“There is an indisputable, man-made, intentional deprivation of aid that continues to suck the life out of any and all humanitarian operations, including our own,” said one campaigner.
The Israeli government is intentionally restricting the flow of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip by subjecting shipments to a prolonged and dysfunctional inspection process, arbitrarily rejecting items, attacking aid convoys, and limiting the number of crossings through which deliveries can pass, Oxfam International said in a report published late Sunday.
The report, titled Inflicting Unprecedented Suffering and Destruction, argues that Israel’s continued obstruction of humanitarian aid is a direct violation of both international humanitarian law (IHL) and a January order from the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which ruled the Israeli government is “plausibly” committing genocide in Gaza and must ensure that assistance reaches desperate Gazans.
Oxfam said Sunday that “humanitarian access in the Gaza Strip has effectively worsened” since the ICJ handed down its interim order nearly two months ago, and conditions on the ground in the Palestinian territory have deteriorated rapidly. New data from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) shows that Gaza’s “entire population” is facing “high levels of acute food insecurity” and 1.1 million people are experiencing “catastrophic” hunger—a figure that one expert called “unprecedented.”
“The ICJ order should have shocked Israeli leaders to change course, but since then conditions in Gaza have actually worsened,” said Sally Abi Khalil, Oxfam’s Middle East and North Africa director. “The fact that other governments have not challenged Israel hard enough, but instead turned to less effective methods like airdrops and maritime corridors is a huge red flag, signaling that Israel continues to deny the full potential of better ways to deliver more aid.”
“Israeli authorities are not only failing to facilitate the international aid effort but are actively hindering it,” Abi Khalil added. “We believe that Israel is failing to take all measures within its power to prevent genocide.”
In its new report, Oxfam outlines seven ways in which the Israeli government is impeding humanitarian aid shipments and exacerbating one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in modern history:
In February—the first full month after the ICJ’s order—Israel allowed just 2,874 aid trucks to enter the Gaza Strip, a 44% decline compared to the previous month, according to Oxfam.
The group said Israeli authorities “have rejected a warehouse full of international aid including oxygen, incubators, and Oxfam water and sanitation gear, all of which is now stockpiled at Al Arish just 40 kilometers away from the border of 2.3 million desperate Palestinians in Gaza.”
Israel’s military, which is armed by the U.S. and other major countries that are legally obligated to prevent genocide, has also blocked humanitarian staff from entering Gaza, adding “pressure and workload” to already overwhelmed aid efforts, Oxfam said.
Celine Maayeh, advocacy and research officer at Juzoor for Health and Social Development—an Oxfam partner organization—said Sunday that “there’s been an alarming increase in cases of malnutrition among children in the last month, and yet the only food the team is able to find to feed people living in 45 shelters is some vegetables.”
“There is an indisputable, man-made, intentional deprivation of aid that continues to suck the life out of any and all humanitarian operations, including our own,” said Maayeh.
“If a famine is declared, it will already be too late for too many people—children are famine’s first victims and are already dying in Gaza because of malnutrition.”
Oxfam’s findings are consistent with those of other aid organizations and lawmakers who have visited the region in recent weeks.
In January, U.S. Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) told reporters that they witnessed “miles of backed-up trucks” stuck at border crossings as Gazans nearby struggled to survive, eating grass and drinking contaminated water.
The senators said they saw one warehouse full of items that Israeli authorities rejected in their inspection process, including oxygen cylinders and medical kits used for delivering babies.
Van Hollen said the warehouse was “a testament to the arbitrariness” of Israel’s inspections.
Oxfam argued Sunday that the “only meaningful solution” to Gaza’s intensifying humanitarian emergency is “an immediate, permanent, and unconditional cease-fire.”
“Even the trickle of aid that a humanitarian response could provide under the current circumstances is being further obstructed by Israel’s policies and practices, inflicting suffering on millions of Palestinians who are living under Israeli bombardment without access to food, clean water, and medical care,” the group said.
Xavier Joubert, country director for Save the Children in the occupied Palestinian territory, echoed Oxfam’s call for a cease-fire and warned in response to the new IPC figures that “we have a clear timeframe to stave off famine, and it demands urgency.”
“If a famine is declared, it will already be too late for too many people—children are famine’s first victims and are already dying in Gaza because of malnutrition,” said Joubert. “Every minute counts for them. It should be on the collective conscience of Israeli authorities and the international community that every day without an immediate, definitive cease-fire and unfettered access for and to humanitarian aid is another catastrophic day of starvation and suffering, another step towards famine, and another death knell for Gaza’s children.”
“This famine is not a natural disaster. It is not a flaw. It is not an earthquake. It is entirely man-made,” said Josep Borrell, the E.U.’s foreign affairs chief.
The European Union’s top foreign affairs official on Monday said that after more than five months of Israel’s blocking of humanitarian aid and bombardment of Gaza, the U.S.-backed government has pushed the enclave into famine.
Josep Borrell, the E.U.’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, demanded that Western governments clearly state the reason that at least two of Gaza’s five governorates have now been identified by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification global initiative (IPC) as experiencing famine “with reasonable evidence.”
“In Gaza we are no longer on the brink of famine; we are in a state of famine, affecting thousands of people,” Borrell said in Brussels at a meeting on humanitarian aid for the besieged enclave. “This is unacceptable. Starvation is used as a weapon of war.”
“By whom? Let’s dare to say by whom. By the one that prevents humanitarian support entering into Gaza,” he said, adding that “Israel is provoking famine.”
