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.

“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.

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.”