“If you’re into whales, you don’t want windmills,” Trump asserted in an Inauguration Day speech before supporters in Washington D.C.. The same day, Trump issued an executive order withdrawing all areas of the outer continental shelf from offshore wind leasing.

This dramatic reversal for the U.S. offshore wind sector marks a clear victory for offshore wind critics who have long warned that wind projects would devastate Atlantic whale populations. Such arguments have amassed surprising popularity. Earlier this month for example, controversial commentator and self-described journalist [past Breakthrough co-founder?] Michael Shellenberger published a tweet thread to viral acclaim claiming that offshore wind projects off the East Coast of the U.S. threaten the North Atlantic right whale with extinction and calling upon the new Trump administration to “end the slaughter.” In his post, Shellenberger shared Thrown to the Wind, a September 2023 movie produced by his organization Environmental Progress that allegedly investigates the links between wind farm construction and whale deaths.

But upon cursory examination, Thrown to the Wind commits numerous factual errors on critical points, systematically omits contextualizing information, neglects to discuss the many other threats that whales currently face, and generally dresses up uncritical sensationalism with vigorous hand waving and worn appeals to science. In 29 minutes of runtime, Shellenberger’s “documentary” presents only tenuous circumstantial evidence that no credible researcher would deem sufficient to support his bombastic, confident claims that offshore wind projects are killing and will kill endangered whales en masse.

When placed in context of the total sum of human shipping, surveying, and construction activities and broader human impacts upon the sea, a conclusive assertion that wind projects represent the existential threat to right whales rightly appears ridiculous. Moreover, Shellenberger appears wholly uninterested in discussing any technical, operational, or policy solutions that could ameliorate or even eliminate any impacts that offshore wind might pose to whales.

Yet this forgettable cinema project actually highlights a broader long standing problem—the boomer environmental movement’s endemic reliance upon appeals to emotion and simplistic tropes to resist new technology and construction. Despite paying reverent lip service to science, old-school conservationists now routinely eschew evidence-based inquiry in favor of such run-of-the-mill indie documentaries. All of this video content borrows from the same playbook—suggestive tricks of cinematography, hamfisted appeals to emotion, grave sermons on the inviolability of the “precautionary principle”, vague claims about the “fragility of intertwined ecosystems” and the certainty of collapse should the objectionable project of the day move forward. Unfortunately, such misleading messaging is often as effective as it is ubiquitous, as evidenced by the social media splash made by Shellenberger’s posts—20,000 retweets, 48,000 likes, and over a million views.

What this all highlights is how commentators of all stripes readily invoke marine wildlife protection for their own purposes. Shellenberger and others attack the offshore wind sector by spinning a whale slaughter narrative while ignoring far more impactful threats whales face from fishing gear and boat strikes. Yet their tactics parallel those of ocean conservation groups catastrophizing about how seafloor minerals exploration will destroy the ocean carbon cycle—with an equal passion for flashy claims that contradict evidence-based reasoning. Meanwhile mainstream environmentalists lament the miniscule quantities of fish eggs and plankton ingested by a nuclear power plant’s cooling system while simultaneously calling for offshore wind development on the same patch of coast.

All of this agenda-driven messaging suffers from the same lack of holistic perspective. Human civilization already interacts profoundly with the ocean through ship traffic, dredging, transoceanic cables, fishing, naval activity, aquaculture, coastal construction, and countless other activities. All of this meanwhile takes place against a larger backdrop of human impacts from nutrient pollution, plastic waste, ocean acidification, noise, and ocean warming. We already have no choice but to balance new activities like wind farm development, now and forever, within this larger landscape of ubiquitous human activities at sea and human impacts on oceans. If we want to work seriously to advance infrastructure development with well-managed impacts on the ocean environment, then we simply must let go of the traditional environmentalist reliance on selective narratives.

What does Thrown to the Wind get wrong?

From the very start, Shellenberger’s brazen tweet makes a sweeping causal conflation. He claims that all 12 whale deaths off the U.S. East Coast throughout December 2024 occurred because of wind turbines, and that the North Atlantic right whale will go extinct unless Trump puts a stop to wind project development.

Having reviewed the film Thrown to the Wind in detail, such gyrating leaps of illogic accurately describe Shellenberger’s work on the subject.

