Donald Trump claimed windmills are driving whales a “little batty” and killing them “in numbers never seen before” in a bizarre speech on Monday.
The ex-president made the outlandish claim during a rally in South Carolina.
He also took aim at President Joe Biden’s regulations on speed boats at the rally in the town of Summerville, vowing to overturn regulations on “day one”.
Turning his attention to whales, Trump told a cheering crowd: “Windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. Nobody does anything about that.”
He continued: “The windmills are driving them crazy. They’re driving the whales a little batty. And they are washing up on shore in levels never seen before.”
What the science says
Trump appeared to be parroting a controversial talking point that breaks along party lines.
Many right-of-centre claim wind turbines are behind an uptick in Whale deaths.
His comments come after thousands gathered at New Jersey’s Point Pleasant beach in February with the explicit aim of pausing offshore wind projects in response to recent whale deaths along the New York-New Jersey coast.
Since 2023, at least 10 whales have washed ashore on the New York and New Jersey coastlines.
However, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) fisheries division, which investigates such whale deaths, has called them “unusual mortality events”.
And many scientists insist there’s no evidence to support claims that wind turbines are the cause of the whale deaths.
Many proponents cite noise created by offshore wind survey work as confusing the whale’s navigation system.
However, scientists argue that current evidence does not support such a claim.
“It’s just a cynical disinformation campaign,” Greenpeace oceans director John Hocevar said to USA Today.
And even though the agency considers the whale deaths unusual, a statement from Noaa fisheries officials read: “[T]here is no evidence to support speculation that noise resulting from wind development-related site characterization surveys could … cause mortality of whales, and no specific links between recent large whale mortalities and currently ongoing surveys.”
Noaa fisheries research on the 183 total whale deaths found that 40 percent of them resulted from human interaction, either from ship strikes or netting entanglement.
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