Borrell’s remarks signify that the E.U. has now accepted that “that Israel is starving Gaza,” said journalist Owen Jones, with “straightforward genocidal intent.”
The IPC, which was established in 2004 by the United Nations and international humanitarian groups, said Monday that since the analysis it conducted in December—in which it warned of famine by May if a cessation of hostilities did not take place—the conditions needed to prevent such a catastrophe have not been met.
Famine in Gaza’s northern governorates is now projected to take hold between mid-March and May, the IPC said.
“According to the most likely scenario, both North Gaza and Gaza Governorates are classified in IPC Phase 5 (famine) with reasonable evidence, with 70% (around 210,000 people) of the population in IPC Phase 5 (catastrophe),” said the initiative.
The group uses the famine classification when at least one of three conditions has been observed:
At least 20% of households have an extreme lack of food;
At least 30% of children suffer from acute malnutrition; and
At least two adults or four children for every 10,000 people die daily from starvation or from disease linked to malnutrition.
At least 27 children in Gaza have now died of malnutrition in recent weeks, according to local authorities, as Israel has attacked civilians seeking humanitarian aid numerous times and has blocked deliveries.
The E.U. said Monday that just 100 tonnes of aid per day are reaching Gaza, compared with 500 tonnes that entered the enclave daily before Israel’s current bombardment.
The entire population of 2.2 million people is now facing high levels of “acute food insecurity,” according to the IPC.
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, head of the pediatric department at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, told Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) that the facility is seeing the daily effects of Israel’s blocking of aid.
“Amid the famine in the north, there are many cases of elderly people and especially children showing symptoms of dehydration and malnutrition,” said the doctor. “Twenty-five to 30 children are admitted to the hospital on a daily basis, with half of them suffering from dehydration and malnutrition. One child, two months old, died today because of dehydration and malnutrition. Other children are on the same trajectory unless the situation is addressed soon.”
Meanwhile, he said, medical workers themselves are “suffering from physical weakness and extreme exhaustion” as they try to treat people injured in relentless bombings and gunfire.
“As a medical team managing the hospital, we have not been able to secure even one meal,” said Abu Safiya. “Our staff are worn out working 24/7 without food.”
Borrell pointed to recent comments by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in which Scholz warned: “We cannot stand by and watch Palestinians starve.”
“This famine is not a natural disaster. It is not a flaw. It is not an earthquake. It is entirely man-made,” said Borrell. “Chancellor Scholz is saying Europeans cannot sit and watch Palestinian starving, when on the other side of the border there is food for months accumulated in stocks, while on the other side of the road there are people dying of hunger.”
Rose Caldwell, CEO of children’s rights group Plan International, added that the “entirely man-made catastrophe should be a source of shame for the international community.”
“After months of unimaginable trauma and indiscriminate bombing, the children of Gaza are now facing the horror of starvation and the threat of imminent famine,” said Caldwell. “There can be no excuses: preventing access for humanitarian aid is a clear violation of international humanitarian law. The starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is illegal and immoral.”
The IPC has classified only two other humanitarian crises as famines: one in Somalia, which killed 490,000 people in 2011, and one in South Sudan, which killed 80,000 people in 2017.
At least 31,726 Palestinians have been killed by the Israel Defense Forces since it began its bombardment.
“Before the war, Gaza was the greatest open air prison,” said Borrell. “Today it is the greatest open air graveyard.”
Melanie Ward, CEO of MAP, noted that the organization warned in January that its physicians were seeing evidence of severe malnutrition in children.
“World leaders have fiddled at the edges rather than take decisive action which addresses the cause of this starvation,” said Ward. “Now world leaders must insist that Israel immediately opens all land crossings into Gaza, particularly the Karni and Erez crossings, and allows safe and unfettered access for aid and aid workers.”
“Children in Gaza are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever known,” she added, “and their survival depends on more food, fuel, and water entering Gaza immediately, as well as a lasting cease-fire.”
It’s been a rough few years for most people around the world—but not these folks.
Four years ago, the United States entered the Covid-19 pandemic. Forbes published its 34th annual billionaire survey shortly after with data keyed to March 18, 2020. On that day, the United States had 614 billionaires who owned a combined wealth of $2.947 trillion.
Four years later, on March 18, 2024, the country has 737 billionaires with a combined wealth of $5.529 trillion, an 87.6 percent increase of $2.58 trillion, according to Institute for Policy Studies calculations of Forbes Real Time Billionaire Data. (Thank you, Forbes!)
The last four years have been great for particular billionaires:
On March 18, 2020, Tesla CEO Elon Musk had wealth valued just under $25 billion. By May 2022, his wealth had surged to $255 billion. As of March 18, 2024, Musk is at $188.5 billion, more than a seven-fold increase in four years.
Over four years, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has seen his wealth increase from $113 billion to 192.8 billion, even after paying out tens of billions in a divorce settlement and donating tens of billions to charity.
Three Walton family members — Jim, Alice, and Rob — are the principal heirs to the Walmart fortune. They saw their combined assets rise from $161.1 billion to $229.6 billion.
In 2020, only one billionaire — Jeff Bezos — had $100 billion or more. Today, the entire top ten are centi-billionaires, bringing their collective wealth to a staggering $1.4 trillion.
The only billionaire on the 2020 top 15 wealthiest Americans list to see their wealth decline in four years was MacKenzie Scott. Four years ago, on March 18, 2020, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos had a net worth of $36 billion. It has declined to $35.4 billion due to her aggressive giving to charity.
