September 23, 2023 — The Pulitzer Center supported this story through its Connected Coastlines project.
A Rhode Island citizen activist made a powerful pitch about the dangers of offshore wind projects to a mostly supportive audience in Westport, Mass., on Tuesday, and a small group of pro-offshore wind observers pushed back afterward, accusing the speaker of bias and distortion.
The speaker at the Sept. 19 event, Lisa Knight, is one of the founders and leaders of Green Oceans, a Little Compton-based citizens group that is using media, small-group meetings, and promises of forthcoming legal actions to block wind projects in development off the coast of Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
She said, “People believe what they want to believe,” a comment that was heartily seconded by a wind-farm supporter.
Knight’s comments were delivered to a live audience and were also livestreamed on YouTube, one of a series of gatherings Green Oceans had hosted since the start of this year. She touched on many topics, including the fossil fuel industry origins of some wind developers; potential harms of wind farms to the ocean environment and animals; dangers to fishermen; costs of electricity created by wind power; and the permitting decisions of federal and state agencies that, she said, are giving wind developers a free pass.
About 60 people attended the talk, and a few dozen more watched online.
During the Q&A period, a man in the audience said, “Listening to this, I don’t know who the bad guys are.” Knight replied, “They are the same people,” pursuing her earlier theme that wind farm developers are former oil industry people.
At present, the South Fork and Vineyard Wind projects are permitted and under construction from bases in Long Island, N.Y., and New Bedford, Mass. Revolution Wind, to be constructed from ports in Rhode Island, has received most of its permits and hopes to begin construction next year. SouthCoast, Sunrise, Revolution 2, and other wind projects are grinding through the permitting process. Regardless of where the wind-generated electricity makes landfall, the turbines will be built in a giant patch of the ocean, or wind lease area, southeast of the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.
Stephen Porder, a professor at Brown University, the associate provost for sustainability, and part of a group of pro-wind industry activists, watched the session online and commented afterward. He said Knight’s talk was riddled with examples of cherry-picking data “to make it appear that something is happening when it is not.” Porder also said Knight often would “mistake correlation with causation,” meaning that she assigned causes to events that simply happened at the same time.
“I’m getting older and the planet is getting warmer, but global warming is not causing me to get old,” Porder said, by way of illustrating many of Knight’s arguments.