Trump adviser involved in Vineyard Wind opposition - E&E News

Gunnar Larson g at xny.io
Tue Oct 18 18:33:33 PDT 2022


"Trump adviser involved in Vineyard Wind opposition"
https://www.eenews.net/articles/trump-adviser-involved-in-vineyard-wind-opposition/#:~:text=Trump%20adviser%20involved%20in%20Vineyard%20Wind%20opposition


David Stevenson, policy director at the Caesar Rodney Institute,
participates in a press conference yesterday in Boston announcing a lawsuit
that aims to block construction of Vineyard Wind, the first major offshore
wind facility approved in the United States. AP Photo/Philip Marcelo

The two Nantucket women said they were suing the federal government because
they wanted to save the North Atlantic right whale from offshore wind. Then
a former member of President Trump’s EPA transition team stepped to the
microphone to commend them for their bravery.

“They did it voluntarily,” David Stevenson, the former Trump adviser, said
of the women. “They’re not getting anything out of this other than trying
to save the whales, save Nantucket.”

So went a press conference outside the Massachusetts State House yesterday,
where offshore wind critics announced a lawsuit challenging the federal
government’s approval of Vineyard Wind, the first major offshore wind
project in America to be issued an environmental permit.
Advertisement

The lawsuit marks a new chapter in a decadeslong push to build offshore
wind farms in America. Cape Wind, the first offshore wind project proposed
in the U.S. waters, was sunk by nearly two decades of legal battles. Now,
the question is whether they will sink a second generation of projects.

Vineyard Wind, a 62-turbine project 12 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard, is
the first to run the legal gauntlet. The $2.8 billion project is the only
utility-scale offshore wind project to receive a final permit from the
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. Other projects could soon follow. BOEM,
as the bureau is known, has committed to reviewing 16 others along the
Eastern Seaboard by the end of President Biden’s first term.

The lawsuit
<https://subscriber.politicopro.com/f/eenews/?id=0000017b-7fbb-d1d1-a57f-ffbb8efb0000>
filed
by Nantucket Residents Against Turbines in the U.S. District Court District
of Massachusetts argues that the bureau failed to consider the impact of
Vineyard Wind on right whales. It seeks to vacate the permit.

It’s not the first time opponents have challenged BOEM’s review of Vineyard
Wind. That distinction belongs to a small-scale solar developer who owns a
vacation house on Martha’s Vineyard (*Climatewire
<https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eenews/2021/07/20/solar-executive-with-ocean-views-sues-vineyard-wind-238125>*,
July 20).

But the Nantucket suit illustrates how critics of offshore wind are
starting to organize in opposition to projects along the East Coast.
Nantucket Residents Against Turbines is a part of the American Coalition
for Ocean Protection, a network of community groups that are fighting
offshore wind developments, Stevenson said.

The Caesar Rodney Institute, a libertarian think tank where Stevenson
serves as director of the Center for Energy and the Environment
<https://www.caesarrodney.org/CRI-staff/David-T-Stevenson.htm>, is
spearheading a legal defense fund to fight offshore wind up and down the
Eastern Seaboard.

“We communicate with each other, help each other out with resources and
ideas,” he said. “You’ve got the emotional power of the beach community,
that comes without a lot of background in how to get things done, with
these state policy groups.”

Community groups like Nantucket Residents Against Turbines played a key
role in defeating Cape Wind. At the time, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket
Sound unleashed a storm of legal action against Cape Wind with funding from
conservative industrialists like William Koch.

Stevenson said donations to the American Coalition for Ocean Protection
have come from individual property owners along the coast, though he
declined to identify any.

“So far there is no Koch money, not that we wouldn’t take it,” he said.

The Caesar Rodney Institute recently helped establish a legal defense fund
to finance lawsuits against offshore wind projects. It has raised $75,000
to date with the goal of raising $500,000, Stevenson said. He said the
money would be directed to plaintiffs with standing and a strong legal
case. None has yet gone to Nantucket Residents Against Turbines.

But the lawsuit sets an important precedent, Stevenson said.

“The approval of the Vineyard Wind is kind of a hinge point,” he said. “If
it gets approved and it stands with the shoddy job they did on the EIS
[environmental impact statement], they’ll approve the rest of them. The
coalition partners agree we need to stop the Vineyard Wind project.”


Whale extinction ‘inevitable’

Vallorie Oliver, the founder of Nantucket Residents Against Turbines, is
listed as the sole plaintiff in the case.

BOEM had failed to provide scientific justification for giving Vineyard
Wind an incidental take permit for right whales, Oliver told reporters at
the press conference. The permit enables the developer to drive monopoles
into the seabed in the vicinity of up to 20 whales. Noise from pile driving
is considered harassment.