For more details on how America’s billionaires have fared since the onset of the pandemic, check out our updates page.
“How can Greenpeace’s activists paddling on kayaks be a threat to the environment, but the plundering of the oceans be a solution to the climate catastrophe?”
As the International Seabed Authority kicked off its annual summit in Jamaica on Monday to discuss rules for extracting minerals from the ocean floor, Greenpeace—which could be expelled from the United Nations body over a demonstration targeting a mining company—is urging the ISA to “stop deep-sea mining, not protests.”
Representatives of 167 nations are gathering in Kingston to draft the regulatory framework for deep-sea mining, which ISA member states agreed to work out by July 2025. Although there are no current commercial deep seabed mining operations, the ISA has issued exploration licenses to state-owned companies and agencies in China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, and South Korea, and to private corporations including U.K. Seabed Resources, a subsidiary of U.S. military-industrial complex giant Lockheed Martin.
The Metals Company, a Canadian startup looking to make a big splash in deep-sea mining, has been targeted by Greenpeace “kayaktivists,” who last November boarded a ship belonging to subsidiary Nauru Ocean Resources Inc. in the Pacific Ocean and occupied the vessel’s stern crane to draw attention to the potential harm that mineral extraction would cause to one of the world’s last untouched ecosystems.
That peaceful protest could cost Greenpeace its ISA observer status, as members will consider whether to punish the environmental group during this week’s conference. ISA Secretary-General Michael Lodge claimed that Greenpeace’s kayak protest posed a “serious threat” to company personnel and “the marine environment.”
However, last November a Dutch court rejected The Metals Company’s request for an injunction against the protesters, finding it “understandable” that Greenpeace took direct action in the face of “possibly very serious consequences” of the company’s mining plans.
Greenpeace plans to hold a side event at the ISA conference on Monday focusing on the right to protest.
“If Michael Lodge had put as much effort into properly scrutinizing deep-sea mining companies and ensuring transparent negotiations as he has chasing dissent, a pristine ecosystem would have a fair chance to remain undisturbed,” said Greenpeace International Deep-Sea Mining campaign lead Louisa Casson. “How can Greenpeace’s activists paddling on kayaks be a threat to the environment, but the plundering of the oceans be a solution to the climate catastrophe?”
This year’s ISA conference comes as two dozen nations are calling for a moratorium on deep-sea mining and campaigners are urging the United States to ratify the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, under which the ISA was established.
“Over the past year, it’s been outstanding to see the growing call for a moratorium from countries in the Pacific, Europe, and Latin America,” said Casson. “Responsible nations at the ISA are listening to the mounting science that shows deep-sea mining would cause irreversible damage to the oceans… The momentum is on the side of a moratorium.”
There is also pushback. Last week, more than 350 former military and political leaders in the United States including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton published a letter urging the U.S. Senate to sign and ratify the Law of the Sea in a bid to boost deep-sea mining amid rising international competition for minerals.
“Almost everyone agrees that the United States should ratify the Law of the Sea—it’s a no-brainer and has been since the treaty was adopted over 40 years ago. This might be the only thing that Greenpeace and Big Oil agree with each other on,” said Arlo Hemphill, who heads the Oceans Are Life campaign at Greenpeace USA.
“Now, deep-sea mining corporation The Metals Company has jumped on the bandwagon, hoping it will increase their chances of making it big after several costly failed ventures,” Hemphill added. “With two dozen countries already on the record opposing the launch of deep-sea mining any time soon, there is little possibility it will be permitted.”
However, earlier this year Norway became the first country to green-light deep-sea mining, a decision one environmental campaigner warned will have “severe impacts on ocean wildlife.”
Britain’s foreign minister has played the lead government role in defending the indefensible – the UK’s support of Israel as it engages in the mass killing of Palestinians.
Andrew Mitchell has consistently defended and apologised for Israel’s war on Gaza since it launched its brutal campaign following the Hamas attacks of 7 October last year.
His support, delivered in numerous parliamentary debates and questioning, is part of the UK government’s extraordinary backing of Israel.
This includessubstantial military activities not reported by Britain’s mainstream media, defence of Israel at the United Nations and ongoing negotiations to increase trade between the two countries – all taking place as Israel has killed over 30,000 Palestinians.
Mitchell’s tireless assistance to Israel while it accused by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) of “plausibly” conducting a genocide, has covered numerous aspects of Israel’s war.
‘Wrong and provocative’
In particular, the foreign minister has led the vociferous UK government rejection of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ.
Mitchell has said that “South Africa’s decision to bring the case was wrong and provocative”. Indeed, he has dismissed the charge of genocide against Israel as “hideous”.
In parliament, Mitchell has repeatedly said the case is “unhelpful and we do not support it”. He has added: “We do not believe that calling this genocide is the right approach. It is wrong to say that Israeli leadership, and Israel as a country, have the intention to commit genocide”.
From a small group of seasoned protesters, a lively and creative coalition of Jewish groups has come together to form a growing, visible bloc in solidarity with the Palestinians on all the protests against Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. RUTH LUKOM reports
…
Our newly formed Jewish Bloc — including, among others, the Black-Jewish Alliance, Na’amod, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, the Jewish Socialists’ Group, Jewish Voice for Labour and Jewdas as well as individual Jews and activists who have come together — is now a recognised presence. No longer a curiosity.
We are getting an entirely different and sometimes quite moving response to what we have previously encountered. It is a combination of gratitude and relief as we have vindicated what everyone knew in their hearts: that what they were reading and hearing in mainstream media about British Jews being united on Israel and Palestine was a lie.
