RKF Jr. responds to NOAA investigating his 30-year old rotting whale carcass: ‘Contrasts sharply with your stubborn intransigeance in addressing the apparent massacre of marine mammals by the offshore wind industry’
Another Captive Agency Weaponized Against White House Critics
Another Captive Agency Weaponized Against White House Critics
NOAA launches investigation of 30-year-old carcass while allowing offshore wind titans to harm whales, including the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.
By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
On September 4, I received a letter from Mr. Todd J. Smith, Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the National Marine Fisheries Service, United States Department of Commerce. In the letter, the agency states that they are investigating the alleged claim that I collected a specimen from a rotting carcass found on a Massachusetts beach in 1994. It claims that I may have violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
The agency sent its letter just 12 days after I endorsed President Trump on August 23, raising the concern that this investigation is yet another instance of the systematic weaponization of federal enforcement agencies against White House critics.
Here’s my response to his letter, which I sent to Mr. Smith on Oct. 8:
October 8, 2024
RE: Alleged Violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act
Mr. Smith:
This is my response to your inquiry about the unsubstantiated allegation that my collection, in 1994 on a Massachusetts beach, of a specimen from a rotting carcass may have violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act. I never collected a whale specimen in Massachusetts or transported marine mammal specimens across state lines, nor do I have such a specimen in my collection.
While I am impressed with the alacrity with which the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) launched its investigation of the fate of a 30-year-old specimen, the rapid reaction contrasts sharply with your stubborn intransigeance in addressing the apparent massacre of marine mammals by the offshore wind industry. Recently approved offshore wind farms appear to be putting several protected dolphin and whale species, including the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale, in dire crisis.
Your agency has idly watched the approval of 30 offshore wind leases from Maine to North Carolina effectively privatizing 2.3 million acres of ocean bottom, mostly on extremely productive fishing grounds and critical habitat for migratory whales and other marine mammals, including the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.
Many Americans suspect that your agency’s anemic response to this serious emergency may be rooted in its reluctance to obstruct the profit ambitions of a politically powerful cabal of energy titans including Dominion, Shell, and General Electric, and U.S. financial houses Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Wells Fargo, Citibank, J.P. Morgan, and Blackstone. These firms either directly own or are funding projects by foreign energy behemoths including Equinor (Norwegian government), Ørsted (Danish state majority-owned), Iberdrola (Spain), and TotalEnergies (France). The backing by those U.S.-based financial houses allows foreign governments and foreign-owned wind developers to collect tens of billions of dollars in U.S. subsidies and tax credits. These subsidies are provided for by the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden’s signature “environmental” legislation. In the U.S., offshore wind is an environmentally destructive boondoggle. No financial institution will fund these projects in the absence of obscene government subsidies. Offshore wind farms produce energy 300% more expensive than cheap and abundant onshore wind, which I strongly support.
These companies, based on present offshore wind construction plans that have been approved or are in the process of being approved, will pile-drive 2,200 offshore wind turbines into the ocean floor at intervals of one mile or less across 5,816 square miles. Each turbine with blades will be approximately 1,000 feet tall, on par with the height of the Eiffel Tower.
The advent of the first wind project on Block Island and the arrival of seismic survey boats in 2016 and 2017 were coterminous with an alarming uptick in unexplained whale deaths so unusual that the NOAA Office of Protected Resources declared three Unusual Mortality Events (UMEs): one for humpbacks, one for minke, and one for North Atlantic right whales. The North Atlantic right whale has a total population of fewer than 360 individuals, so every stranding poses a threat to its total extinction.
Prior to the inception of increased seismic survey and construction activity for the wind industry, ship strikes killed 1.4 humpbacks annually from Maine to Virginia. In 2016, as the offshore wind gold rush gathered steam, 26 humpbacks stranded from Maine to North Carolina. Fifteen more stranded from January to April of 2017. Of the 20 humpback whales that were necropsied from that time period, 10 of them were ship strikes. There was no increase in shipping during this period. The only thing that changed was a flurry of offshore wind survey boats, from Massachusetts to North Carolina.
Mass deaths have increased in lockstep with expanding exploration and construction activities. In the 13 months beginning in December of 2022, there were 85 large whale strandings on the East Coast with zero entanglements. A total of 109 large whale deaths occurred from December 1, 2022, through June 6, 2024, mostly within range of offshore wind survey and construction vessels. This amounts to an average of 5.7 dead whales a month for 19 months — a record number of dead whales the likes of which have not occurred in a lifetime. Hundreds of dolphins and porpoises have also died. Only last month, a dead humpback washed ashore on Block Island in the vicinity of the Revolution Wind wind farm, and a dead fin whale landed on Cupsogue Beach on Long Island after being seen the day before floating 12 miles south of Shinnecock, while a young minke whale was found alive struggling in the surf in Montauk, only to die and then to float out to sea.
In September of 2020, 17 environmental groups conveyed to NMFS their “profound concerns” about NMFS’s systematic coddling of the offshore wind farm industry. In that letter, they discussed the 12 previous comment letters they submitted to NMFS since 2018 identifying your agency’s multiple failures in enforcing the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA). They repeatedly urged your agency to “require even stronger protections … for marine site characterization surveys required for offshore wind development” in compliance with the MMPA. Despite their urgings, NMFS has taken no meaningful steps to mitigate the massacre.
Instead of calling an immediate moratorium on offshore wind development, government regulators continued to permit lethally deficient Incidental Harassment Authorizations (IHAs) that allow the wind farm industry to “take” Atlantic whales by the drove. Your reckless dereliction of your statutory obligations to protect these magnificent creatures has resulted in up to 108 vessels conducting geophysical survey activities over more than 10,000 survey days from 2017 to 2022. Independent analysis of your own data suggests that these activities have already resulted in more than 113,000 instances of “taking” of marine mammals, including 402 North Atlantic right whales, 647 endangered fin whales, 53 endangered sei whales, 93 endangered sperm whales, 494 humpback whales, 329 minke whales, and 12,493 harbor porpoises. These are all noise-vulnerable marine mammal species.