A biological assessment
<https://subscriber.politicopro.com/f/eenews/?id=0000017b-7fbc-d290-a57b-fffefffe0000>
conducted
by NOAA Fisheries as part of BOEM’s analysis found pile driving activity
could temporarily force right whales to go elsewhere, but was unlikely to
injure or kill them.

“Once these installations are erected and the damage is done, that is not
the time for regret, especially for the North Atlantic right whale, whose
extinction will then most surely be inevitable,” Oliver said.

Right whales and offshore wind projects have the potential to come into
conflict. A recent study
<https://www.int-res.com/articles/esr2021/45/n045p251.pdf> by the New
England Aquarium found the whales’ presence appears to be increasing in the
waters off southern New England, where seven wind developments have been
proposed.

Whale sightings were common between 2011 and 2015 just north of the area
where Vineyard Wind and six other developments have been proposed, the
study found. They moved into the eastern area of the wind development area
in the winters of 2017 to 2019.

The whales were even more prevalent during the spring months.

“Implementing mitigation procedures in coordination with these findings
will be crucial in lessening the potential impacts on right whales from
construction noise, increased vessel traffic, and habitat disruption in
this region,” the aquarium researchers wrote.

Funding for the aquarium study was provided by BOEM and the Massachusetts
Clean Energy Center, a state entity that supports the build-out of
renewable energy in the Bay State.

BOEM and Vineyard Wind declined comment on the lawsuit.


‘No … serious injury of any kind’

The developer, a joint venture of Avangrid Inc. and Copenhagen
Infrastructure Partners, has made efforts to limit its impact on whales.

In 2019, Vineyard Wind agreed to a series of voluntary mitigation measures
as part of a deal <https://www.vineyardwind.com/protecting-environment> with
the Natural Resources Defense Council, National Wildlife Federation and
Conservation Law Foundation. The deal calls for no pile driving between
Jan. 1 and April 30 and requires the developer to halt pile driving if
whales are sighted near the area at other times of the year.

Those conditions were incorporated into BOEM’s permit.

The biological assessment issued by NOAA Fisheries found that pile-driving
events would last up to three hours, but would be unlikely to harm the
animal if whales went undetected.

“No non-auditory injury, serious injury of any kind, or mortality is
anticipated,” the opinion stated.

Fishing gear, which can entangle whales and kill them, and vessel strikes
are the primary cause for the dangerous drop in the right whale population
over the last decade, the New England Aquarium found. It estimated the
whale’s total population is 356.

NOAA, which regulates commercial fisheries, is reportedly weighing more
stringent regulations on fishing gear in an attempt to stop the decline of
right whales.

While offshore wind critics said they were concerned about Vineyard Wind’s
impact on right whales, they said they were not following the NOAA proposal
and could not offer an opinion on what it would mean for the animal.

“The fishermen say they are already obeying all the restrictions,”
Stevenson said.


‘I am not a denier’

Stevenson made a name for himself in conservative circles for fighting
proposed climate policies. He has opposed Pennsylvania’s decision to join
the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap and trade program for power
plants, and is on the board of policy advisers
<https://www.heartland.org/about-us/who-we-are/david-t-stevenson> at the
Heritage Institute, a conservative think tank that has questioned the
science of climate change (*Energywire*
<https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eenews/2020/02/18/pas-future-in-rggi-uncertain-as-coal-labor-groups-attack-018873>,
Feb. 18, 2020).

At EPA, Stevenson was a part of a transition team that sought agency
records on controversies like “Climate Gate,” the 2009 hacking of the
University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit that some conservatives
argued showed climate change was a conspiracy cooked up by scientists
(*Greenwire
<https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eenews/2017/09/25/trump-transition-targeted-climate-records-053512>*,
Sept. 25, 2017). In one instance, Stevenson specifically requested agency
communications regarding EPA’s crafting of a 2013 social cost of carbon
calculation.

Stevenson said his opposition to offshore wind was borne from a belief that
it would damage the environment and economy, causing electricity bills to
rise.

“I am not a denier of climate change. I am not against solar,” Stevenson
said, noting he has built a net-zero house in Delaware and was involved in
solar research when employed by DuPont, a chemical company.

Massachusetts and other Northeastern states involved in offshore wind
should consider solar and natural gas as alternatives, he said.

Members of Nantucket Residents Against Turbines said they were grateful for
the support.

Raising concern about Vineyard Wind’s impact on Nantucket has often been a
lonely task, said Mary Chalke, a member of the group who joined Stevenson
and Oliver at yesterday’s press conference. Many people on Nantucket were
unaware of the project and often confused it for Cape Wind.

She described Nantucket Residents Against Turbines as “pure grassroots” and
said environmental impacts like the plight of the right whale are its
primary concern.

“Politics or other special interests don’t weigh into that as far as I am
concerned,” she said. To the contrary, support from other communities along
the East Coast and groups like the American Ocean Protection Coalition was
welcome.

“We’re not alone anymore,” Chalke said.
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