As more groups joined, our Jewish Bloc began organising more methodically. Someone knew a graphic designer and they came up with our watermelon/star logo, which has been picked up everywhere.
Before a mass demo, we talk online and arrange a meeting place which is put on to our Jewish Bloc logo and then circulated. Our numbers have grown — up to 1,000 on one demo. The people joining us are a combination of longstanding activists and other Jews who are horrified and angry at Israeli brutality but still wary of the mass protests because of the raw emotions, fear of hostility or uneasiness about the “river and sea” chants.
Since December the Jewish Bloc has met up each month with other comrades and friends for a Shabbat dinner, where we eat, drink, sing and dance with our group banners draped around the room.
But that’s just in London.
Around the country, in all the major cities, Jews are demonstrating as Jews. In Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool, Jews have joined the Palestine demos and organised vigils. Says Carla Bloom, a member of Na’amod in Brighton: “We demonstrate to all and sundry that it’s possible to be an ‘out’ Jew and not support Israel. We encourage other Jews to have the confidence to speak out against Israel — because the pro-ceasefire argument is strengthened when ‘even’ Jews espouse it.”
And Misha in Scotland says: “I will often march with a wider community group of Jewish people at the protests, or will visibilise myself as being Jewish through holding different signs. To believe in and act for Palestinian liberation is what my Judaism requires of me.
“The mainstream narrative, perpetuated by both global and mainstream British Jewish institutions, holds the belief that all Jews are zionists. I identify as Jewish at the demos to resist this narrative: to show that there is Jewish solidarity for Palestine; that there is a global community of Jews who stand in solidarity with Palestine and we are no less Jewish for this.”
THOUSANDS of anti-racism campaigners rallied across Britain at the weekend to reject the Tories’ “desperate attempt” to win votes by ramping up division and to show support for MP Diane Abbott.
The rallies took place just days after reports emerged that a major Tory donor had said that Britain’s longest-serving black MP “should be shot.”
And in the same week, the government ramped up its Islamophobic rhetoric, with Communities Secretary Michael Gove unveiling a new definition of extremism targeting Muslim groups.
Sabby Dhalu, co-convener of organisers Stand up to Racism, told the Morning Star: “We mobilised to reject the Tories’ ramping up of racism, Islamophobia, hatred, and division in a bid to gain votes at the general election.”
“They are continuing to do similar things today to try to fool people and pull the wool over people’s eyes just in the name of greed,” the former vice president said.
In reflecting on nearly 50 years of climate advocacy, former Vice President Al Gore said that he had “underestimated” the greed of the fossil fuel industry.
The remarks came in an interview published in USA Today on Sunday. When asked if he had any regrets, Gore responded that he had “put every ounce of energy” he had into climate advocacy, but added:
“I was pretty slow to recognize how important the massive funding of anti-climate messaging was going on. I underestimated the power of greed in the fossil fuel industry, the shamelessness in putting out the lies.”
“They are continuing to do similar things today to try to fool people and pull the wool over people’s eyes just in the name of greed,” Gore continued.
“What’s at stake is so incredible.”
Gore, who tried to raise awareness about the climate crisis in the U.S. House of Representatives as early as 1981 and brought the issue to national attention in 2006’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, has taken a harsher tone against oil, gas, and coal companies in recent months. In August 2023, he said that the “climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis,” and in September, he implored the industry to “get out of the way.” In December, he lamented that the industry had “captured the COP process,” referring to the appointment of the United Arab Emirates national oil company CEO Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber to preside over the United Nations’ COP28 climate conference in that country.
In the USA Today interview, Gore also named the fossil fuel industry when asked about his greatest frustration.
“Well, that we haven’t made more progress,” Gore answered, “and that some of the fossil fuel companies have been shameless in providing, continuing to provide lavish funding for disinformation and misinformation.”
“What’s at stake is so incredible,” he added.
However, Gore told USA Today that he tried not to focus on his anger, but instead on continuing to raise awareness about the crisis and what can be done about it. And he remained hopeful that his grandchildren would live in a world in which people had come together and acted in time.
“We’ve got all the solutions we need right now to cut emissions in half before the end of this decade,” he said. “We’ve got a clear line of sight to how we can cut the other 50% of emissions by mid century.”
He also encouraged more people to get involved with the climate movement.
“I would say the greatest need is for more grassroots advocates because the most persuasive advocates are those in your own community,” he said.
Inside the conspiracy to take down wind and solar power.
This article by Sierra is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
LAST JULY, a small group of rabble-rousers boarded a trio of powerboats, banners and bullhorns in hand. They were headed for the massive floating construction site of an offshore wind farm 35 miles from the eastern tip of Long Island, New York. As the boats motored through the swells, the self-styled activists broke into a chorus of pleas for the wind farm construction to cease—chants likely intended less for the still-faraway workers than for the camera there to capture footage. “Hear this message: We’re here to save the whales!” called out a man in a black polo shirt. “If you were a fossil fuel project, you would have been shut down long ago.”
That apparent conservation activist was, in fact, an infamous climate change disinformation artist: Marc Morano, who’s done more than perhaps any other person to manufacture doubt about global warming. From his perch at Climate Depot, the blog he’s run since 2009, Morano has elevated fake climate experts, encouraged the harassment of real climate scientists, and promoted the myth of “global cooling.”