Thrown to the Wind’s glaring sin is that it noticeably sidesteps discussion of any other possible causes of whale deaths, particularly the two consistent top known causes of death—entanglement in discarded fishing nets and gear, and collisions with boats of all kinds. These two factors accounted for 25 out of 41 known right whale deaths between 2017 and 2024. If a film were really centering whale welfare, one would expect it to touch at least briefly upon all the varied threats that whales face in practice.

It only gets worse from there. None of 12 East Coast whale deaths in December 2024 were right whales, contrary to what a casual reader might take Shellenberger’s tweet to imply. One of these dead whales washed ashore far away in North Carolina, where no wind construction is ongoing. Several of the dead whales appeared on beaches along the north side of Cape Cod, the side opposite from early-stage wind project development off Martha’s Vineyard south of Cape Cod’s southern coast. And while whale autopsy work on most of these dead whales is still in progress, initial findings so far have already ruled out offshore wind as the clear culprit in a couple cases—a Minke whale dead of disease, and a young humpback whale found on Cape Cod’s north side struck head-on by a boat.

Skating over such inconvenient details, Shellenberger and colleagues pin the blame for whale deaths squarely upon underwater noise pollution from offshore wind development. They claim to have shadowed ships performing preliminary work at the Vineyard Winds offshore wind site and to have taken damning measurements of noise emitted from such work.

A trailer clip Shellenberger shared prominently includes an off-the-cuff statement by a boat crew member recording noise from a survey vessel, who remarks “it sounds like somebody is pile driving.” This alludes to the process of pounding monopile structures into the offshore continental shelf, upon which developers later place the wind turbines themselves. Yet the fast-paced chirping sounds recorded from the small boat clearly do not originate from pile driving, which exhibits much longer intervals between strikes. Robert Rand, who the film credits as an acoustics expert, does correctly identify the noise as scanning sonar shortly thereafter in the film. This clarification is left out of the shorter promotional clip. Yet in any case, multibeam and sidescan sonar typically operate at frequencies above what humpback whales can hear and dissipate over short distances, and are used across oceanic industries like fishing, dredging, and scientific surveys. If sonar systems posed an existential threat to large whales, culpability would extend far beyond the offshore wind sector.

The film’s commentary on underwater sound levels also neglects context regarding the volume of the sounds measured. The film crew claims to have measured 150 decibels of sonar sound at a good distance from a specific seafloor surveying vessel in the Vineyard Wind development area, MISS EMMA MCCALL, then around 90 dB of sonar noise at a distance of 0.5 nautical miles in a separate instance. In comparison, the underwater noise from a moving cargo ship can be 190 dB at the source, while some research papers report that whale watching boats can produce 138-169 dB at the source (all decibel measurements are with respect to 1 μPa at 1 m). Coastal dredging to maintain harbor channels for ships and boats generates 180 dB.

How noisy does underwater sound have to be to bother marine life? Natural “ambient noise levels experienced in gentle weather conditions”, as it turns out, typically reach 94 dB. The U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service defines a continuous noise threshold of 120 dB beyond which there is a “possibility of behavioral impacts, generically, to marine mammals.” In other words, not all of the wind farm zone noise measured by the film crew was even particularly distinguishable from background ocean noise let alone harmful, while offshore wind operations are far from the only potentially loud noise sources in the coastal marine environment.

MISS EMMA MCCALL also uses exactly the same gear to survey across the U.S. East and Gulf coasts for offshore cables, underwater pipelines, offshore oil and gas drilling, dredging, government and scientific research, and other seafloor surface characterization activities. As of time of this writing, MISS EMMA MCCALL is docked in the Gulf of Mexico.

At another key point, the film shows charts comparing regional ship traffic in the mid-Atlantic and New England against the locations of reported whale deaths over different time frames. Predictably, the charts do show an increase in ship activity in the Martha’s Vineyard region in 2022 and 2023, while the number and location of whale deaths seems to fluctuate wildly between periods. Shellenberger quips in response to a colleague: “I appreciate your caveat about not suggesting causality, but it’s impossible not to look at these correlations and imagine there’s some connection.” His comment unintentionally reveals the skew characterizing the whole documentary project—a deliberate disinterest in alternative hypotheses, uncertainties, and sources of error.

The film, for example, does not seem particularly concerned with comparing its ship traffic and whale deaths narrative against the actual timeline of wind farm construction. Before 2022, the US built just 7 offshore wind turbines. Five turbines near Block Island, Rhode Island constructed between 2015-2016, and two turbines off Virginia constructed in 2020. This calls into question the significance of the ship traffic imagery shown from December 2016 through the end of 2021.

