If Trump is re-elected, a familiar face may lead the fight against wind: RFK Jr

Former allies have reacted with dismay to Kennedy’s alliance with Trump, who routinely mocks the climate crisis

Donald Trump has hurled insults at wind energy, calling it “bullshit” and “disgusting” and, if elected US president, may turn to another staunch opponent of offshore wind turbines to help stymie the nascent industry: Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy has emerged as the leading foe of offshore wind in conservative circles and well-connected opposition groups, blaming new turbines, baselessly, for a spate of whale deaths and accusing former friends in the Democratic party of abandoning environmental ideals to the right. Allies see a perfect role for him in advising a new Trump administration crackdown on offshore wind energy.

“I would love to see that because of Robert F Kennedy’s background. He has so much to offer, he’s a real free thinker,” said Robin Shaffer, president of the anti-offshore wind group Protect Our Coast New Jersey, promoted by Kennedy earlier this year. “He has a love for the environment, he clearly loves the outdoors. He comes with some insights you wouldn’t get from a typical politician.”

Kennedy, who ended his own presidential run in August to endorse Trump, has already suggested he will help shape agricultural and health policy should the Republican nominee win. He did not respond to questions on a potential role to combat offshore wind, too, but the Trump campaign said it was “proud” to have his support.

“President Trump will choose the best people for his cabinet to undo all the damage dangerously liberal Kamala Harris has done to our country,” said Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesperson. “But formal discussions of who will serve in a second Trump administration is premature.”

Trump has ramped up rhetoric against wind energy in recent rallies, heightening the nervousness among climate campaigners and the wind industry before next week’s election. The former president has taken aim at offshore wind, saying he will cancel projects on his first day in office while accusing Harris, his Democratic opponent, of enabling the deaths of birds and whales. (Trump also, separately, told a child on Fox News recently that Harris wants to ban cows. She does not.)

“You want to see a bird cemetery? Just go under a windmill, you see thousands of birds dead,” Trump has said. “They are all rusting and disgusting looking. It’s the most expensive form of energy there is. It sounds so wonderful, the wind, the wind, the wind. Wind is bullshit, it’s horrible. It’s too expensive, it doesn’t work.”

This stance chimes with that of Kennedy, who in the early 2000s, as a prominent environmental lawyer, helped kill off a proposed offshore wind farm near his family’s compound in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Since endorsing Trump, Kennedy has appeared with the prominent rightwing figures Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson to further tie this cause to the former president’s campaign.

“The Democrats are putting these offshore wind farms in, they are exterminating the whales,” Kennedy told Carlson. “They are about to extinguish the right whales, the last ones on Earth, with these monstrosities.”

Kennedy has few qualms about onshore wind but has said that offshore wind is a “boondoggle” and that green groups and Democrats have “this fixation upon carbon alone”. He told Peterson: “Republicans are focused on protecting the environment, protecting habitat, protecting our children from these toxic chemicals, and the Democratic party and the associated environmental groups have forgotten about that mission.”

The US had just one relatively small offshore wind farm, off the coast of Rhode Island, when Joe Biden took office, but since then the president’s administration has approved 10 commercial projects along the Atlantic coast that, it says, will provide enough renewable power for more than 5m homes.

About 2.6m acres (1.1m hectares) of federal waters, in total, have been leased for about 3,200 turbines that the administration considers to be critical in providing clean energy needed to shift from the fossil fuels causing the climate crisis.

But the rise of US offshore wind has coincided with an apparent spike in whale deaths, with about 230 humpback whales found dead along the coast from Maine to Florida since 2016. Even more worryingly, as many as 20% of the world’s remaining 370 north Atlantic right whales, which are critically endangered, have been killed or injured in this timeframe.

Federal government scientists have stressed there is no evidence that offshore wind turbines are responsible for the whale deaths. Whales have been killed by disease, or after being hit by ships or entangled in fishing nets, autopsies have confirmed, with the warming oceans possibly pushing the marine mammals to forage for food in different, riskier areas.

Wind turbines can have “direct and indirect” effects upon marine life, according to Andy Lipsky, chief of the offshore wind ecology branch at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with their fixed structures either attracting or deterring different aquatic creatures.

The noise of construction and attached electric cables may also add to what is an increasingly industrialized ocean, he said, but added that more research needed to be done to understand these interactions.

“Noise is a big concern for animals that spend time under water, but the operational noise of these turbines hasn’t caused anything like a mortality event,” said Lipsky. “There is a lot of hard evidence that has examined the dead animals that show they have collided with vessels or tangled with fishing gear. We haven’t had any evidence linking these deaths to wind energy.”

Still, Kennedy has found common cause with several groups, some funded by fossil fuel interests, that have sought to slow the rollout of offshore wind amid some difficulties faced by the industry. Companies have been beset by rising costs, as well as opposition, with the Danish firm Ørsted canceling two projects off New Jersey last year.

Meanwhile, in July, a 300ft-long turbine blade snapped off from the Vineyard wind project, prompting the closure of several Massachusetts beaches to swimmers as the debris washed ashore.

Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, said she was “thrilled” to speak with Kennedy on his podcast about the alleged harm of offshore wind in June.

“No energy source wears a halo but the footprint [of wind] is so much dramatically larger than oil and gas,” said Brady, who has ties to a conservative Texas-based group that opposes renewables and promotes oil and gas use.

“I hope whoever wins the election stops offshore wind,” she said. “These turbines are a perfect doomsday machine. They won’t make anything better. They will destroy the ocean.”

But former allies of Kennedy have reacted with dismay to his alliance with Trump, who routinely mocks the dangers posed by the climate crisis and overturned dozens of environmental protections when he was president. Several green groups have condemned him as a conspiracy theorist who spreads “toxic beliefs” on vaccines and global heating.

“It’s been truly horrifying to see because Bobby was such a commanding presence in the environmental movement. He went from Time’s hero for the planet to a scourge,” said Dan Reicher, a lawyer and academic who got to know Kennedy through the Natural Resources Defense Council. The duo went kayaking and camping together in the 1990s.

“I’ve never seen such a fall from being an environmental hero to being an outcast,” said Reicher. “It’s sad to say but RFK Jr and Donald Trump are in perfect alignment now. It’s scary because it could set us back decades on climate change. It’s been such an extreme change, this is the last place I could imagine him ending up. I wouldn’t be surprised if his father and his uncle are rolling over in their graves.”

The seemingly unlikely alliance between Kennedy, a scion of Democratic royalty who campaigned against river pollution from New York to South America, and Trump, a Republican property developer who has called environmental concerns “a giant scam”, has resulted in Trump admitting to some jarring inconsistencies when campaigning together.

“He’s going to straighten out our health and all of that stuff,” Trump said of Kennedy at a rally in Nevada this month.

“I don’t know if I can have him working too much on the environment, I’m a little concerned about that with Bobby. I don’t know if I want him playing around with the liquid gold under our feet. Bobby, work on health. I like the liquid gold, oil and gas. I think I like that a little bit more than Bobby.”

Cover photo: Robert F Kennedy Jr joins Donald Trump in Duluth, Georgia, on last week. Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters