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On Monday, Fox News and its Republican guests warned their fellow conservatives that the impeachment of President Donald Trump could be right around the corner. With just over two weeks to the midterms, the GOP has rallied around the message that if the Democrats win majorities in the House and Senate, it could mean the end of Trump’s historically unpopular agenda.

According to Fox News host Chad Pergam, Republicans are “leery” of what Democrats have in store should they secure the major victories polls have suggested are on the way. He spoke with MAGA-oriented Senator Jon Husted (R-OH), who is running an extremely tight race against former Senator Sherrod Brown, with most polls showing that the latter has a lead of between 1 and 6 points. In Husted’s estimation, the Ohio race “will determine whether Republicans stay in the Senate majority or not.” Pergam went on to share a clip of Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ), who ran and was elected as a Democrat in 2019 before switching to GOP in 2020, though the Fox segment still identifies him as the latter. According to Van Drew, criticisms of the administration come down to “Trump Derangement,” and he warns that his former Democratic colleagues are “gonna slow them down and try to stop the government. It's gonna be mayhem.”

If Van Drew is right, then Trump Derangement Syndrome is catching, as polls show the president, his policies, and his corruption are historically unpopular – findings borne out by surveys conducted by Fox News itself. In a poll released last week, Fox found that Trump’s approval has plunged to 36 percent – the lowest he’s ever charted on the network – while other polls have placed him even lower. And Trump’s plunging numbers aren’t driven by Democratic disapproval, who have always rated the president poorly, but by Independents and Republicans who are increasingly turned off by his disastrous policies and self-serving agenda. As the Fox poll revealed, for the first time ever, Americans rate government corruption as their top concern, surpassing even the economy. On that note, the Fox survey found that 74 percent of voters view Trump’s economy negatively, while a mere 18 percent say their lives are better now than they were two years ago.

In the face of such numbers, Fox News has turned up the volume on its alarm for Republicans. As longtime Fox financial analyst Stuart Varney explained last week, “Fox Power rankings suggest the House is very likely to go Democrat. The Senate is a toss-up. The latest Fox poll shows 54 percent prefer Democrat candidates, 45 percent Republicans, and the lead by the Democrats is widening. Worse, voters are very unhappy with inflation – increasingly unhappy. 77 percent disapprove of his policy, only 22 percent think he's doing an OK job. That's a massive gap.” In light of voters’ profound rejection of Trump’s second term and the likely GOP midterm beating to come, said Pergam on Monday, “Voters should expect two years of investigations and even impeachment if Democrats prevail.”

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Some on Fox question Trump's efforts to hinder new renewable projects as power demand and electricity bills skyrocket

After weeks of blaming renewable energy for skyrocketing electricity prices across the country, at least three personalities appear to push back

Special Programs

Climate & Energy

Written by Ilana Berger

:{Published 08/29/25

In three recent segments, Fox personalities questioned the Trump administration’s efforts to block new renewable energy projects as increased demand for electricity to power new data centers drives rate hikes.

Between 2021 and 2024, average monthly residential electricity bills went up by about $22 per month. Now, energy prices are rising twice as fast as the cost of inflation. According to The Guardian, a recent report from the think tank Energy Innovation found that, “Household electricity bills have increased by 10% since Donald Trump re-entered the White House.”

Several factors, including the cost of equipment updates in response to extreme weather events and an increase in demand for electricity, are contributing to the rate hikes. In New Jersey, grid operators have reportedly been slow to connect new energy projects, with many renewable and storage projects waiting in interconnection queues. In the first five months of 2025, renewable energy projects accounted for 91% of new electricity generation. But much more is needed to help lower the cost of electricity.

One such project is Revolution Wind, a wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island that is expected to power “more than 350,000 homes.” Or at least, it was. On August 22, Trump issued a stop-work order on the project.

A few Fox voices begin to pierce through the network’s (and the president’s) anti-renewable agenda

Fox News has scrambled to find a way to blame rate hikes on renewable energy, recently focusing on New Jersey after wholesale electric bills in the state rose by 20% in 2025.

But in an August 26 segment of Varney & Co., Fox correspondent Madison Alworth discussed the stop-work order in Rhode Island for “national security concerns” and concluded that “at the end of this are those folks that are left in the lurch the ratepayers? Because energy bills, they just continue to go up.”

