RUTHFULLY YOURS

A major offshore-wind-power project approved by the Biden-Harris administration was shuttered last week after a turbine dramatically shattered, spewing sharp fiberglass shards onto nearby beaches and into the Atlantic Ocean.

Lifeguards now patrol the beaches in full body personal protective equipment and thick gloves while participating in cleanup to protect from the severe dangers of shattered fiberglass shards, which can cause serious health problems. Six beaches in Nantucket, Mass., and the surrounding area are closed because of the risks involved in cleanup. Dangerous shards of the turbine from Vineyard Wind are still washing up on the beach. The turbines were about 13 nautical miles south of Martha’s Vineyard and were part of the country’s second-largest offshore wind farm.

The controversial offshore wind turbines were approved in 2021 after the Biden-Harris administration aggressively pushed them as a solution to global warming. Many more turbines are on the way. Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, told National Review that the Biden-Harris administration claimed this project was a “major milestone,” leading to “rapid fire” development. “There’s nine leases within the Rhode Island-Massachusetts area alone,” Brady said.

The Biden-Harris administration rushed the approval due to blind faith in wind power’s superiority. Kamala Harris in particular has been adamant about wind energy’s safety.

“America is at the start of a historic transition away from fossil fuel plants that pollute our communities and toward cleaner and safer energy sources,” Harris once claimed [emphasis added].

The turbine operator allegedly took two days to notify nearby towns of the disaster, directly violating agreements between the wind operator and the town.

“The town wasn’t informed until Monday. That’s unacceptable,” Bob DeCosta, a former member of the town’s select board, said at a town meeting, according to the Nantucket Current. “We’ve got a bunch of suits here trying to cover their tracks.”

The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement shut down Vineyard Wind following the disaster incident while it works to determine “the cause of the incident and next steps.”

“We don’t know why it broke, they don’t tell you why it happened,” Brady said. “They refer to a ‘technical issue’ in France while in the U.K. a blade of the same brand, LM 107, exactly like this broke from supposedly this same factory.”

If you want to know who paid for Vineyard Wind, look in a mirror: Taxpayers are on the hook for this disaster.

Vineyard Wind was funded with $1.2 billion generated via a tax-equity package with J. P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo. This type of federal subsidy allows the wind developer to assign rights to special tax credits to investing institutions like banks. In exchange for the tax credit, the investor provides upfront cash to the developer in exchange for the future value of tax credits. This allows big banks to fund a green project without serious risks, as they’re cashing in on the value of sweetheart tax credits and other subsidies. Taxpayers bear the costs of any problems.

The Biden-Harris Inflation Reduction Act extended and expanded this type of financing to a variety of green-energy projects, such as offshore wind power. Harris proudly bragged about how the IRA “invests $370 billion towards a clean energy economy that includes more solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles.” But this project, put on what Brady called “the most productive commercial fishing grounds in the U.S.” (particularly valuable for squid), would “decimate” local industry and the area’s fish. “If they pave the ocean floor with electric cables, a trawler can’t afford to snag a cable with their net,” Brady said. “You’d flip your boat and die.”

Brady’s organization is a plaintiff suing the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and other federal agencies to stop this. Biden and Harris heavily backed the expansion of offshore-wind-energy production by a factor of 714 by 2030. The plan, which enjoys support from the largest environmental groups, doesn’t mention its potentially negative environmental effects. But Brady noted that the project’s own documents find a “negligible impact” on global warming. Even worse, greenhouse-gas emissions will increase because of the construction and transportation costs involved. “These things are fabricated for the most part in Denmark,” Brady said. “That blade that failed came from Canada, that’s a long way.”

There’s a strong case that Biden-Harris enthusiasm for offshore wind is directly attributable to last week’s disaster. Just look at a September 2023 White House Fact Sheet, which promised to “expand America’s offshore wind supply chain” and “advance innovation to reduce deployment barriers and lead on cutting-edge technologies,” according to a September 2023 White House Fact Sheet. Those “deployment barriers” cut by Harris might have prevented something like the Vineyard Wind disaster from happening.

Harris’s enthusiasm for offshore wind predates her vice-presidential tenure. As California attorney general, she had a habit of suing offshore wind’s energy competition out of business. As a U.S. senator, Harris co-sponsored the Green New Deal, which would have banned coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear energy in favor of unreliable wind and solar. The Green New Deal directly inspired the Biden-Harris Inflation Reduction Act, which actually increased inflation.

Harris actually didn’t think Biden went far enough on global warming. During her unsuccessful run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, Harris proposed $10 trillion in new global-warming spending, more than twice the entire annual U.S. federal budget of $4.5 trillion.

Harris even stated “there’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” during a 2019 CNN town hall on global warming. That’s actually a huge problem for her pro-offshore-wind position. Recent research indicates offshore wind actually increases the total amount of greenhouse-gas emissions as the inherent unreliability of wind power requires it to be backed up by fracked natural-gas power.

Since the amount of wind cannot be predicted in advance, conventional power plants are forced to rapidly adjust their output to match wind gusts and lulls. This is inherently inefficient and drives up emissions, much like how a car repeatedly stopping and accelerating when driving in a city will use more fuel and thus creates more greenhouse-gas emissions than one driving at a constant speed on a highway. The world’s most efficient gas power plants, which are generally used to back up wind power as they can rapidly fire up, release about twice as much carbon dioxide when constantly adjusting their outputs to adjust for wind farms.

But although this reality utterly refutes the Biden-Harris justification for offshore wind, it isn’t the only problem. Citing a study, Brady noted the discovery of considerable evidence during the Trump administration of “major detrimental impacts” on commercial fishing in the area from wind turbines. Trump intends to issue an executive order scrapping offshore wind development on the first day of his second term if he is reelected; he cited bird and whale deaths as justification. In this case, a lot of smaller environmental groups agree with him.

The environmentalist group Nantucket Land & Water Council, for example, told the Nantucket Current that the accident was “tragic” and “unacceptable.” The shattered turbine parts are “absolutely harmful and damaging to our waters and our environment,” and “will ultimately be ingested by fish and wildlife and this type of industrial accident often comes with a cascade of other impacts which we may not see or understand for months or years.”

One potential ramification concerns the possibility that offshore wind may have killed a lot of whales. Nine recently beached themselves near these particular windfarms. Wildlife experts in the U.K. have stated that a considerable increase in whales stranded on beaches in that country “could be a consequence of [offshore] wind farms.” Government bureaucrats at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) note in press conferences that a link between whale strandings and offshore-wind-energy production hasn’t yet been proven. Yet internal government presentations indicate that federal agencies are aware of these projects’ potential damage to whales. And the Biden-Harris administration blew through certain regulatory steps intended to protect these animals, Brady said.

Indeed, Vineyard Wind’s rapid approval by the Biden-Harris administration has proved to be a reckless move. “I would hope this is the beginning of people finding out more about what offshore wind really is,” Brady concluded. “The Emperor’s New Clothes spin is nothing but spin. There’s so many more things that are wrong with these. People believed what they were told, and they’ve been lied to.”