Ben Jealous: Whales are dying and the fossil fuel industry is lying

Adobe Stock Photo (TriceEdneyWire.com)—Whoever would have thought fossil fuel industry front groups would make whales and other marine species a cultural wedge issue? However, thanks to a deception campaign targeting wind energy that’s exactly where we find ourselves. The Marine Mammal Stranding Center in New Jersey rescues and rehabilitates live beached animals and performs necropsies on the remains of dead ones to pinpoint their causes of death. Sheila Dean, one of the group’s founders, describes how the rampant misinformation connecting whale deaths to sonar used in surveying the seafloor for offshore wind farms is making her job more difficult. And it is distracting people from what is really killing the whales: vessel strikes, climate change, plastic pollution, and entanglement in fishing gear and marine debris. “I’ve been doing this for 47 years. We had a lot of whale deaths in 2023 but there have been years we’ve had more. In 2013 we had a lot of whales and dolphins washing up. Our necropsy data show a wide variety of possible causes of death, including blunt force trauma from suspected vessel strikes. If the sonar from mapping was killing marine life, our shores likely would have been littered with hundreds, if...