Host Stuart Varney then asked, “And they haven't spelled out what is the national security concern with the project, have they?” Alworth replied that “they have not.” Varney continued, “I thought we wanted all forms of energy to power AI, wind included.”

Fox contributor and wealth management CEO Mark Tepper told Varney, “That would make sense but what we really want is consistent energy sources, and wind is known to be intermittent. It’s inconsistent.”

(Though he appeared to question the administration’s directive in the moment, Varney has hosted Interior Department Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright to push anti-renewable energy talking points unchallenged in defense of cancelling the wind project.)

During an August 23 interview on Fox News Live, correspondent Rich Edson asked Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin why it was necessary to halt a nearly-finished offshore wind farm.

“What’s the problem with this wind farm in Rhode Island?” Edson asked. Zeldin replied that Trump is “not a fan of wind,” pointed to largely overblown claims of negative environmental impacts, and added that, “Our country needs more baseload power. … It’s just not an honest approach to this entire energy conversation if we start acting as if wind is going to be a substitute for all of those things.”

In an unusual move for Fox, Edson continued to challenge Zeldin. “This project is apparently largely almost finished,” he continued. “You’ve got AI, you’ve got the electrification of everything around us. I mean, we just need power. Why would you take any power offline?”

Later in the segment, after Zeldin plugged a proposed natural gas pipeline, Edson continued to press the question of renewables, asking, “Is there room for both, though?”

Video

Citation

From the August 23, 2025, edition of Fox News' FOX News Live

Edson and Varney haven't been the only Fox employees to push back recently.

In an August 22 Fox Business segment, anchor Cheryl Casone interviewed Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ), a leading anti-renewable voice in New Jersey. Casone asked “The critics will say yeah, sure, but the money was already put through, these projects have already begun, so you’re going to get a lot of job losses. I'm curious if you worry about that?”

She also referenced that this is a nationwide issue, pointing out higher rates in Connecticut and Maine, saying, “The EIA reports that there’s going to be a 13% rise in electricity costs from 2022-2025 just in general. So this is a major problem. And now with AI data centers, we need all the energy.”

Video

Citation

From the August 22, 2025, edition of Fox Business' Mornings with Maria

Van Drew replied that “this was all about virtue signalling and nothing about reality.” He said he worked with Trump to make offshore wind “a dead industry because it does nothing good for New Jersey.”

Casone later mentioned how Trump’s signature legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill, eliminated the 30% solar tax credit for home owners, adding, “I know there’s a lot of solar use in New Jersey.”

Trump’s energy policies contradict his promises

Trump is actively shrinking potential energy supply and killing hundreds of “good union jobs” by halting the construction of the Revolution Wind Project, which began in 2023.

According to Ørsted, the company behind the project, Revolution Wind is 80% finished. It has reportedly created 1,200 jobs in the region, including 300 union jobs.

Trump promised to “cut energy and electricity prices in half within 12 months” during his 2024 campaign. Instead, the administration is actively pumping the brakes on new energy projects, and costs are up and expected to continue rising. In fact, the Rhodium Group predicts that “new clean capacity additions to the grid will shrink by 57-62% from 2025 through 2035,” tightening energy supply as demand grows. And since Trump took office, 64,000 renewable energy jobs have been cut or paused. BloombergNEF also recently found that billions of dollars in investments are leaving the U.S. in response to Trump’s anti-renewable energy policies.

Experts also say that Trump’s tariffs will make the grid less reliable by making batteries more expensive. According to Wood Mackenzie, Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports could mean that “the cost of a utility scale solar facility in the US will be 54% more expensive than in Europe and 85% more expensive than a new solar plant built in China.”

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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/offshore-wind-moratorium-whale-deaths_n_642599d9e4b02a8d518d12f0

no pix lnx twt

federal officials have repeatedly stressed that there is no evidence linking offshore wind development along the East Coast to a recent string of whale deaths.

Regardless, GOP lawmakers are citing those deaths in an effort to ban offshore wind — the latest in a growing, misinformation-rich campaign to stymie a ballooning renewable energy sector that stands to compete with America’s powerful oil and gas industry.

:{“The current system in place has allowed offshore wind to move forward too quickly & too recklessly in an attempt to solidify the legacies of green new deal advocates,”:{ Rep. Jeff Van Drew}: (R-N.J.) wrote in a Twitter thread last week. “They hurt the environment, raise energy prices, & will destroy existing industry.”

