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An interview with Kaniela Ing, the national director of the Green New Deal Network and a seventh-generation Indigenous Hawaiian
Kaniela Ing was looking for his car.
The national director of the Green New Deal Network and a seventh-generation Indigenous Hawaiian who currently lives in Oahu, Ing had just touched down in Maui — and was navigating the rental car lot — when he took my call on Thursday afternoon. “It’ll be quiet,” he considerately assured me as he navigated the garage, moving upstream from the chaotic flow of tourists and evacuees trying to leave the island, and en route to see his family, friends, and the unthinkable wildfire devastation of Lahaina, a community he loves.
Our conversation touched on the dizzying speed of the destruction, outsider misconceptions about Maui, the colonialist mismanagement of the land, and the urgency of the climate crisis, as well as the loss of Lahaina, the physical town, and the resilience of Lahaina, the community. It has been lightly edited for clarity.
First of all, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me — I know you’re busy with media appearances today while also grieving the devastation of a place and a community you love. Have you heard from your family and friends? Are they okay?
My immediate family is. I texted a few of my friends from high school who are now firefighters. I haven’t heard back so, you know, they’re probably busy saving people and searching for loved ones and doing the heroic work.
Growing up in Maui, were wildfires ever something you worried about?
No. I mean, I vaguely remember once in a while there’d be a small fire up on the mountain. And then there was, like, a slightly bigger one. So it’s definitely a trajectory. But never anything remotely close to this. It’s not like we live in Canada. It’s … it’s really shocking.
I’ve been reading today about how Lahaina was a historic and cultural heart of the islands even before it became the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1802. What does the Indigenous Hawaiian community lose when there is a fire like this?
Lahaina has been characterized by many as a tourist destination and nothing much more, but it was and continues to be at the heart of a lot of our culture here in Hawaii. Even today, some of our best cultural practitioners and musicians live in Lahaina, sometimes on the same land and home that their families have been living on since the 1800s. Even before that.
So Front Street, yes, in some ways, it’s become like a Waikiki Time Square sort of area that locals avoid. On the other hand, the people that actually live on or adjacent to that street are some of the most rooted Native Hawaiians in the world.
Yeah, my next question was about the misconception of Maui as just a tourist spot. I saw you boosted a tweet about a large unhoused population that lives in the area impacted by the fires. Can you speak to the disproportionate impacts of climate change that we’re seeing?
The response has been mixed. It’s really heartening to see community come together and local businesses taking supply drop-offs and delivering it. If anything, emergency institutions are overwhelmed by the volume of volunteers that are reaching out to help. On the other hand, it appears that in some ways the tourists were prioritized in some of the response. Or at least this is some of the feedback I’m hearing on the ground, where their safeties seemed to come first when it came to the more institutional players like the hotels and government. But we are seeing a rapid deployment of government services and large nonprofits now directed at local residents.
It’s just — I mean, it’ll unfold this quickly. I think that’s what people don’t understand about climate change and sea level rise. For example, sea level rise, it just makes people think that the water is slowly going up and the same for global warming: the temperature is just going to get a little bit warmer every year. But no, sea level rise is punctuated by massive tsunamis and hurricanes. And the same for global temperatures; these hurricane-force winds are just going to become more and more common. The dry grass and the low humidity are going to make these disasters become the norm unless we take some really drastic action now for a clean-energy transition. And the people that are hit first tend to be Indigenous folks, Black folks, especially if you’re in a community that lacks certain infrastructure, like a low-income community — even more so for the unsheltered.
You’ve been speaking out strongly on social media about the political and business powers that are sitting by as climate change unfolds. So I wanted to ask if there was anyone or anything you would point a finger at when it comes to the fires in Maui?
There are multiple. It’s a confluence of factors. The official line by the National Weather Service is [that the fires were caused by a downed] powerline caused by hurricane-force winds, worsened by dry vegetation and low humidity. But what caused that is, of course, corporations that let loose a blanket of pollution that’s overheating our planet.
