RFK Jr.’s ‘Sad’ Slide From Environmental Hero to Outcast

In the early 2000s, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then a prominent environmental attorney who had recently been named one of Time magazine’s “Heroes for the Planet,” played a leading role in killing an offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound not far from his family’s Cape Cod estate.

Project proponents say the fierce opposition by Kennedy, a presidential candidate who recently suspended his campaign but remains on the ballot in nearly three dozen states, had a long-lasting impact on the U.S. offshore wind industry and laid the seeds for opposition that continues today.

“It set back offshore wind over 20 years in the United States,” said Jim Gordon, the former CEO of Cape Wind, the company that tried to build the Nantucket Sound project. Gordon said Kennedy was often the loudest, most combative voice of the well-funded opposition. “You have to understand that they created such a brouhaha and so much fear over the technology and the impacts, which have proven to be unfounded.”

Two decades later, Kennedy—who recently endorsed former President Donald Trump, a candidate who frequently mocks wind power—says he opposes all offshore wind. When asked about the role he may have played in significantly delaying one of the most promising sources of clean energy in the United States, he embraced the connection.

“Well, if I did, I’m very happy about that because offshore wind has been a catastrophe,” Kennedy told Inside Climate News. “It should be shut down. It makes no sense.”

Environmental advocates who once looked up to Kennedy say the positions he has taken in recent years have disheartened them. Kennedy is a vaccine skeptic who has promoted a link between vaccines and autism that has been disproven.

“The whole story just makes me profoundly sad,” climate activist and author Bill McKibben said. “I don’t know whether it began with the vaccine stuff or if it began with the fact that he didn’t want to look at wind turbines off Cape Cod, but at some point he just began this apparently relentless slide, to something very, very different from what he’d been.”

“He could have used his name and platform to really help the early push for renewable energy.”

— Bill McKibben, climate activist and author

Kennedy was celebrated as an environmental champion for his work cleaning up the Hudson river with the Riverkeeper association in the late ’90s. He was also a founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance, where he took on pollution from coal mines, coal-fired power plants and factory farms. Working for the Natural Resources Defense Council, Kennedy assisted Indigenous tribes in Canada and South America seeking to protect their homelands against large-scale energy and extractive projects, though his work in Ecuador was later called into question.

McKibben noted that Kennedy suffered from a brain parasite in 2010 and wondered if that may have played a role in his changing views on offshore wind and other issues. Kennedy has said he recovered from the parasite and had no aftereffects. 

“He could have used his name and platform to really help the early push for renewable energy,” McKibben added. “He could have done it by saying, you know, ‘What an honor to get to participate in this, in the place that I love.’ And he did exactly the opposite.” 

‘Strong NIMBYism and Strange Bedfellows’ 

When first proposed in 2001, Cape Wind would have been not only the first offshore wind farm in the U.S. but also one of the largest such projects in the world. Cape Wind’s 170 turbines (later reduced to 130 larger turbines) in shallow waters approximately five miles off Cape Cod would have provided 75 percent of the electricity used by Cape Cod, Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. 

That would have reduced dependence on the Canal Generating Plant, the last of the state’s “Filthy Five,” a power plant on the Cape that continues to burn fuel oil, though it is now only used during periods of peak demand.  

Fierce opposition to the project was led by some of the country’s most powerful and wealthy individuals, including U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy and William Koch, whose family made billions from fossil fuels. Koch’s brothers, David and Charles, have underwritten many of the think tanks and institutions that have challenged the science of climate change over the past quarter century.  

While politically opposed on most issues, William Koch and the Kennedys had one thing in common: Both owned large estates on Cape Cod overlooking Nantucket Sound, where the proposed wind farm would be built.  

“It was a case of strong NIMBYism and strange bedfellows,” said Dan Reicher, a senior energy researcher at Stanford University and a former assistant secretary of the Department of Energy.

RFK Jr. was often the public face of the opposition, taking part in debates and writing opinion pieces in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. His environmental credentials and family name gave his viewpoint added credence. 

In 2002, he and Gordon of Cape Wind engaged in a heated debate on National Public Radio. Kennedy railed against the project, warning that boats that drifted into the turbines’ support pilings would be “splintered to pieces” and that the wind farm’s unsightly aesthetics would “forbid people from going there.”

In Gordon’s defense of the project, he said he saw a certain beauty in its form and function, including reducing America’s reliance on foreign oil.

“It would be beautiful to look at these wind turbines [rather] than watching kids march off into the Persian Gulf to fight for oil,” Gordon said.

The debate occurred just over a year after the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The George W. Bush administration was gearing up for war in Iraq. Several years later, the Bush administration spoke out against efforts to delay Cape Wind.

Under Secretary of Energy David Garman said in a 2006 letter to lawmakers that blocking the project “could have a chilling impact on the continued investment and growth of this promising renewable energy resource.”

Jim Lanard, an offshore wind energy developer and former president of the Offshore Wind Development Coalition, a trade organization, said that’s exactly what happened.