More recently, Morano has been talking about whales—specifically, the idea that the higher-than-usual number of dead ones washing ashore along the East Coast is the result of President Joe Biden’s push to develop 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by the end of the decade. In fact, the spate of whale strandings began in January 2016, before most survey activity for ocean turbines had even begun. Federal agencies are still investigating “unusual mortality events” for three whale species, but regulators and academic researchers say there’s no evidence of a link to wind development. Since 2019, hundreds of gray whales have also washed up dead on the West Coast, where offshore wind development is only now getting underway. The clearest common factor is rising ocean temperatures, which are disrupting whales’ feeding and migration patterns. In other words, climate change. But no matter—video of Morano’s boat protest landed on Fox News and spread like a ripple through the social media groups that have sprouted to oppose offshore wind.
Morano and company’s mission failed, as construction continued on the 12 turbines that now compose one of the largest offshore wind farms built to date in the United States. In December, New York flipped the switch on South Fork Wind, which will deliver renewable power to some 70,000 homes in the state. But figures like Morano may be gaining ground in a larger mission: twisting public opinion against renewable energy in other would-be host communities.
Morano works at the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, part of a sprawling climate-denial machine assembled with funding from fossil fuel interests like ExxonMobil and the Charles Koch Foundation and dark-money groups like DonorsTrust. Between 1998 and 2014, ExxonMobil and its foundation gave more than half a million dollars to the committee, which did not respond to a request for comment. DonorsTrust gave the group nearly $8 million between 2008 and 2017, according to federal tax data. Today, as both the science and the tangible effects of a warming planet become irrefutable, it’s increasingly rare to encounter the kind of outright climate denial these groups pioneered. Instead, it’s being replaced by what misinformation experts call “climate delayism”—a coordinated campaign to undermine climate solutions.
For fossil fuel ideologues, sowing misinformation about wind and solar power is proving to be an effective stall tactic. Public opinion surveys show that renewable energy remains popular with a bipartisan majority of Americans; in a poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland, seven out of 10 people said they’d be comfortable with a wind farm in their own community. But in New Jersey—where Morano’s group has gone so far as to buy billboards reading “Save Whales Stop Windmills”—nearly half of all the state’s residents now believe that such a connection probably exists, according to an August poll from Monmouth University.
“There is absolutely zero evidence that any of the offshore wind activity has been involved in any of those strandings,” says Douglas Nowacek, a professor of marine conservation technology at Duke University. Claims that noise from offshore wind surveys are driving whales into harm’s way don’t hold water, according to Nowacek—and it bears noting that seismic surveys for oil and gas are far louder. Many of the dead whales have borne signs of ship strikes or entanglement in fishing gear.
Yet in lawsuits challenging offshore wind projects, opponents continue to routinely cite alleged threats to whales. Two separate groups of plaintiffs retained an attorney, David Hubbard, who also represents Morano’s group. (Citing attorney-client privilege, Hubbard declined to discuss the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.) Courts have rejected such challenges to date. But coupled with high interest rates and supply-chain disruptions, such lawsuits could delay the offshore wind sector’s development.
It’s not just offshore wind at risk either. In order for the Biden administration to hit its goal of a 100 percent clean power grid by 2035, the nation needs to rapidly increase the rate of new wind and solar power installations. Hard-won federal policies like the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act put that target within reach. But at the local level, challenges are mounting. A report from Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law identified nearly 230 local measures across 35 states that have been enacted to restrict renewable energy development. Matthew Eisenson, the report’s author, said these could amount to a “serious obstacle” to achieving US climate goals.
Many such measures bear the fingerprints of “wind warriors” who have reemerged in dozens of local fights to stymie the energy transition at key points. For more than a decade, climate deniers and fossil fuel interests have quietly cultivated ties with these activists, equipping them with talking points, legal muscle, model ordinances, and other tools to try to subvert renewable energy adoption. Now, from coastal hamlets in New York to rural farming towns in Ohio, residents supporting wind and solar in their communities are running up against the same barrier: a chorus of disinformation, much of it tied to, or even circulated directly by, fossil-fuel-backed groups waging an existential fight to preserve the status quo.
IN THEIR BOOKMerchants of Doubt, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway detail how Big Oil took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook to stoke the embers of the climate-denial movement. The longer industry groups could “keep the controversy alive” by creating the appearance of scientific debate, the longer they could continue to stall regulations and rake in profits. Oreskes and Conway even spotted overlap in the operatives carrying out this strategy, as figures like tobacco lobbyist Steven Milloy made a seamless transition from denying the health impacts of secondhand smoke to smearing climate scientists. Today, Milloy can be found attacking renewable energy—such as in a bizarre 2023 tweet in which he claimed that “wind power made the trans-Atlantic slave trade possible.”
While slick public relations operatives were once the go-to for industry spin, today scrappy antagonists working through social media can be highly effective, according to Joshua Fergen, a sociologist who has studied how online groups opposing wind energy stoked local conflict over its development in Ohio. Deepening political polarization, fueled by social media, has helped transform renewable energy into a culture-war issue—and extended the reach of its most ardent opponents.
As both the science and the tangible effects of a warming planet become irrefutable, it’s increasingly rare to encounter outright climate denial. Instead, it’s being replaced by what misinformation experts call “climate delayism.”
Fergen emphasizes that valid concerns arise about how renewable developers engage communities and choose project locations. But browse the myriad local Facebook groups dedicated to opposing renewable energy and you’ll see a different set of themes repeat. Along with AI-generated images of whales washed ashore in front of wind turbines, there are memes of the Grim Reaper holding a turbine in place of a scythe. In 2021, a viral post blaming Texas’s deadly winter blackout on iced-over wind turbines used an image from Sweden—and originated from a prominent oil and gas consultant, as USA Today reported.