Van Drew is part of a group of Republicans who introduced a resolution this month that calls for an immediate federal moratorium on offshore wind leasing and construction activity pending the outcome of an investigation to “determine the true impacts” of this development.}:

The resolution specifically notes that 23 dead whales have washed up along the East Coast since December and accuses regulatory agencies of having “an unclear process for determining all contributing causes of death of whales through necropsies.”

Along with Van Drew, the measure currently has five other GOP co-sponsors: Reps. Marjorie Taylor Green (Ga.), Andy Harris (Md.), Chris Smith (N.J.), Scott Perry (Pa.) and Anthony D’Esposito (N.Y.).

[ pix Offshore wind energy opponents gather during a "Save the Whales" rally on Feb. 19 in Point Pleasant, New Jersey.]

To be clear, there are a lot of unknowns about how offshore wind will impact wildlife and marine ecosystems in the short and long term. Like all other offshore industries, wind development has the potential to disrupt and harm whales and otherwise negatively impact the ocean environment.

But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and independent scientists have for months been pushing back against sweeping claims that offshore wind activities, including sonar surveys, are to blame for recent whale deaths. Such misinformation has featured prominently on Fox News and other conservative media in recent months.

“When you think about this obsession with green energy — the argument is always like ‘oil and gas is so bad for the environment,’” Fox News host Laura Ingraham said on her show March 10. “How ironic that what they are doing is almost certainly killing large swaths of the whale population.”

Greene, one of Congress’ proudest conspiracy theorists, has peddled similar nonsense. In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity in February, she claimed — again, without evidence — that whales are washing up because of “wind farms that are being placed all over the ocean.”

“People are calling the alarms over how [wind farms] are not only killing unknown thousands of bird species but also causing whales to beach themselves at record numbers,” Greene said.

There are only two small wind farms in operation in U.S waters, one off the coast of Rhode Island and another off Virginia. Together, they have just seven turbines and a capacity of 42 megawatts.

More than a dozen other large-scale projects are in various stages of permitting and development, but none are currently under construction — a reality that makes the conservative narrative particularly deceitful.

As part of a broader climate agenda, the Biden administration set a goal of securing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030, enough to power 10 million homes for a year and cut 78 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. So far, it has granted final approval to two major offshore wind projects: the long-stalled Vineyard Wind project off the coast of Massachusetts, and South Fork Wind project off Rhode Island.

The recent whale strandings are part of what federal authorities have classified as an “unusual mortality event” that dates back to 2016.

“At this point, there is no evidence that noise resulting from wind development-related site characterization surveys could potentially cause mortality of whales, and no specific links between recent large whale mortalities and currently ongoing surveys,” reads an FAQ on the NOAA’s website.

Rather, officials have pointed to vessel strikes and entanglement in fishing gear— the two biggest human threats to whales, including humpbacks and the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.At least 190 humpback whales have died along the East Coast since 2016. Forty percent of the animals that underwent necropsies showed signs of being struck by a boat or an entanglement.

“Since December 1, 2022, injuries consistent with vessel strike were identified in many of the animals necropsied,” Lauren Gaches, spokesperson for NOAA Fisheries, told Inside Climate News this month.

Conservative lawmakers and media outlets are following the lead of fossil fuel-allied groups in exploiting whales to fight offshore wind. As HuffPost reported in November, anti-offshore wind groups, including some of the nation’s most hard-line climate change denial outfits, have branded themselves guardians of the endangered right whale as they threaten legal action against newly approved offshore wind projects.

:{

Meanwhile, these same groups have advocated for increased offshore drilling while remaining silent about the documented threats to whales posed by oil and gas development. The NOAA estimates that 22% of the population of the endangered Rice’s whale in the Gulf of Mexico was lost as a result of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.}:

[The Block Island Wind Farm off Rhode Island is the first commercial offshore wind farm in the United States.

Those groups include the Heartland Institute and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, better known as CFACT,both of which have long histories of peddling climate change disinformation and cheerleading for the fossil fuel industry. In one of the more ironic and laughable moves of this anti-wind crusade, Peter Murphy, a senior fellow at CFACT, labeled the Biden administration “deniers” on par with the tobacco industry.

