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The research instead suggests the opposite is true.
When former President Donald Trump was campaigning in Michigan last week, he warned autoworkers that President Biden’s electric vehicle policies would “put an end” to their “way of life.”
“Hundreds of thousands of American jobs, your jobs, will be gone forever,” he said. “By most estimates, under Biden’s electric vehicle mandate, 40% of all U.S. auto jobs will disappear.”
Trump may be exaggerating, but the underlying idea, that electric vehicles require less labor to manufacture than internal combustion engine cars, is the conventional wisdom. It has been circulated for years by automakers, autoworkers, politicians, and journalists. EVs contain fewer parts, the thinking goes, so naturally they will require fewer workers.
That logic seems obvious, which might be why it hasn’t received much scrutiny. But when I tried to find any research supporting it, what I found instead suggested the opposite. A number of analyses showed that electric vehicles could actually require more labor to build than gas-powered cars in the U.S., at least for the foreseeable future.
There are countless news articles and studies that reiterate the point that electric vehicles “have fewer moving parts” or are “less complex” and therefore pose a threat to autoworkers’ jobs. Many cite a 2017 Ford presentation that mentioned a “30% reduction in hours per unit” as a benefit of producing EVs, or former Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess, who said in 2019 the company would need to make job cuts due to its switch to EVs, which “involve some 30% less effort.” More recently, as the United Auto Workers strike has ramped up, a 2022 quote from Ford’s CEO Jim Farley that “it takes 40% less labor to make an electric car,” has been circulating.
But I couldn’t find any data, research, or even further explanation backing up these figures. Part of the challenge of digging into these claims is that it’s not clear what they even refer to. Are the CEOs talking about the labor required for final assembly, like dropping in the motor and putting on the doors? Are they taking into account the production of components, like the EV battery? Where do they draw the line on what constitutes EV manufacturing?
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Ford didn’t respond directly to my request for more information about its public estimates. Instead, spokesperson Dan Barbossa replied that if I was going to quote Farley, I needed to include his entire quote. After dropping the “40% less labor” statistic, Farley had continued, “So as a family company, we have to insource so that everyone has a role in this world. We have a whole new supply chain to fill out, in batteries and motors and electronics.”
There may be more to Farley’s words than a bit of public relations fluff. His suggestion that building out new supply chains will help people find “a role” aligns with the conclusions of a study that Volkswagen’s independent Sustainability Council commissioned in 2020. It was conducted by the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering, a German research group, using Volkswagen company data, and found only minor impacts on employment due to the transition. Losses can be mitigated by “shifting to the production of new components,” it said, like the individual battery cells that make up the battery packs.
One of the findings was that “employment intensity” for the final manufacturing of Volkswagen’s electric ID.3 is only 3% lower than that of the conventional Golf Mk8. The bigger gap is in the labor required to produce the individual components of each car’s drivetrain. The employment intensity of the battery system and electric motor, combined, was about 40% lower than that of the combustion engine and transmission system.
Notably, the study did not include the jobs required to produce the individual battery cells which make up the battery system, because Volkswagen wasn’t producing them at the time. But a more recent analysis of the U.S. manufacturing landscape found that cell production holds the most potential for job creation, and concluded that if you account for this, the transition to EVs could actually result in significantly more jobs.
Turner Cotterman, a McKinsey consultant, led the research as part of his Ph.D. in public policy and engineering at Carnegie Mellon under Associate Professor Kate Whitefoot. He sought out partnerships with U.S.-based automakers and electric vehicle component manufacturers and collected original data from nine companies on the number of hours it takes to complete more than 250 process steps. In some cases he visited the shop floors and personally gathered the data himself. In his final analysis, he also incorporated public data for an additional 78 production process steps. He used the data to model three scenarios where EV and combustion engine powertrains are produced at the average efficiency, as well as a “most efficient” case and a “least efficient” case.
In every case, EV manufacturing required more hours. The conventional powertrains took 4 to 11 worker hours, while the EV powertrains took 15 to 24. “A lot of the confusion sits around, what parts are you counting in this evaluation?” Cotterman told me. “We’re saying that if you were to produce every single component in an EV in the U.S., that the total sum of those powertrain components will be higher than the equivalent ICE components.”
Cotterman, Turner and Fuchs, Erica Renee and Whitefoot, Kate, The transition to electrified vehicles: Evaluating the labor demand of manufacturing conventional versus battery electric vehicle powertrains (June 4, 2022)
There are a few important caveats to the research. For one, Cotterman stressed that these are present-day numbers, and they might change as EV plants scale up and learn to be more efficient. When he looked at data from Chinese manufacturing plants, they were a lot more efficient than what he saw in the U.S. And that relates to his other point. Currently, most battery components are not made in the U.S.
“With so many battery components made in China and South Korea, a lot of those potential labor hours are being captured by other countries,” he said. “So it's a question of the future American manufacturing workforce — how do we value them? How many opportunities do we want to extend to them?”