Certain names also pop up over and over—many of them tied to a 2012 anti-wind confab in Washington, DC. Fergen says that the seeds of today’s online wind wars were in a draft public relations strategy that circulated the same year; a leaked document outlined how wind warriors can “create so much confusion, so many opinions on this, that you don’t really want to step in it,” he says.
One of those names is John Droz. He is a retired real-estate investor who has been involved in an impressive array of local energy fights over the past 15 years. It was Droz who convened the 2012 meeting that brought together staff from groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow with local wind opponents. Droz also edited the PR document that put forth tactics including a meme campaign, a “dummy business” to go into communities considering wind development, and youth science fairs “with preset parameters that cause students to steer away from wind.” The watchdog group Checks and Balances Project, which obtained documents from the conference, told The Guardian that it marked “the first time that local NIMBY anti-wind groups are coordinating and working with national fossil-fuel-funded advocacy groups to wreck the wind industry,” referring to “not in my backyard” anti-wind groups that proliferated during the mid-aughts.
Droz, who once worked at General Electric and describes himself as an “independent physicist,” has links to some of the key organs of the Right. He has been a guest speaker at the infamous climate-denial conferences hosted by the Heartland Institute. But Droz has achieved much of his impact through fastidious networking in communities with planned renewable energy projects. On his website, the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions, he provides a menu of wind ordinance templates. The ordinances often focus on “setback” rules, which mandate how far wind turbines must be located from neighboring properties. In one strategy document, Droz explains that the point of setbacks should be to make them “so restrictive that the cost of the project becomes prohibitive and the developer leaves.”
Droz denies that his ordinances have had this effect; he also says that he does not keep track of how many have passed. But his name has turned up in the local meeting minutes of towns like Richland, New York, which enacted restrictive setbacks in 2018. In the nearby town of Worth, where dozens of residents turned out to try to stop the passage of a similar measure, documents filed with the state utility regulator show that the town board consulted Droz as an “independent wind expert.”
Many such local regulations act as de facto wind farm bans, according to Columbia University’s Eisenson. Local governments extend six-month moratoriums indefinitely, or set caps on the acreage renewables can occupy. “If you have a one-mile setback from roads, you essentially need to have a property that’s at least four square miles in order to have a single wind turbine,” Eisenson says.
Dave Anderson, a policy analyst at the pro-renewables Energy and Policy Institute, has watched figures like Droz reappear perennially. The upshot, he says, is that while local anti-renewable groups may not have been started by the fossil fuel industry, “very quickly, they began to coordinate and get a lot of their information from think tanks and front groups” for the industry.
For more than a decade, Anderson’s group has chronicled this kind of coordination in purportedly grassroots campaigns. That included a yearslong, nationwide assault on state renewable energy mandates led by the State Policy Network, a 50-state group of Koch-affiliated think tanks. Network members turned up to testify on behalf of cut-and-paste legislation rolling back the renewable requirements—sometimes citing debunked studies from other Koch-backed groups. In Ohio, which froze its requirements in 2014, conservative think tanks and utility lobbyists cultivated ties with local wind opponents to stage public meetings featuring a David and Goliath narrative about the invasion of “Big Wind.”
In August 2021, a press conference staged on the steps of the Massachusetts State House seemed to repeat the same formula. After two Nantucket residents announced plans to file suit against a planned offshore wind project, a man with a shock of white hair and a smart blue suit stepped forward. Homeowners fighting wind turbines “need help,” he said, which is why he had traveled from Delaware to announce a new coalition “pairing think tanks like ours from various states with beach community groups.”
The speaker was David Stevenson, a former DuPont executive and adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 transition team. The think tank he was referring to is the Caesar Rodney Institute, the Delaware affiliate of the State Policy Network, where Stevenson works. At least five State Policy Network groups now work within the American Coalition for Ocean Protection, the new anti-wind umbrella group Stevenson announced. The coalition hadn’t received any Koch money to date, Stevenson told reporters at the statehouse press conference. He then added, “Not that we wouldn’t take it.”
Stevenson said in an email that the coalition has provided organizational but not financial support to local offshore-wind opponents. The dollar amount raised by the Caesar Rodney Institute for its Ocean Environment Legal Defense Fund is confidential, he said, “but it is substantial.”
A WOMAN DRESSED in a full-body whale costume sat in the front row of a school gymnasium in Rhode Island last March, holding a sign that read “Save Me.”
The event was an info session about planned offshore wind projects with a panel of experts including Timmons Roberts, a professor of environmental studies at Brown University. The woman, Mary Chalke, was one of the Nantucket homeowners from Stevenson’s press conference. Roberts had first encountered affiliated local wind opponents earlier that year, when they began publishing a series of over-the-top warnings. One said that just as chemical dispersants had intensified the environmental damage from the 2010 Gulf oil spill, so, too, could offshore wind prove to be a cure worse than the disease of climate change. “The claims were so unsupported by the evidence and so sensationalized, and they really seemed to be just playing on people’s fears,” Roberts says.
A few years ago, Roberts was part of a team that modeled possible pathways to decarbonization in Rhode Island and found that nearly two-thirds of its electricity could be supplied by offshore wind, the most viable option in the densely populated state. After watching wind misinformation mount, Roberts switched gears and, with his students, produced a report analyzing opponents’ tactics. The report found that while wind foes circulated voluminous studies, white papers, and regulatory comments that gave the impression of rigor, they relied on fake experts and cherry-picked or misrepresented data—mainstays of the larger climate-denial movement.