“As with the tabacco [sic] companies of yesteryear that disputed their product caused cancer, the Biden NOAA and climate-change cohorts are deniers, claiming there is ‘no evidence’ off-shore wind sites are harming whales,” Murphy wrote in a March 18 post to CFACT’s website, without presenting evidence to the contrary. “Rather, the agency attributes some of whale fatalities to ‘pre-mortem vessel strike,’ while conceding ‘more research is needed.’”

It is no secret that the tobacco and fossil fuel industries have a shared playbook for downplaying and dismissing the harm they have caused. In fact, a trove of documents compiled in 2016 by the Washington-based Center for International Environmental Law, or CIEL, showed that tobacco and oil giants have worked collaboratively for over half a century, sharing marketing and advertising strategies, research institutes, PR firms and even scientists.

:{

CFACT is a member of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a group of conservative charities and nonprofits “focused on dispelling the myths of global warming,” according to its website. Between 1997 and 2007, CFACT received nearly $600,000 from oil giant ExxonMobil.}:

Few if any oil companies have done more to sow doubt about human-caused climate change than ExxonMobil.

In this July 31, 2010, file photo, a dolphin swims through an oil sheen from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill off East Grand Terre Island, where the Gulf of Mexico meets Barataria Bay, on the Louisiana coast.

In his post, Murphy concluded that “at the very least, there needs to be a moratorium on construction of off-shore wind turbines, which from a climate perspective alone are ineffective and a colossal waste, and now hazardous to the largest mammals on the planet.”

:{

Three days later, Republicans introduced their resolution for an offshore wind moratorium.}:

Among other things, the resolution declares that “Atlantic coast offshore wind leases represent a transformative industrialization of vital environmental and maritime resources of the United States.”

There is no question wind farms will industrialize large swaths of U.S. waters. But one of the biggest threats to global ocean health is the burning of planet-warming fossil fuels. Oceans have absorbed an estimated 93% of the excess heat from human-caused climate change. This ocean warming has come with devastating impacts, from mass bleaching of coral reefs to the collapse of fisheries.

The NOAA notes on its website that whales, including the endangered right whale, are particularly vulnerable to climate change, as warming ocean temperatures impact the availability of zooplankton and other prey.

Without a herculean global effort to shift away from fossil fuels and halt planetary warming, scientists warn the impacts to the ocean and marine life will continue to mount.

“The percentage of animal species exposed to potentially dangerous conditions increases significantly the faster the world warms,” climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe tweeted this month, summarizing a finding of the latest United Nations climate report. “In general, ocean species like coral and tropical species are most at risk.”

Offshore wind could ultimately help rein in fossil fuel emissions and combat the global crisis — if disinformation doesn’t get in the way.

Media Matters, a media watchdog group, published a report last week that found that of the 288 Facebook posts from right-wing media in January and February that mentioned wind energy, a whopping 84% included unsubstantiated claims that offshore wind farms impact whale populations. The most popular post was a clip from Fox News’ Jesse Watterstitled “Wind Surveying is KILLING our Whales.”

Related

Republican Party

renewable energy

Whales

wind power

Climate Deniers Exploit Endangered Whales In Bid To Kill Offshore Wind

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/misinformation-about-recent-whale-deaths-dominated-discussions-offshore-wind-energy

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:{after a slew of whale deaths along the east coast of the U.S., right-wing media have been promoting false fossil fuel industry talking points about offshore wind projects on Facebook.

Media Matters found that in the first two months of 2023, from January 1 - March 1:

Of the 288 posts that mention wind energy, nearly 84% specifically mentioned the unsubstantiated claim that offshore wind farms impact whale populations. These posts received 73,457 (73%) out of 101,277 interactions on posts about wind energy.

22 out of the top 50 most-interacted with posts about offshore wind energy contained misinformation claiming that they may be responsible for whale deaths on the East Coast.

None of the posts with misinformation had fact-checks from Facebook moderators, and nearly all of them were from right-leaning pages.}:

Right-leaning pages earned 90% of interactions on posts about wind energy.

Many posts that did not contain misinformation still promoted a misleading narrative about offshore wind projects.

According to NOAA and other experts, there is no evidence that proposed offshore projects have contributed to what the agency is calling an “unusual mortality event.”

