Renewable energy’s biggest political liability? It may be the whales and tortoises, according to Heatmap polling.
Conflicts over the environmental impacts of energy transition technologies — some rooted in fact, others founded more in fear — have played out in myriad ways across America over the past few years, from residents of beach towns protesting against offshore wind in the name of whale safety to farm communities opposing solar and onshore wind over impacts to livestock and birds. While some of these fights have been seeded by anti-renewable interest groups, these outside actors have fertile soil to work with. Exclusive Heatmap polling conducted in April found the top concern both Democrats and Republicans have with renewable energy projects in their areas is the harm those facilities could inflict on wildlife.
Notably, almost half of all Democrats said consequences for wildlife from projects would elicit “strong concern” from them. Other big concerns for Republicans such as reliability during extreme weather and land use factors received nowhere near the same level of Democratic agreement.
It’s hard to say whether this is because people are really concerned about animals and species protection generally or because there’s a concerted public relations effort (funded in no small part by fossil fuel companies) to focus on the negative environmental effects of solar farms and wind turbines. But nevertheless, this polling result — which is being reported today for the first time — underscores a real vulnerability that energy projects labeled “clean” can face when a would-be host community is faced with information indicating they may produce pollution or harm to the environment.
It also helps explain a recent statewide poll of New Jersey residents conducted by researchers at Stockton University that found a sharp increase in the percentage of respondents opposed to offshore wind following a very public campaign to tie new offshore project development to a spate of whale deaths.
“These conflicts are real, I’m not going to say they aren’t. That’s why I say there are appropriate places to site and inappropriate places to site,” Matt Kirby, senior director of energy and landscape conservation for the National Parks Conservation Association, told me. “I hope that industry understands that it needs to have social license to operate, and it will only be able to get that if they’re a good player.”
The Jersey campaign
How this played out in New Jersey should be cause for concern to anyone trying to deploy more renewable energy.
In 2019, researchers at Stockton, a public university in the state, found broad bipartisan support for offshore wind development. Then came at least a dozen dead whales that washed onto the Atlantic coastline, an incident that lacks a known cause to this day … but also spurred a non-stop anti-offshore wind campaign driven by politicians and political media figures, including those with ties to fossil fuel-funded opposition groups.
There’s been no evidence to date that the offshore wind build-out off the Atlantic coast has harmed a single whale. But studies have shown that activities related to offshore wind could harm a whale, which appears to be enough to override the benefits for some people. When Stockton pollsters checked again in September 2023 to measure support for offshore wind, they found it had plummeted. More state residents supported wind farms than opposed them, still. But support had dropped 30%, to roughly half of all participants backing the projects. Only a third of those living on the coasts were for constructing new offshore wind.
Alyssa Maurice, one of the researchers involved in the recent poll, told me there’s multiple ways to read this data, including that it may have been driven by partisanship. The whale campaign had a lot of play on Fox News (and still does today). But there’s a very real chance the campaign to tie the whale deaths and other potential environmental harms to offshore wind worked: Nearly 44% of respondents said they believed offshore wind would impact marine life “a great deal,” a figure that rose to 62% when it came to people on the coast.
“There’s now this gap between shore communities and the state that wasn’t there before,” Maurice said. “[It’s] a really stark geographic divide.”
Climate vs. environment
Climate change is a major risk to wildlife habitat and imperiled species across the world — that much is plain as day. There’s a reason the survival of certain mammals, fish and fauna often described as “keystone species” are seen as bellwethers for planetary warming. When they go extinct from climate impacts to river temperatures or food availability, it portends harms that may befall other species too — including, maybe, humans.
But an unfortunate truth is that major industrial projects — even ones aimed at decarbonizing the global economy — will always impact the local environment. To build large-scale solar farms or lithium mines or sprawling CO2 pipelines, we may need to disrupt a substantial number of endangered species and their habitat, not to mention the livelihoods of countless people who make their livelihoods off the land, air, and sea, or who enjoy outdoor recreation and hunting.
These conflicts are the reason I gave a talk at the Society of Environmental Journalists’ conference this year explaining why I do not use the term “clean energy” without quotation marks — not for the derisive reasons climate deniers put scarequotes around the term, but in pursuit of accuracy and out of respect for the populations most impacted by new projects. Before I joined Heatmap, I spent years writing about mining for battery metals, and I heard countless complaints from individuals in frontline communities and human rights groups about how there’s nothing “clean” about a car made with cobalt mined by a child or lithium chemicals that sapped an aquifer dry.
That’s not to say focusing on the “clean” part of decarbonization is a bad thing — it’s just not what brings people together, according to the Heatmap poll. In fact, we found the most bipartisan agreement for supporting “clean” energy projects in two areas: job creation and reducing the nation’s dependence on foreign sources for oil and gas.
Reducing local air and water pollution? There was a 52 percentage point difference in support between Democrats and Republicans, with only a third of GOP respondents identifying it as a major driver of support. Combating climate change? That gulf widens to 66 percentage points, with only 16% GOP support.
Whether those who favor overlooking wildlife concerns in favor of deployment like it or not, these findings undergird an argument being made by the ecologically-focused segments of the climate advocacy world that planning through the transition can have a political upside.
Patrick Bigger, a senior researcher at the left-aligned Climate and Community Project, said he wasn’t surprised by Heatmap’s findings.
“Talking about conservation polls really well and talking about climate change polls really poorly” with some communities, Bigger said. “I think there’s this implicit sense by folks who care about climate action that clean and green are permanently symbiotically coded as good, and it’s very hard to break that habit until you’re confronted with the polling that this doesn’t actually play well with the communities you’re trying to reach.”
The Heatmap poll of 2,094 American adults was conducted by Embold Research via online responses from April 5 to 11, 2024. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.