Take the evolution of the narrative that wind turbines are killing whales. Conservative tabloids in Britain began falsely reporting a link more than a decade ago, sometimes referencing findings from Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. In 2011, one of the university’s researchers protested when The Daily Telegraph cited his study linking naval exercises to whale strandings—in order to claim that wind farms “posed an even greater threat” to whales. The newspaper issued a correction, but the same claim, with the same citation, continued circulating nonetheless. In 2016, it was picked up by Paul Driessen, head of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. Driessen’s blog post on whale deaths, citing the debunked article, is now marshaled as evidence by US opponents of offshore wind.
University of Rhode Island marine scientist Robert Kenney tried to correct the record in 2017, when a Daily Caller article linked the death of a humpback whale to the first US offshore wind farm. “Whales themselves are louder than turbines”—unlike ultraloud naval sonar—Kenney and a colleague explained in a published response. Plus, the Daily Caller piece had misstated the start of a series of humpback strandings to make the whales’ death rate appear three times as high. “The only thing in the whole article that was true was that there was a dead whale,” Kenney says.
Kenney’s research has tracked the decline of the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale. Since 2011, the whales’ deaths—largely from ship strikes and entanglements in fishing gear—have outpaced births. The most effective protections would involve stricter regulations on commercial fishing, according to Kenney. But, he says, “the fishing industry fights tooth and nail every step of the way.”
It’s suspicious, then, that the fishing industry is now one of the loudest voices decrying the supposed dangers that offshore wind poses to right whales. In 2021, six commercial fishing associations sued the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, alleging that its approval of a wind farm off the coast of Nantucket violates the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The legal muscle behind the case was provided free of charge by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank. The group, which does not comment on its donors, has received at least $4 million from fossil fuel interests.
Amplified by fossil-fuel-backed groups and Fox News, the claims about whale deaths have derailed support for offshore wind in communities like Long Beach, New York, where many residents thought their community would welcome a proposed wind farm. Long Beach sits on a thin strip of land on the south shore of Long Island, an area devastated by 2012’s Superstorm Sandy. In the storm’s aftermath, the city came out in staunch opposition to a proposed liquefied natural gas terminal off its coastline. Residents packed public meetings and staged beachfront rallies. When then-governor Andrew Cuomo arrived in the city in 2015 to announce his veto of the gas project, a crowd of 200 people burst into applause.
During the past year, a vocal group of locals mounted a mirror-image campaign against a proposed offshore wind farm whose underwater cable would make landfall in Long Beach before carrying power to some 1 million New York homes. “I’m all for green energy, believe me. I recycle every little thing I can,” said one area resident at a public hearing before New York’s utility regulator last October. Then she continued, “I am vehemently opposed to this entire project. The whales washing up that never used to wash up before.”
Conservative think tanks and utility lobbyists cultivated ties with local wind opponents to stage public meetings featuring a David and Goliath narrative.
Wind opponents began showing up to nearly every city council meeting. “There weren’t that many of them, but they were very organized, and very loud,” says Ellen Gluck Feldman, an environmental planner who has lived in Long Beach for almost four decades. She watched in dismay as the city council came out in formal opposition to the project last summer, leaving its path forward uncertain.
Gluck Feldman had thought that renewable energy would be a relatively easy sell in a community intimately familiar with climate calamity. “We should be the first ones to step up and do it because of what happened with Sandy,” she says. “We should be the first ones to say yes, we’re on board. And instead, we said no. It just boggles the mind.”
IN MANY PARTS of the country, the tactics honed by anti-wind campaigners are now being deployed against solar.
In late November, residents of Knox County, Ohio, packed a 1,000-seat theater to enjoy snacks and free alcohol and learn about a solar project proposed for their area. The catered town hall was hosted by Knox Smart Development, an anonymously funded LLC incorporated less than three weeks earlier. The speakers included Steve Goreham, a policy adviser for the Heartland Institute whose latest book forecasts a “coming renewable energy failure.” Attendees were instructed on how they could voice their opposition to the state regulator now reviewing the solar project.
Kathy Gamble attended the town hall to pass out information on behalf of Knox County for Responsible Solar, a group she founded to support residents’ rights to use their land as they choose, including for renewable energy development. The solar scare tactics are straining local relationships to the breaking point, she says. “Landowners are afraid to admit that they have land in the project.”
A mostly rural area outside of Columbus, Knox County happens to be home to the Ariel Corporation, a major manufacturer of methane gas compressors. Gamble suspects that its CEO, Republican megadonor Karen Buchwald Wright, is behind the new anti-renewables group. Around the same time as the town hall, according to Gamble, residents began receiving copies of Goreham’s book with a handwritten note from Buchwald Wright. (Neither Knox Smart Development nor the Ariel Corporation responded to a request for comment.)
Gamble is unfazed by these tactics. The dark-money group in Knox County is just the latest of its kind to pop up in Ohio, where fossil fuel and utility companies have launched some of their most brazen attacks on renewable energy. Last year, the Empowerment Alliance, a separate group linked to Buchwald Wright that runs ads attacking wind and solar, successfully lobbied for state legislation categorizing methane gas as green energy. In 2019, Ohioans weathered a $9.5 million advertising blitz in favor of another disastrous energy law. The pressure campaign had been orchestrated by a front group for FirstEnergy, a bankrupt utility at the center of the state’s largest-ever corruption scandal. The utility company built a sprawling network of dark-money groups—and spent some $60 million on outright bribes—to grease the way for the state’s bailout of two aging nuclear plants. The 2019 legislation also gutted renewable energy standards and left taxpayers on the hook for ongoing coal subsidies benefiting FirstEnergy that will total nearly $2 billion by the end of this decade.