In addition, there’s real mismanagement of land and water, where corporations that stem from the original Big Five oligarchy in Hawaii — which is the first five missionary families who control our government, rich, white, right-wing families. They persist today in the form of various corporations. And throughout my life, some of these companies have put agriculture mono-crops on our islands, knowing that it’s not profitable or sustainable, to hold the land for speculative purposes. And once the business went under — the sugarcane biz went under — they didn’t have a plan for the workers and they pit the union against the community activists that didn’t like cane burning, right? So those are the people that have controlled our island for a long time.
And in fact, we want to make sure that as we recover, once the direct relief efforts are done, the cameras have left — we understand that recovery will take years. And as that recovery unfolds, we want to make sure that the people, the communities, are actually empowered to rebuild themselves, that we don’t open the door for disaster capitalists. Unfortunately, the institutions best poised to distribute direct aid are also the most likely to enable disaster capitalists to exploit this tragedy. They’re actively raising millions and once the spotlight moves from our island, what’s to come of those monies and who’s really going to benefit? Those are questions that I think we need to be really proactive about answering on our own as community organizers.
And maybe in this opportunity — like, we all understand that we’re going to have to be lobbying for additional FEMA funds, federal funds, state and local funds. We want to make sure that the people, the forces that contributed to this problem in the first place, are pushed out of power for a more community, ground-up sort of infrastructure. So there’s a lot of mutual aid and power building that needs to happen immediately.
In the Western U.S., there’s been a push to incorporate Indigenous knowledge about wildfire management into state and federal stewardship practices. My understanding is that Hawaii’s natural ecosystem doesn’t have the same wildfire cycles as the continental U.S., but is there a better way forward here? What do you think needs to be done?
I think the Smokey the Bear narrative of just stopping fires unnaturally is something that we’re learning isn’t necessarily the right way to go. And that the light burns, planned sort of burns that native folks have initiated — First Nations in Canada — have been much more productive. And rather than building cities wherever we want and trying to keep nature out, we need to understand our role in the broader ecosystem if we want to survive. Like, this isn’t a matter of environmentalism. It’s for our own survival. This disaster is not natural. And I’m tired of people saying that it’s natural. It could have been prevented.
For example, Lahaina is known for its native practices. When I was the chair of Ocean and Marine Resources and Hawaiian Affairs in the state legislature, I would go to Lahaina committee members to check in every time, like, NOAA was trying to designate a coral as endangered. They’d be like, No, actually, that “endangered” coral is invasive in this one area so what we’ve been doing for 200 years is moving it into the area next to us — which is illegal under normal rules. But these kupuna, they knew much, much better than these federal regulators.
To me, when I think about Lahaina, it’s not gone, right? The town is gone. But Lahaina is these people and their way of being and the actual place, and that’s still strong.
What was the other part of the question?
Oh — what do you think we need to do now?
Yeah, yeah. I think the narrative right now needs to be controlled by members of the community and people who are rooted and understand the broader history of Hawaii. That’s why I love these calls and talking to people like you. But, like … whenever I stop texting and frantically calling, I start crying.
This is so heavy. At least 36 people died. And I do this shit for a living. I do this work for a living and you see the disaster and you help — but then to actually see it come in your own community. It's … I just … I just hope people actually envision that, like, your kid’s school, your church, the grocery store you shop at are just gone, tomorrow. Not 10 years down the line, 20 years down the line from climate change. But tomorrow. That’s where we’re at in terms of urgency. So what needs to happen moving forward is people need to recognize that urgency, and act accordingly. President Biden needs to declare a climate emergency. Congress needs to invest at least a trillion a year, multiple Inflation Reduction Acts, every year, and accelerate the clean energy transition, and do it in a way where the native people that actually are the keepers of his knowledge are leading the way.
If our readers walk away from this interview understanding one thing, what do you want that to be?
Lahaina used to be wetlands. It was known for the plethora of water around Mokuʻula, Mokuhinia. Boats would literally circulate Waiola Church years ago. So the fires were never … it’s bizarre that it’s even happening in this area. And it’s only a result of the theft: the water theft, the diversions, the irrigations that big business set up — golf courses, sugar cane, pineapple, hotels — they took away that natural protective essence of Lahaina.
These disasters are preventable. It’s not too late. We still have a small window. Right now, we’re still looking at 3% or 4% warming, which is catastrophic, and we might not hit the 1.5-degree goal that the Paris Accord and the UN says we need to do, but every fraction of a percent from now on will matter. It will mean fewer people dying. And we need to do everything we can, and that work isn’t always exciting. It can be phone-banking, door-knocking, writing op-eds. It’s not glamorous, but it’s necessary — more necessary than whatever your day job is.
