Offshore wind opponents in Australia, Europe lean on US groups for advice

By Nichola Groom and Lewis Jackson

LOS ANGELES/SYDNEY (Reuters) -Bill Thompson's fight to stop offshore wind farms was once confined to the tiny U.S. state of Rhode Island where he lives. Today, he is part of a global movement.

In April, Thompson, who is director of the activist group Green Oceans, got an email from a fellow anti-offshore wind group more than 10,000 miles (16,000 km) away called Responsible Future (Illawarra Chapter). They were looking for advice on ways to combat projects off Australia’s southeast coast. In August, he got another request, this time from French group PIEBIEM fighting projects in Brittany.

"It's always nice to know that other people are thinking the same way you are," he told Reuters.

These groups are among a dozen or more local activist organizations across the U.S., Europe and Australia who told Reuters they have begun sharing tactics, talking points and other resources in their common mission to derail offshore wind – a development they hope will transform what was once a disorganized scattering of local activists into an increasingly sophisticated global network.

Several anti-offshore wind groups said they believe governments and wind developers, such as Orsted, Avangrid and Shell, are downplaying the environmental damage caused by projects as they promote the renewable energy source as a solution to climate change.

In most cases, the groups are looking to anti-offshore wind activists on the U.S. East Coast for advice, citing their years of success in slowing or cutting the size of major projects, eroding public support for the technology, and winning over conservative politicians like former President Donald Trump, whose administration had supported offshore wind, but now opposes it virulently as the Republican presidential nominee.

Offshore wind is a nascent industry in the U.S. and a key pillar of President Joe Biden's plan to fight climate change. However, plans to install turbines along every U.S. coastline have been challenged by soaring costs and supply chain snags and attracted multiple lawsuits over concerns about the industry's impact on tourism, property values, fishing and marine habitats.

Reuters reporting reveals how the groups' global cooperation presents a fresh challenge to the industry as it allows new opposition groups to quickly tap into years of work done by others. In many cases, it also helps to propagate viral, politically powerful, but sometimes false talking points, including that turbines kill endangered whales and do nothing to slow global warming.

"It's a huge problem, and I don't think the industry has got its head around A, what's happening, and B, what to do about it," Ben Backwell, CEO of the Global Wind Energy Council, a Lisbon-based industry trade group, said.

Opposition groups say they are just getting started.

"We would like to go further, for example with joint declarations, and a better media impact, to alert public opinion," said Eric Sartori, secretary of PIEBIEM, which in French stands for Preserving the Environmental Identity of Southern Brittany and the Islands against Offshore Wind.

A U.S. West Coast group told Reuters this month it is starting a national anti-offshore wind organization. Other groups, including Responsible Future (Illawarra Chapter), said they have discussed forming a global coalition, especially as the rest of the world steps up trying to catch up with China, Britain and Germany, the top producers of offshore wind energy.

INCUBATED ONLINE

Sartori of PIEBIEM said he first contacted Green Oceans and another group in Nantucket after seeing pictures of broken wind turbine blades washing ashore in Massachusetts this summer on social media platform X.

Sartori said Green Oceans' Thompson helped, including by providing him a quote from a U.S. government agency suggesting offshore wind has no climate benefit.

That quote - “it is anticipated there will be no collective impact on global warming as a result of offshore wind projects” - now appears on PIEBIEM's web site next to photos of fiberglass shards littering Nantucket's coast.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management told Reuters the quote was part of an environmental analysis of a project, and that the second half of the sentence - not present on PIEBIEM's site - says wind projects "may beneficially contribute to a broader combination of actions to reduce future impacts from climate change."

BOEM routinely states in its environmental reviews that wind power will not change the course of global warming on its own but can help when combined with other actions.

In other groups, posts range from skepticism about whether wind turbines can survive high winds to fears they will obstruct ocean views. The most viral, however, is that offshore wind development threatens whales.

That claim caught fire in the U.S. in early 2023 after several New Jersey and New York groups blamed the industry for a spate of whale deaths and caught the attention of conservative media.

The claim is now repeated by opponents across the globe, including in France and Australia.

The U.S. government says the claim has no merit, and links most human-caused whale deaths to vessel strikes and entanglement in fishing gear.

A clean energy trade group, American Clean Power Association, said it is addressing opposition by working to communicate the benefits of offshore wind, such as economic growth and energy independence.

"Misinformation undermines trust, fosters confusion, and divides communities at a time we need more American energy," a spokesperson for ACP said.

EXPERT BACKING

Green Oceans has enlisted the support of Spanish marine biologist Josep Lloret, who has raised concerns about the potential environmental harms of offshore wind in the Mediterranean Sea, and hosted a talk by Texas-based journalist Robert Bryce who is skeptical of the renewable energy transition.

Other groups piggy-back off their work.

“Green Oceans ... the beauty of them is they have scientists behind them, so we could look at the papers they are saying are factual and determine they are peer reviewed,” said Jenny Cullen, president of Australia's Responsible Future (Illawarra Chapter).

"It wasn't Charlie down the road using ChatGPT to pull up BS."

The tactics are already helping turn an industry that received little opposition during its early days in Europe decades ago into a political hot potato.

In New Jersey, where opposition to offshore wind is arguably stronger than in any other U.S. state, support for the industry stood at 50% late last year from 80% four years earlier, according to a poll by Stockton University.

Trump has also joined the movement, promising to halt offshore wind projects if he wins back the presidency in November.

His administration several years ago had promoted offshore wind as a part of his “America First” agenda, and held a record offshore wind government auction in 2018.

Trump's campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

In Australia, which is a new target for offshore wind developers, the main opposition party has also swung behind the movement, and public opposition has been growing – reaching 18% in September, from 12% a year earlier, according to polls from Freshwater Strategy.

In France, meanwhile, a Senate committee in July recommended cuts to the nation’s offshore wind target, arguing the technology is expensive and lacks maturity. The nuclear powerhouse is already lagging its neighbours on renewable energy and has fallen behind targets set by the European Commission.

In tandem with their successes, groups opposed to offshore wind have been dogged by accusations they are backed by right-wing interests linked to the fossil fuel industry.

A 2023 study by researchers at Brown University mapped links between U.S. groups and conservative think tanks, including a case in which the Delaware-based Caesar Rodney Institute supported a lawsuit to block the Vineyard Wind project filed by a Nantucket group, ACK4Whales.

Amy DiSibio, a board member of ACK4Whales, said her group is not partisan and has distanced itself from the pro-fossil fuel think tank. A New Jersey group, Protect Our Coast NJ, said the same.

"It takes away from our message," Robin Shaffer, president of Protect Our Coast NJ, said in an interview.

(Reporting by Nichola Groom in Los Angeles and Lewis Jackson in Sydney; Editing by Richard Valdmanis, Marguerita Choy and Stephen Coates)