:{Ramping up offshore wind development has been a focus of Biden’s energy agenda. In 2021, the administration set a goal of deploying 30 Gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. More recently, the Inflation Reduction Act granted $100 million for offshore wind projects and reopened additional areas for lease in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic for wind development.

This effort, along with concerns over what is causing whale mortality, has mobilized clean energy opponents and sparked extensive coverage and discussion on Facebook, driven almost entirely by right-leaning pages.}:

84% of Facebook posts about wind energy also mentioned whale populations

Out of the 288 posts on the topic of wind energy from the study period, 241, or 84%, specifically mentioned whale populations. From December 1 to March 1, 16 humpback whales have been stranded on or near beaches in states along the Atlantic coast, mostly in New Jersey and New York. North Atlantic Right Whales have also been experiencing an unusual mortality event along the Atlantic Coast since 2017; 6 have been found dead so far in 2023.

Currently, there are only two functional wind farms in the U.S., with about 20 proposed offshore wind projects in various stages of development in 11 states along the East Coast. This has become the perfect opportunity for anti-renewable activists and fossil fuels industry shills posing as environmentalists sympathetic to the plight of whales to launch a public relations and legal campaign in opposition to these offshore wind projects.

Right-wing media, and particularly Fox News,have propelled these efforts in response to Biden’s push for offshore wind. One of the top posts with the most interactions, about 1,600, featured a FoxNews.com article with a headline that read, “SOMETHING FISHY: Congressman says green energy projects may be to blame for animal deaths.” That Congressman isRep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), who introduced legislation that would mandate a federal investigation into the role wind energy development may have played in the recent uptick in whale deaths.

Fox News article with image of beached whale

Smith isn’t the only lawmaker that spoke out after extensive right-wing media coverage. Reps. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ), Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), as well as a dozen New Jersey mayors have all called for a moratorium on offshore wind construction.

Another popular post was a screenshot of a tweet from Monica Crowley, a right-wing podcaster, former Trump official, and former Fox News contributor. The post suggests environmentalists do not care about whales dying because, in this instance, it does not fit their political agenda. It was shared by several pages affiliated with The Western Journal, including the Tea Party Community and Conservative Tribune. The February 13 tweet itself had over 100,000 likes, shares, and comments.

screenshot of a tweet from Monica Crowley

22 out of the top 50 posts with the most interactions about offshore wind and whales contained misinformation on the topic.

Nearly half of the top 50 posts examined by Media Matters incorrectly linked whale deaths to offshore wind projects.

The most popular post from our study, which had nearly 19,500 interactions, was a clip from the January 11 edition of Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime where Watters claimed that surveying for wind projects is killing whales. On January 11, Watters did a segment on his prime time show where he attempted to misleadingly portray Protect Our Coasts NJ as a grassroots oceans advocacy organization.

Jesse Watters plays video of beached whale

The second most popular post, which had almost 15,500 interactions came from Power the Future, whose founder, Daniel Turner, is an alumnus of the Charles Koch Institute. The post links to an opinion piece by Turner claiming that “radical environmentalists” are blaming whale deaths on fishing communities when they should, without evidence, be blaming wind farms.

Power The Future posts an article about "radical wind farm activists" from the Daily Caller

None of the posts were labeled as misleading by Facebook fact-checkers

None of the posts which contained blatant misinformation were labeled as such by Facebook through its fact-checking partnerships. In general, these posts failed to note NOAA’s statement on the topic or statements from any experts that have pointed out the improbability of a connection between the mortality event and offshore wind, especially given that whales face many other risks such as vessel strikes and entanglement. Some posts also accused environmentalists, Democrats and the Biden administration of being dismissive about the plight of whales. In reality, Biden’s massive investments in renewable energy may actually be key to helping save marine life; burning fossil fuels is impacting the species by limiting the availability of their food and changing marine migration patterns.

Other social media posts that were not included in this study and contain similar misinformation on the topic have been repeatedly fact-checked by other sites.

:{Many posts that did not contain misinformation still promoted a misleading narrative about offshore wind projects

Several posts Media Matters looked at featured articles and reports from USA Today, NPR, POLITICO, and Greenpeace that called out this misinformation campaign around offshore wind.