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On the IEA’s latest report, flooding in LA, and Bill Gates’ bad news
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms tomorrow could spawn tornadoes in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama • A massive wildfire on a biodiverse island in the Indian Ocean has been burning for nearly a month, threatening wildlife • Tropical Cyclone Zelia has made landfall in Western Australia with winds up to 180mph.
Bill Gates’ climate tech advocacy organization has told its partners that it will slash its grantmaking budget this year, dealing a blow to climate-focused policy and advocacy groups that relied on the Microsoft founder, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has learned. Breakthrough Energy, the umbrella organization for Gates’ various climate-focused programs, alerted many nonprofit grantees earlier this month that it would not be renewing its support for them. This pullback will not affect Breakthrough’s $3.5 billion climate-focused venture capital arm, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which funds an extensive portfolio of climate tech companies. Breakthrough’s fellowship program, which provides early-stage climate tech leaders with funding and assistance, will also remain intact, a spokesperson confirmed. They would not comment on whether this change will lead to layoffs at Breakthrough Energy.
“Breakthrough Energy made up a relatively small share — perhaps 1% — of climate philanthropy worldwide,” Brigham writes. “But what has made Breakthrough Energy distinctive is its support for policy and advocacy groups that promote a wide range of technological solutions, including nuclear energy and direct air capture, to fight climate change.”
Anti-wind activists have joined with well-connected figures in conservative legal and energy circles to privately lobby the Trump administration to undo permitting decisions by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to documents obtained by Heatmap’s Jael Holzman. Representatives of conservative think tanks and legal nonprofits — including the Caesar Rodney Institute, the Heartland Institute and Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, or CFACT — sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum dated February 11 requesting that the Trump administration “immediately revoke” letters from NOAA to 11 offshore wind projects authorizing “incidental takes,” a term of regulatory art referencing accidental and permissible deaths under federal endangered species and mammal protection laws. The letter also requested “an immediate cession of construction” at four offshore wind projects with federal approvals that have begun construction: Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind project, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners’ Vineyard Wind 1, and Ørsted’s Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind projects.
“This letter represents a new stage of Trump’s war on offshore wind,” Holzman writes. “Yes, he has frozen leasing, along with most permitting activity and even public meetings related to pending projects. But the president's executive order targeting offshore wind opened the door to rescinding leases and previous permits. Doing so would produce new, costly legal battles for developers and for publicly-regulated utilities, ratepayers. Over the past few weeks, offshore wind developers with projects that got their permits under Biden have sought to reassure investors that at least they’ll be fine. If this new request is heeded, that calm will subside.”
Heavy downpours triggered flooding and debris flows across Los Angeles County yesterday. A portion of the Pacific Coast Highway, one of the most iconic roadways in America, is closed indefinitely due to mudslides near Malibu, an area devastated in last month’s fires. Duke’s Malibu, a famous oceanfront restaurant along the PCH, was inundated. The worst of the rain has passed now and many flood alerts have been canceled, but the cleanup has just begun.
Rain flows down a street outside a burned home.Mario Tama/Getty Images
Global electricity use is set to rise by 4% annually through 2027, “the equivalent of adding an amount greater than Japan’s annual electricity consumption every year,” according to the International Energy Agency’s new Electricity 2025 report. Here are some key points:
IEA
JPMorgan Chase clients have apparently been demanding more guidance about the climate crisis. As a result, the bank launched a new climate report authored by its global head of climate advisory, Sarah Kapnick, an atmospheric and oceanic scientist who was previously chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The report seeks to build what Kapnick is calling “climate intuition” – the ability to use science to assess and make strategic investment decisions about the shifting climate. “Success in the New Climate Era hinges on our ability to integrate climate considerations into daily decision-making,” Kapnick writes. “Those who adapt will lead, while others risk falling behind.” Here’s a snippet from the report, to give you a sense of the tone and takeaways:
“Adhering to temperatures below 1.5C will require emissions reductions. Depending on your definition of 1.5C, they may require historic annual reductions and potentially carbon removal. Conversely, if you have a technical or financial view that carbon dioxide removal will not scale, you should assume there is a difficult path to 1.5C (i.e. emissions reductions to zero depending on your definition in 6, 15, or 30+ years). If that is the case, you need to plan for the physical manifestations of climate change and social responses that will ensue if your investment horizons are longer.”
