusetts
Stephen M. Coan, President and CEO, Mystic Aquarium
Sarah Oktay, Executive Director, Center for Coastal Studies
Jeff Trandahl, Executive Director and CEO, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation
Chris Bason, Executive Director, Delaware Center for the Inland Bays
Elizabeth Gray, CEO, National Audubon Society
Jennifer Morris, CEO, The Nature Conservancy
Carter Roberts, President and CEO, World Wildlife Fund
Azzedine Downes, President and CEO, International Fund for Animal Welfare
Mike Bartlett, President, The Lobster Foundation
Kathy Phillips, Executive Director, Assateague Coastal Trust
Lenore Tedescao, Executive Director, Wetlands Institute
J. Andrew Ely, Executive Director, Project Oceanology
Kristen Yarincik, Director, National Ocean Sciences Bowl
Kevin Smith, Executive Director, Maryland Coastal Bays Program
Roger Fleming and Zack Klyver, co-founders, Blue Planet Strategies
Daniel McKiernan, Director, Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries
Dear Marine Conservation Leaders:
We are writing you as long-time conservation and environmental activists dedicated to protecting the critically-endangered North Atlantic right whale. We respect your decades of well-meaning and highly effective advocacy, educational efforts, and research.
However, we are concerned that financial conflicts of interest are interfering with your analysis of offshore wind projects. We are particularly concerned that the construction and operation of industrial wind turbines along the Atlantic Coast will harm right whales.
Your groups have accepted donations, sponsorships, and grants from offshore wind energy companies. Attached to this letter is a document that outlines each donation from wind companies that we believe constitutes a conflict of interest.
Through our research, we identified 36 separate examples of donations constituting a conflict of interest. Conservatively estimated, wind companies and foundations that receive wind company money have donated nearly $4.3 million to environmental organizations. This does not include 16 donations of undisclosed value, or pledges whose status we were unable to confirm. Of this total, $1.1 million coming from Avangrid and Shell were passed through the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation before being distributed to specific groups.
Offshore wind is an industry like any other. Attention to the impacts of its industrial wind projects on the environment is a threat to corporate profits and investors. When offshore wind companies donate to environmental groups, they often frame their donations as a way to mitigate the impacts of their projects by funding conservation research. But such research may be mere tokenism that serves to distract from the immediate risks of the proposed project.
In full disclosure, we have no financial conflicts of interest whatsoever relating to offshore wind or other energy projects, and our finances are open to journalists and others to review.
Scientists, some of whom belong to your organizations, have repeatedly raised the alarm that the right whale population is rapidly declining. Several of your organizations signed letters in September 2020 and March 2021 stating that “[t]he best available scientific information shows that the North Atlantic right whale population cannot withstand any additional stressors; any potential interruption of foraging behavior may lead to population level effects and is of critical concern.”
Yet many of your organizations have promoted the current administration policy to site 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind turbines along the East Coast by 2030 despite risks to threatened and endangered marine mammals, including the North Atlantic right whale. Vineyard Wind I and South Fork Wind, which are furthest along in development, will place dozens of turbines and related infrastructure in southern New England waters now recognized as year-round core North Atlantic right whale foraging habitat. However, the mitigation requirements meant to protect the right whales during project construction are certain to fail because they are based on outdated science that assumes seasonal, not year-round whale activity. We have shared our concerns on this and other mitigation methods in an open letter, which you can find on our website.
Environmental organizations claim that these first projects will serve as a test bed to determine the effectiveness of their mitigations but such research will take years to validate. Other projects proposed for New York, New Jersey, and Maryland have been under development for several years. To our knowledge, there is no intent to halt project development in order for the research to happen. This is an unacceptable position given the perilous state of the right whale.
Further, researchers now acknowledge that the impacts of offshore wind development on right whales are unknown.
However, it is documented that excess noise can cause habitat displacement, hearing loss, and stress in whales, and impede whales from communicating to one another. Additionally, the construction of wind turbines will increase vessel traffic, which could lead to ship strikes, a leading cause of whale deaths.
The public relies on your expertise and authority to conserve our marine environment. These conflicts of interest call into question that authority.
We request you disclose publicly the quantity and timing of all donations you have received from the offshore wind and other energy industries and encourage you to clarify your policy on donations from such industries, and to refuse future donations if they might constitute a conflict of interest.
Our oceans need stalwart defenders now more than ever. We ask you to follow the steps we outlined and thus bravely assert your role as some of our country’s best protectors of marine species. If the public trusts you, your voices could be what saves the right whale from extinction.
Sincerely,
The Save Right Whales Coalition
Mary Chalke, Cape and Islands Wildlife Conservation Alliance
Janet Christensen-Lewis, Kent Conservation and Preservation Alliance
Suzanne Hornick, Protect Our Coast NJ
Si Kinsella, OSWSouthFork.info
Lisa Linowes, Wildlife Energy and Community Coalition
Michael Shellenberger, Environmental Progress