The film team’s presentation of ship traffic in inconsistent time periods does not account for seasonal patterns of boat traffic around the Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, Cape Cod regions during the summer months. Nor do they consider the seasonal pattern of whale activity, in which whales are present year-round but concentrate off New England largely in the winter and spring months. In response, federal agencies and wind farm developers have also explicitly agreed that developers will concentrate onsite activity during summer months—another factor that the superficial commentary does not consider.

Meanwhile, dead whales washing ashore do not exactly offer the clear narrative that Shellenberger and company would like. Dead whales appearing on beaches are obviously decoupled in time and place from where and when they died, and researchers often require months of autopsy work to investigate the cause of death. ​​Whale strandings, by nature, are a metric carrying considerable error—an inherently incomplete picture of whale mortality with a lot of chance thrown in that could create illusions of trends. The time needed to detect robust trends in whale deaths in response to a new stressor may be quite long. Simultaneously, one can easily imagine other explanations for increasing whale deaths on the U.S. East Coast since 2016, such as infectious disease, marine pollution, climate shifts, or significant shifts in boat traffic during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the film’s final piece of evidence, activist Lisa Linowes claims that a letter to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management by NOAA Chief of Protected Species Sean Hayes warns that wind turbine turbulence will destroy the plankton that whales feed on. This assertion utterly butchers the actual scientific concern the letter by NOAA scientists highlights—a far more mundane risk that turbines could change local patterns of water circulation and stratification, shifting where zooplankton occur. Many anti-wind activist groups regularly cite this NOAA letter, but few groups draw attention to the NOAA scientists’ proposed solution to protect whales from negative impacts—an incremental 20 kilometer shift of the wind farm development zone. This policy suggestion stands in sharp contrast to how Shellenberger’s film frames the threat to whales from offshore wind projects as a yes or no binary, as opposed to any interest in exploring solutions throughout the whole spectrum of impacts and countermeasures.

Make no mistake—this critique of Shellenberger’s film does not seek to dismiss the real concerns regarding possible negative impacts upon whales from offshore wind development. As evidenced by federal regulations, industry countermeasures, and academic research and oversight, such concerns do demand serious study and attention. But members of the public worried about whale welfare are far better off reading the actual NOAA letter and related scientific work themselves rather than wasting time on this “documentary.”

On the future of humans, the ocean, and the Earth

Overall society would benefit by drawing some much-needed lessons from this silly film. Likely, many clean energy advocates and climate hawks have nodded along so far with this critique of Thrown to the Wind.

Yet members of the broader environmental coalition should consider how this film is actually representative of the highly unscientific, typical documentary often celebrated by the environmental movement. Thrown to the Wind’s distorted narrative echoes that of films like the widely-panned Seaspiracy, which spun similarly superficial and unscientific narratives about fishing and ecological collapse. The ranks of junk food movies on nuclear power include examples like Meltdown: Three Mile Island, which earned a Netflix release despite wildly mischaracterizing numerous technical and historical facts and leaning heavily on appeals to emotion.

One could literally shoot the same kind of documentary speculating about how geothermal power will poison the flamingos, complete with an eerie musical score, camera angles lingering melancholically on a flamingo chick, and sermonizing over the sins of industrializing nature. This is a mirror image of classical environmentalist doco-dramas, just mobilized for different ideological purposes. Shellenberger, after proclaiming the “Death of Environmentalism” just two decades ago, has now essentially chosen to leap into the same grave.

Critics do not need to make up arguments against offshore wind. Shellenberger is likely grossly overstating the impacts of offshore wind development on Atlantic whale populations so far, but neither is it reasonable to argue that the old Biden administration goal of expanding offshore wind capacity from 42 megawatts to 30,000 megawatts by 2030 would have zero impacts upon whales. A more rational discussion of impacts management can appreciate the full spectrum of tradeoffs between building many wind farms speedily and cheaply versus slower, limited construction with obligations to implement a whole suite of high-cost mitigative measures.

From a big picture perspective, one can easily imagine that in a techno-economic future where nuclear power or advanced geothermal scale with great commercial success, the entire case for offshore wind could weaken to the point of non-viability. But the future technological breakthroughs are hard to predict and society needs more clean energy tools, not less.

Meanwhile, one thing is certain: the fate of Atlantic whales will depend upon a far richer set of factors—ranging from fishing to navy sonar to climate shifts—than just offshore wind turbines alone.