Greenhouse gas leaks from supermarket refrigerators are estimated to create as much pollution each year as burning more than 30 million tons of coal.
Grantees told Heatmap they were informed that Bill Gates’ climate funding organization would not renew its support.
Bill Gates’ climate tech advocacy organization has told its partners that it will slash its grantmaking budget this year, dealing a blow to climate-focused policy and advocacy groups that relied on the Microsoft founder, Heatmap has learned.
Breakthrough Energy, the umbrella organization for Gates’ various climate-focused programs, alerted many nonprofit grantees earlier this month that it would not be renewing its support for them. This pullback will not affect Breakthrough’s $3.5 billion climate-focused venture capital arm, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which funds an extensive portfolio of climate tech companies. Breakthrough’s fellowship program, which provides early-stage climate tech leaders with funding and assistance, will also remain intact, a spokesperson confirmed. They would not comment on whether this change will lead to layoffs at Breakthrough Energy.
“Bill Gates and Breakthrough Energy remain as committed as ever to using our voice and resources to advocate for the energy innovations needed to address climate change,” the Breakthrough spokesperson told me in a written statement. “We continue to believe that innovation in energy is essential for achieving global climate goals and securing a prosperous, sustainable world for future generations.”
Gates founded Breakthrough Energy in 2015 to help develop and deploy technologies that would help the world reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The organization made more than $96 million in grants in 2023, the most recent year for which data is available.
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Among its beneficiaries was the Breakthrough Institute, a California-based think tank that promotes technological solutions to climate change. (Despite having a similar name, it is not affiliatedwith Breakthrough Energy.) Last week, a representative from Breakthrough Energy told the institute’s executive director, Ted Nordhaus, that its funding would not be renewed. The Breakthrough Institute had previously received a two-year grant of about $1.2 million per year, which wrapped up this month.
“What we were told is that they are ceasing all of their climate grantmaking — zeroed out immediately after the USAID shutdown because Bill wants to refocus all of his grantmaking efforts on global health,” Nordhaus told me on Monday, referring to the Trump administration’s efforts to defund the United States Agency for International Development. “But it’s very clear that this wasn’t brought on solely by USAID. I had heard from several people that there was a big reassessment going on for a couple of months.”
The Breakthrough spokesperson disputed this characterization, and denied that cutbacks were due to the USAID shutdown or a shift in funding from climate to global health initiatives. The spokesperson also told me that some grantmaking budget remains, though they would not reveal how much.
As for Breakthrough Institute, the funding cut will primarily impact its agricultural program, which received about 90% of its budget from Breakthrough Energy. Nordhaus is trying to figure out how to keep that program afloat, while the institute’s other three areas of policy focus — energy and climate, nuclear innovation, and energy and development — remain largely unaffected.
Multiple other organizations confirmed to Heatmap that they also will not receive future grants from Breakthrough Energy. A representative for the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment, a trade organization for sustainability professionals, told me that Breakthrough had recently informed the group that it would not renew a $400,000 grant, which is set to wrap up this May. (ACLCA’s spokesperson also noted that the grant had not come with any indication that it would be renewed.) Another former grantee told me that while their organization is currently wrapping up a grant with Breakthrough and does not have anything in the works with them for this year, they expected that future funding would be impacted, though they did not explain why.
Breakthrough Energy made up a relatively small share — perhaps 1% — of climate philanthropy worldwide. Foundations and individuals around the world gave a total of $9 billion to $15 billion to climate causes in 2023, according to an analysis from the Climateworks Foundation.
But what has made Breakthrough Energy distinctive is its support for policy and advocacy groups that promote a wide range of technological solutions, including nuclear energy and direct air capture, to fight climate change.
“Their presence will be missed,” said the CEO of another climate nonprofit who was notified by Breakthrough that its funding would not be renewed. Breakthrough Energy “was one of the few funders supporting pragmatic research and advocacy work that pushed at neglected areas such as the need for zero-carbon firm power and accelerated energy innovation,” they added.
