Save the Whales, Again
Watch the trailer for Public's upcoming documentary revealing the wind energy industry's darkest secret
LEIGHTON WOODHOUSE AND MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER
AUG 12
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PAID
Public is proud to release the trailer to our first full-fledged, 30-minute documentary, coming soon.
When the two of us were little kids in the 1970s, the environmental movement was in its infancy. Like anyone who was alive in those years, we have vivid memories of the movement’s most famous and powerful rallying cry: Save the Whales. The phrase was much more than a slogan: it was in those years that a handful of Greenpeace activists captured the world’s attention when they put their bodies between Russian harpooners and the whales they were aiming to kill. Only an animal that majestic could inspire such courage.
The global campaign to stop the whaling industry was a stunning success. Whale species that teetered on the precipice of extinction, such as the humpback, bounced back. In 1982, 25 countries signed an international treaty to ban commercial whaling. More than three times that number now adhere to the ban, and the three countries that still practice commercial whaling do so in ignominy.
But today, whales are once again under threat. Only this time, it isn’t whale hunters who are killing them. Instead, it’s the favored industry of the environmental movement itself: wind energy.
On the East Coast, dead whales are washing up on beaches from North Carolina to New England practically every week. Some of them are the critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whale, of which only about 340 are left on the entire planet. Government agencies and NGOs claim that the whale deaths have nothing to do with the dozens of ships surveying the waters off New England and New Jersey in preparation for wind turbine construction, blasting the sea floor with sounds as loud as high-powered weapons, 24 hours a day. But the government hasn’t actually undertaken the studies necessary to show whether or not that’s the case.
The scientists and activists who appear in our film, by contrast, have done precisely that. Public will release their findings soon.
The environmental movement once adhered to “the precautionary principle,” according to which, if a new practice or technology carries unknown risks, we should abstain from implementing them until they can be shown to be safe. Environmentalists have opposed thousands of development projects on this basis, including a Gulf of Mexico oil exploration project that threatens a critically endangered whale. But since the religion of climate alarmism has crowded out every other environmental concern, this principle does not extend to the wind energy industry. When it comes to wind farms, the principle seems to be to plow forward unless and until there is incontrovertible proof of acute harm to wildlife — by which point, of course, it’s too late. When it comes to wind energy, the philosophy animating today’s environmental movement is no different from the one the oil companies espouse when they want to drill holes in the sea floor or lay pipelines in the earth.
The difference between the environmental movement’s approach to wind energy and its approach to any other development project is easy to explain: in addition to its ideological myopia around renewable energies, there’s a boatload of money in it. The very same environmental groups that promote offshore wind and deny the industry’s contribution to mass whale deaths take contributions from the companies constructing those wind farms. Last April, the Save Right Whales coalition put together a report following the wind money.
Public’s documentary filmmaker Jonah Markowitz has been following this story for months. We’re beyond excited to release his film in the coming days. We’re certain you’ll be as excited as we are after you watch his trailer.