However, these debunks were outnumbered by content that, even if it acknowledged the lack of evidence to support anti-wind talking points, still gave them credence by repeating them over and over again without an immediate debunk and framing the issue as a real debate when very few groups actually disagree with NOAA, and those that do have no evidence to support their claims. Some coverage is also omitting or muddling key details about how far along the wind projects are to make them seem more directly correlated with whale deaths. }:

Even left-leaning pages were complicit in this. For example, a NowThis video asked: “Could Offshore Wind Developments be Causing Whales to Die?” The answer is no, but that isn’t evident until the end of the video.

All in all, the fact that content about all of the benefits offshore wind could bring to coastal communities paled in comparison to perceived harms reveals the success of fossil fuel industry propaganda online.

Is offshore wind killing whales?

Conservative New Jersey activist jumps into anti-wind crusade

Out of all of the posts about whales and offshore wind, 31 posts (13%) came from the page of a conservative activist Joseph Rudy Rullo, who unsuccessfully ran for New Jersey governor in 2017. So far, in 2023, Rullo has dedicated his Facebook page which has 384,000 followers, to spreading misinformation about offshore wind development and bashing New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy for opting to not implement a moratorium on offshore wind development off of the New Jersey coast. He has also been used as a source on the topic for local New Jersey news.

Rullo has directed his followers to take steps to actively oppose offshore wind projects, such as attending New Jersey EPA meetings as well as the February 19 rally to “save the whales.” At the rally, “organizers” with the fossil fuel industry front group Protect Our Oceans NJ addressed the crowd along with lawmakers.

Right-leaning pages posted the most about wind energy compared to left-leaning and ideologically nonaligned pages

Right-leaning pages that post about news and politics have almost completely dominated the Facebook conversation about wind energy in general, not just offshore wind. Right-leaning pages posted more often, and earned more total interactions than either nonaligned or left-leaning pages. Right-leaning pages earned over 91,300 interactions on posts about wind energy, or 90% of all interactions on posts about wind energy, while nonaligned pages earned over 5,800 interactions (6%), and left-leaning pages earned 4,077 interactions (4%).

Right-leaning Facebook pages made 192 posts about wind energy issues, over twice the volume of nonaligned pages, which had 81 posts. Left-leaning pages made just 15 posts. All in all, right-leaning pages made up 67%, or nearly three-quarters of Facebook posts about wind energy.

These posts mainly focused on offshore wind projects and marine life, but also pushed misinformation about the functionality of wind turbines on land and their environmental impact, in addition to making exaggerated statements about how often they experience structural issues.

For example, one Newsmax headline suggested that green energy is flawed while in the same video a Newsmax correspondent admitted that according to the Department of Energy, the “reliability rate of a wind turbine is about 98% so these collapses and failures are quite rare by industry standards.”

Jon Glasgow on wind turbines on American Agenda

The threat that wind turbines pose to birds, which has long been exaggerated and pale in comparison to other threats to avian life such as climate change, buildings, pesticides, and domestic cats was also a theme. The idea has been a staple of climate change deniers with deep ties to the fossil fuel industry, such as Robert Bryce and more recently resurrected by renewable energy skeptics on Twitter.

Methodology

Using CrowdTangle, Media Matters compiled a list of 1,773 Facebook pages that frequently posted about U.S. politics from January 1 to August 25, 2020.

For an explanation of how we compiled pages and identified them as right-leaning, left-leaning, or ideologically nonaligned, see the methodology here.

The resulting list consisted of 771 right-leaning pages, 497 ideologically nonaligned pages, and 505 left-leaning pages.

Using CrowdTangle, Media Matters compiled all posts for the pages on this list that were related to wind energy or whales deaths that contained the keywords: “wind energy,” “wind turbines,” “wind turbine,” “wind farm,” “wind farms,” “offshore wind,” “wind projects,” “wind project,” “wind development," “dead whale,” “whale death,” or “whale deaths” in the post itself or in the headline or description of any included link from January 1, 2023, through March 1, 2023.

Two Media Matters researchers then reviewed the posts to determine which ones were relevant to the topic of wind energy, and which were relevant to the topic of offshore wind and whales specifically.

Finally, researchers coded 50 posts with the most interactions to determine whether they contained misinformation about offshore wind and whale mortality. Misinformation in this case was defined as the suggestion that there is evidence that offshore wind development, most frequently the sonar used in undersea surveys, has been or may be contributing to whale deaths. If coding differed, posts were reviewed and discussed to reach a consensus.

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