"Even if it’s a drop in the bucket, it still makes a difference,” another former grantee with a particularly large budget told me. This organization recently sent Breakthrough an inquiry about partnering up again and is waiting to hear back. “But for small organizations, it’s make it or break it.”
Speculation abounds as to the rationale behind Breakthrough’s funding cuts. “I have heard that one of the reasons that Bill decided to stop funding climate was that he concluded that there was so much money in climate that his money really wasn’t that important,” Nordhaus told me. But that is not true when it comes to agriculture, he said, which comprises about 12% of global emissions. ”There’s very little money for advocating for agriculture innovation to address the climate impacts of the ag sector,” Nordhaus told me.
Gates, who privately donated to a nonprofit affiliated with the Harris campaign in 2024 but did not endorse the Democrat, dined with Trump and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, for more than three hours at Mar-a-Lago around New Year’s Day, he told Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker. He said that Trump was interested in the possibility of eradicating polio or developing an HIV vaccine. “I felt like he was energized and looking forward to helping to drive innovation,” he told her, days before the inauguration.
Since then, Trump’s war on USAID has frozen funding to a polio eradication program and shut down the phase 1 clinical trial of an HIV vaccine in South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda.
The Trump administration is now being lobbied to nix offshore wind projects already under construction.
Anti-wind activists have joined with well-connected figures in conservative legal and energy circles to privately lobby the Trump administration to undo permitting decisions by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to documents obtained by Heatmap.
Representatives of conservative think tanks and legal nonprofits — including the Caesar Rodney Institute, the Heartland Institute and Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, or CFACT — sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum dated February 11 requesting that the Trump administration “immediately revoke” letters from NOAA to 11 offshore wind projects authorizing “incidental takes,” a term of regulatory art referencing accidental and permissible harassment, injury, or potential deaths under federal endangered species and mammal protection laws. The letter lays out a number of perceived issues with how those approvals have historically been issued for offshore wind companies and claims the government has improperly analyzed the cumulative effects of adding offshore wind to the ocean’s existing industrialization. NOAA oversees marine species protection.
The letter also requested “an immediate cession of construction” at four offshore wind projects with federal approvals that have begun construction: Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind project, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners’ Vineyard Wind 1, and Ørsted’s Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind projects.
“It is with a sense of real urgency we write you today,” the letter states, referencing Trump’s executive order targeting the offshore wind industry to ask that he go further. “[E]leven projects have already received approvals with four of those under construction. Leasing and permitting will be reviewed for these approved projects but may take time.”
I obtained the letter from Paul Kamenar, a longtime attorney in conservative legal circles currently with the D.C.-based National Legal and Policy Center, who told me the letter had been sent to the department this week. Kamenar is one of multiple attorneys involved in a lawsuit filed last year by Heartland and CFACT challenging permits for Dominion’s Coastal Virginia project over alleged potential impacts to the endangered North Atlantic right whale. We reported earlier this week that the government signaled in proceedings for that case it will review approvals for Coastal Virginia, the first indication that previous permits issued for offshore wind could be vulnerable to the Trump effect.
Kamenar described the request to Burgum as “a coalition letter,” and told me that “the new secretary there is sympathetic” to their complaints about offshore wind permits. “We’re hoping that this letter will basically reverse the letter[s] of authorizations, or have the agency go back,” Kamenar said, adding a message for Dominion and other developers implicated by the letter: “Just because the company has the approval doesn’t mean it’s all systems go.”
The Interior Department does not directly oversee NOAA – that’s the Commerce Department. But it does control the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which ultimately regulates all offshore wind development and issues final approvals.
Interior did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter.
Some signees of the document are part of a constellation of influential figures in the anti-renewables movement whose voices have been magnified in the new administration.
One of the letter’s two lead signatories is David Stevenson, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy at the Caesar Rodney Institute, an organization involved in legal battles against offshore wind projects under development in the Mid-Atlantic. The Institute says on its website it is a member of the State Policy Network, a broad constellation of think tanks, legal advocacy groups, and nonprofits.