Another report published in 2021 by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, reached a similar conclusion. It found that the stakes for workers in the EV transition depend largely on public policy efforts to shore up U.S. manufacturing and enhance job quality. “The real challenge is making sure U.S.-based producers can invest enough to become competitive in battery production, and claw back some of the overall sales market share they lost since the Great Recession,” Josh Bivens, chief economist at the institute, told me in an email. “These are much bigger deals than anything about the inherent production process of EVs — and they’re very amenable to policy.”
Automakers have claimed that paying workers more would put them at a disadvantage and hinder their ability to invest in the EV transition. But in a recent blog post, the Economic Policy Institute argued that with the help of subsidies from President Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, automakers have “more than enough money” to invest in EVs, pay workers a fair share, and maintain healthy profits.
The IRA created a domestic manufacturing tax credit that subsidizes the production of battery cells to the tune of $35 per kilowatt-hour of capacity. It offers an additional $10 per kilowatt-hour tax credit for the domestic production of battery modules, or the process of assembling the cells into arrays that later get put into battery packs. And there’s another incentive for automakers to onshore battery production — it will help their vehicles qualify for the IRA’s consumer tax credit.
According to a database maintained by the advocacy group Climate Power, there have been about 10 EV battery manufacturing plant projects announced in the U.S. since the IRA was passed, at least some of which will produce cells.
So is the crux of the matter that EV job losses or gains all come down to batteries? Not necessarily.
Whether or not the U.S. is able to build up domestic battery production, early evidence of the EV transition in the United States shows that EVs may require more labor, even in the final assembly stages.
Anna Stefanopoulou, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, has been investigating three manufacturing sites that used to produce conventional cars and are now producing EVs: A Tesla factory in California that used to be a jointly-owned facility between GM and Toyota that produced Pontiacs and Corollas; a Rivian plant in Illinois that previously produced Mitsubishis; and the Orion Assembly plant in Michigan, where GM transitioned from producing Chevy Sonics and Buick Veranos to electric Chevy Bolts.
Her research has not been peer reviewed or published yet, but Stefanopoulou told me that after analyzing publicly available data sources for employment and output at each plant, she found that productivity had gone down in all three cases. Each one is producing fewer vehicles per worker than they were before, meaning it’s taking more people per vehicle to produce electric cars. The California site, which has been producing EVs for the longest out of the three, showed the most dramatic change. At its peak, the GM/Toyota plant produced 80 vehicles per person per year. The Tesla plant averages 30.
Stefanopoulou believes the data reflects the nascent state of U.S. electric vehicle manufacturing. She predicts that after a decade or so, as processes become more streamlined, the commonly-held belief that EV assembly requires less labor will turn out to be correct. However, she also said that if she were to consider battery cell production, as Cotterman did, EV production on the whole could require more people.
She also stressed that her data is not conclusive, and poses many more questions. For example, she found that overall production per worker in the U.S. is falling. So does the labor intensity at the EV plants reflect something specific about those factories, or a bigger issue in U.S. manufacturing productivity?
It’s also been hard for her team to identify what was actually being produced at each plant at any given time. For example, the previous owners of the California plant did not assemble engines there, but the Tesla factory is assembling battery packs. So that might explain why productivity is so much lower now. But there are a lot of unknowns. “Over the years, they changed their patterns,” she told me. “They take the cells and assemble the pack, or occasionally they manufacture cells. So we don’t know exactly what kind of work the plants include. We know the outputs are vehicles, but what does assembly include?”
In any case, Stefanopoulou is torn about what conclusion to draw from her findings on productivity. “Sometimes I don’t know if what I will present in my paper will be good news or bad news,” she told me. “Maybe it’s good news for our people that are involved, but at the end, you know, we need to be productive also, so that we can actually lower the costs so people can afford buying electric vehicles.”
What seems clear is that whether the transition results in more jobs or fewer depends a lot on which processes you’re including, how many of them will ultimately be done domestically, and how much will get streamlined through automation and other efficiency measures.
At the same time, topline job numbers aren’t the full story. The jobs created in the EV transition will certainly not all resemble the jobs that are lost. They may not be located in the same places, or require the same set of skills. Workers are right to be worried about upheaval.
But these are things that can be managed, if automakers are willing to come to the table with workers, and vice versa. For example, when Ford negotiated the closure of its Romeo Engine Plant at the end of last year, every employee was offered either a buyout or a transfer to another facility. Barbossa, the Ford spokesperson, told me many are now working about 20 minutes away, at the Van Dyke Electric Powertrain Center, building EV power units for the F-150 Lightning and hybrid powertrains for the Maverick and F-150.
I reached out to the United Autoworkers to get their thoughts on these studies, but the union did not respond to my questions. The UAW does appear to have a good handle on the stakes of battery manufacturing, however. Last week, Jim Farley of Ford provided an update on the negotiations, and said that “the UAW is holding the deal hostage over the battery plants.”
Farley vowed that none of its workers will lose their jobs due to battery plants during the next contract period. “In fact, for the foreseeable future we will have to hire more workers as some workers retire, in order to keep up with demand,” he said. “We are open to working with the union on a fair deal for battery plants, but these are multi-billion investments and they have to make business sense.”
Read more about electric vehicles and labor:
What the UAW Wants Exactly — and What It Means for Electric Cars
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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.
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 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.