Former US President Donald Trump has claimed that wind turbines off the coast of the US “are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before”. But Mr Trump’s claims are not backed up by evidence. Speaking at a rally in South Carolina on Monday, Mr Trump suggested that “windmills” used to generate electricity are driving whales “crazy”, and dead whales are washing ashore “on a weekly basis”.
Some conservationists have raised concerns about whale deaths near the development of an offshore wind farm off the US east coast. This series of strandings led some Republican lawmakers to call for a temporary halt to all development of offshore wind farms, and further research into possible links to humpback whale deaths. Since then, hundreds of posts wrongly linking wind farms to whale deaths have been spreading on social media, with hundreds of thousands of views.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says that, since 2016, a total of 208 humpback whales have been stranded along the country’s east coast. NOAA data shows 2023 has been one of the worst years in the last decade when it comes to humpback whale deaths in the US, with 33 strandings so far.
In a speech on Monday, Mr Trump claimed that “only one such whale” was killed off the coast of South Carolina “in the last 50 years”. But records from the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources show that, since 1993, at least seven humpback whale strandings have been reported in the state.
NOAA officials carried out post-mortem examinations on about 90 humpback whales found dead since 2016. Forty per cent of those deaths were linked to human interaction - whales becoming entangled in fishing nets, or being struck by vessels travelling through their feeding grounds. In the remaining cases investigated by NOAA, other factors were listed as possible causes of death, including parasite-caused organ damage or starvation.
Many other areas with high numbers of wind farms have not seen an increase in whale mortality. For example, the UK is home to the world’s four largest wind farms, but no humpback whale strandings there have been conclusively linked to the impact of those farms.
The Master of Misinformation for Mugs makes ridiculous claims using inflammatory language and bad grammar … 
“They are washing up ashore,” said Trump, the twice-impeached former US president and reality TV host who is facing multiple criminal indictments. “You wouldn’t see that once a year – now they are coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They are driving the whales, I think, a little batty. No one does anything about that.”
“He displays an astonishing lack of knowledge of whales and whale strandings,” said Andrew Read, a whale researcher and commissioner of the Marine Mammal Commission, of Trump. “There is no scientific evidence whatsoever that wind turbines, or surveying for wind turbines, is causing any whale deaths at all.”
Several right-wing groups funded by fossil fuel interests are linked to seemingly organic community protests against wind farms.