While the corruption at the heart of Ohio’s disastrous energy policy has been uncovered, the shadow it cast over the state’s climate future remains. Ohio utilities rank among the worst in the nation for the amount of electricity generated by renewables, and the state’s setback requirements for wind turbines are 10 times greater than those for oil and gas wells. Large-scale solar projects like the one in Knox County could provide a path forward—but only if they can make it through an approval process that’s increasingly stacked against renewables.
Three years ago, legislation cosponsored by Republican state representative Bill Seitz handed counties the power to veto renewable energy projects—and to proclaim themselves off-limits to wind and solar altogether. Communities lack any equivalent power to reject new fossil fuel projects. At least 10 counties in the state have since enacted such bans. And even in counties that haven’t passed such measures, the Ohio Power Siting Board has nonetheless begun rejecting new renewable projects, citing the presence of community opposition as evidence that they don’t adequately serve the public interest.
That’s a stark departure from precedent, according to Karin Nordstrom, an attorney for the nonprofit Ohio Environmental Council. In 2019, the board approved a controversial methane gas pipeline over the protest of communities in its path. Treating community opposition as a sufficient basis for denial appears to be a standard applied only to renewable energy, Nordstrom says. It’s “inappropriate” not to consider a project’s impact on climate change as part of the public interest.
Fossil fuel interests have a history of covert intervention in Ohio’s renewable energy siting. In one now-infamous example, coal producer Murray Energy was unmasked in 2018 as the money behind a yearslong lawsuit against a proposed Lake Erie wind farm. That was after an apparent front group for the coal industry—going by the name of Campaign for Affordable and Reliable Energy—tried unsuccessfully to intervene directly in several renewable energy siting cases. Murray Energy was also a major backer of the corruption-tainted 2019 nuclear and coal bailout.
Even after the astroturf anti-wind scheme was exposed in local media, an attorney for Murray Energy, John Stock, continued to represent groups fighting renewable energy projects until the coal company’s 2019 bankruptcy. At least two of Stock’s cases were then taken over by Jack Van Kley, a Columbus attorney who has since helped accelerate denials of renewable projects in Ohio. In the past four years, Van Kley has helped kill at least three other renewable energy projects, and he’s currently representing intervenors in four solar cases before the siting board. Last summer, The Plain Dealer spotted a reference to an “independent individual” chipping in $10,000 toward Van Kley’s fee in the meeting minutes of one of the townships he’s representing.
Van Kley said in an email that he has never represented or been paid by fossil fuel companies; his clients pay his fees. Other than the support they get from landowners who benefit financially, according to Van Kley, the projects “are almost universally opposed.”
In Madison County, Ohio, a solar proponent named John Boeckl has tried to counter that narrative. Boeckl researches photovoltaics for the nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and his land is a few hundred yards from the proposed site of the Oak Run Solar Project, which could become one of the largest solar projects built to date nationwide. With the help of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center, Boeckl filed testimony on behalf of the project. He says that the objections he has heard from area residents boil down to scare tactics: “They’re taking away all our farmland, and we’re going to be eating soy.” The rhetoric echoes lines about the loss of farmland circulated by new fossil-fuel-linked groups like the Empowerment Alliance, as well as older ones like the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. In fact, Oak Run Solar could break new ground in agrovoltaics, the practice of co-locating crops and solar panels, which can increase some crop yields and reduce the amount of water needed for irrigation.
Local opponents have also raised concerns about the waste generated by solar panels; last year, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Colorado School of Mines warned that such claims may be slowing solar deployment, even though decarbonization “represents a substantial reduction in mass and toxicity of waste.” At present, they found, as much toxic coal ash is generated globally in one month as solar panels are expected to produce in the next 35 years.
In the face of well-financed opposition, Gamble feels outgunned. “You can hardly turn on a computer in this area without seeing their ads,” she says. But she’ll keep having conversations with her neighbors, and she plans to make her opinions known at siting board meetings when hearings get underway this spring. “I plan to get up and say my piece there,” she says, no matter the size of the opposition. “I do know that I just plan to keep on doing what I do.”
This article was published in partnership with The American Prospect.
Perhaps our government imagines bulldog spirit will protect us from the dangerous substances that Europe rules unsafe
It’s a benefit of Brexit – but only if you’re a manufacturer or distributor of toxic chemicals. For the rest of us, it’s another load we have to carry on behalf of the shysters and corner-cutters who lobbied for the UK to leave the EU.
The government insisted on a separate regulatory system for chemicals. At first sight, it’s senseless: chemical regulation is extremely complicated and expensive. Why replicate an EU system that costs many millions of euros and employs a small army of scientists and administrators? Why not simply adopt as UK standards the decisions it makes? After all, common regulatory standards make trading with the rest of Europe easier. Well, now we know. A separate system allows the UK to become a dumping ground for the chemicals that Europe rules unsafe.
While negotiating our exit from the EU, the government repeatedly promised that environmental protections would not be eroded. In 2018, for example, the then environment secretary Michael Gove, in a speech titled Green Brexit, claimed “not only will there be no abandonment of the environmental principles that we’ve adopted in our time in the EU, but indeed we aim to strengthen environmental protection measures”. Such pledges turn out to be as dodgy as a £3 coin with Boris Johnson’s head on it.