Multiple activists who signed onto the letter work with the Save Right Whales Coalition, a network of local organizations and activists. Coalition members have appeared with Republican lawmakers at field hearings and rallies over the past few years attacking offshore wind. They became especially influential in GOP politics after being featured in a film by outspoken renewables critic and famous liberal-turned-conservative Michael Shellenberger, who is himself involved in the Coalition. His film, Thrown to the Wind, blew up in right-wing media circles because it claimed to correlate whale deaths with offshore wind development.
When asked if the Coalition was formally involved in this request of the administration, Lisa Linowes, a co-founder of the Coalition, replied in an email: “The Coalition was not a signer of the request.”
One cosigner sure to turn heads: John Droz, a pioneer in the anti-wind activist movement who for years has given talks and offered roadmaps on how best to stop renewables projects.
The letter also includes an endorsement from Mandy Davis, who was involved with the draft anti-wind executive order we told you was sent to the Trump transition team before inauguration. CFACT also co-signed that draft order when it was transmitted to the transition team, according to correspondence reviewed by Heatmap.
Most of the signatories to the letter list their locations. Many of the individuals unrelated to bigger organizations list their locations as in Delaware or Maryland. Only a few signatories on the letter have locations in other states dealing with offshore wind projects.
On its face, this letter represents a new stage of Trump’s war on offshore wind.
Yes, he has frozen leasing, along with most permitting activity and even public meetings related to pending projects. But the president’s executive order targeting offshore wind opened the door to rescinding leases and previous permits. Doing so would produce new, costly legal battles for developers and for publicly-regulated utilities, ratepayers. Over the past few weeks, offshore wind developers with projects that got their permits under Biden have sought to reassure investors that at least they’ll be fine.
If this new request is heeded, that calm will subside.
Beyond that, reversing these authorizations could represent a scandal for scientific integrity at NOAA – or at least NOAA’s Fisheries division, the National Marine Fisheries Service. Heeding the letter’s requests would mean revisiting the findings of career scientists for what developers may argue are purely political reasons, or at minimum arbitrary ones.
This wouldn’t be the first time something like this has happened under Trump. In 2020, I used public records to prove that plans by career NOAA Fisheries employees to protect endangered whales from oil and gas exploration in the Atlantic were watered down after a political review. At the time, Democratic Representative Jared Huffman — now the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee — told me that my reporting was evidence of potential scientific integrity issues at NOAA and represented “blatant scientific and environmental malpractice at the highest order.”
It’s worth emphasizing how much this mattered, not just for science but literally in court, as the decision to allow more seismic testing for oil under Trump was challenged at the time on the grounds that it was made arbitrarily.
Peter Corkeron, a former NOAA scientist with expertise researching the North Atlantic right whale, reviewed the letter to Burgum and told me in an email that essentially, the anti-offshore wind movement is exploiting similar arguments made by conservationists about issues with the federal government’s protection of the species to target this sector. The federal regulator has for many years faced the ire of conservation activists, who’ve said it does not go far enough to protect endangered species from more longstanding threats like fishing and vessel strikes.
If NOAA were to bow to this request, Corkeron wrote, he would interpret that as the agency’s failure to fully protect the species in good faith instead becoming “suborned by the hydrocarbon exploitation industry as a way of eliminating a competing form of energy production that should, in time, prove more beneficial for whales than what we’re currently doing.”
“The point on cumulative impacts is, on face value, fair,” he said. “The problem is its lack of context. Cumulative impacts on North Atlantic right whales from offshore wind are possible. However, in the context of the cumulative impacts of the shipping (vessel strike kills, noise pollution), and fishing (death, maiming, failure to breed) industries, they’ll be insignificant. Because NOAA has never clearly set out to address ways to offset other impacts while developing the offshore wind industry, these additive impacts place a burden on this new industry in ways that existing, and more damaging, industries don’t have to address.”
CFACT responded to a request for comment by sending me a press release with the letter attached that was not publicly available, and did not respond to the climate criticisms by press time. David Stevenson of the Caesar Rodney Institute sent me a statement criticizing offshore wind energy and questioning its ability to “lower global emissions.”
“The goal is to pause construction until everything is reviewed,” Stevenson said. When asked if there was an outcome where a review led to projects being built, he said no, calling offshore wind an “environmental wrecking ball.”
Well, we’ll soon find out what the real wrecking ball is.