“It served to introduce offshore wind in a negative way,” he said. “Developers were put on the defensive immediately.”

During the 2002 debate, Kennedy said repeatedly that he supported offshore wind, just not in Nantucket Sound, which he compared to Boston Common, Central Park and Yosemite National Park.

“There are certain places that you should not put it,” he said.

He also questioned the permitting process for Cape Wind. “I’ve seen, you know, grocery stores on the Cape that go through more of a permit process than this project.”

The permitting for Cape Wind was still in its early phases at the time of the debate in 2002. Though never built, the project ultimately received federal approval in 2010 after an 800-page environmental impact assessment was completed.

Timmons Roberts, a professor of environmental studies and sociology at Brown University, said Kennedy’s performance in the 2002 debate foreshadowed the “dangerous character” he has become in his attacks on science. Kennedy has been widely criticized for promoting conspiracy theories related to vaccines, COVID and the link between HIV and AIDS.

It was “one person living by the axiom of saying [something] loudly and with enough conviction and enough times that eventually people will believe you,” Roberts said of the debate.

Kennedy’s Widening Objections to Offshore Wind 

Twenty-two years later, Kennedy’s opposition to offshore wind has expanded beyond Cape Wind to any such projects. Kennedy said offshore wind is killing whales, ruining fisheries and is too costly.

Kennedy noted that in January 2023, environmental groups in New Jersey called for an investigation into whale deaths that they believe may be related to offshore wind developments, potentially from sonic surveys of the seafloor prior to construction.

Three of the five groups calling for the investigation have ties to fossil fuel interests, according to the Energy and Policy Institute, a clean energy watchdog organization, and a separate report by Roberts and colleagues at Brown University. 

Federal regulators with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management noted that sound surveys conducted by offshore wind companies have not been linked to whale deaths and are far quieter than the “seismic air guns” used by fossil fuel companies to penetrate several kilometers under the seafloor in search of oil and gas deposits. Vessel strikes, fishing gear entanglement and climate-driven changes all pose dangers for whales, experts say.

“There are no data that suggest that OSW [offshore wind] activities have been implicated in any whale deaths,” Lanard said. Kennedy’s statements are “misleading, irresponsible and fear mongering,” he said.

Last month the political arm of the Center for Biological Diversity called on authorities to investigate Kennedy for possible violation of federal laws including the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act after news resurfaced that in the mid-1990s, Kennedy chain-sawed the head off a dead whale on a Massachusetts beach, tied it to the roof of his car and drove it to New York.

The incident was recounted by Kennedy’s daughter, Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, in a 2012 article in Town and Country. RFK Jr. told Inside Climate News the incident was a “rumor,” though he later said at a public event that he was being investigated by a national fisheries institute. A spokesperson for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Services confirmed the investigation but said the agency could not comment on it. 

As for offshore wind’s impact on fisheries, that’s still a developing picture. One recent study showed sea bass populations in the immediate vicinity of the Block Island Wind Farm, the first offshore wind farm in the U.S., consisting of just five turbines, are slightly higher relative to surrounding waters.  

A 2018 report by the European Commission found that offshore wind farms in Europe can result in the loss of fishing grounds because fishing boats cannot access the waters. The report recommended having at least 1.5 kilometers between individual turbines to allow enough space for commercial fishing nets and bottom trawling equipment.

Offshore wind farms currently being built in U.S. waters typically have a one-mile spacing between turbines, or slightly more than the European recommendation.

Kennedy said that offshore wind is three times more expensive than the electricity produced from wind farms based on land.

“Onshore wind is producing power at about 10 cents or 11 cents a kilowatt hour, and offshore wind is requiring about 33 cents a kilowatt hour, so it makes no sense,” Kennedy said.

“I’ve never heard of anything that high,” said Willett Kempton, a marine science and policy professor at the University of Delaware who recently oversaw a detailed assessment of the cost of offshore wind power.  

Vineyard Wind 1, the first large-scale offshore wind farm in the United States still being built in waters off Massachusetts, will receive 9 cents per kilowatt hour on average for the electricity it produces over a 20-year period. Onshore wind and solar costs are significantly lower, around 4 cents per kilowatt hour. The figures include state and federal subsidies and would be slightly higher without these incentives, according to financial services firm Lazard, but are still well below the figures quoted by Kennedy. 

Onshore wind and solar developments near population centers along the East Coast are limited by space constraints, making offshore wind an attractive alternative.

“Stay very far away from today’s RFK Jr. if you’re interested in environmental protection.”

— Dan Reicher, a Stanford University senior energy researcher

In April, dozens of Kennedy’s former colleagues at the Natural Resources Defense Council, where Kennedy worked as a senior attorney for nearly three decades, called on him to “honor our planet” and “drop out” of the election.

The same month, a dozen environmental organizations made a similar plea, saying Kennedy is “not an environmentalist” but a “dangerous conspiracy theorist and a science denier whose agenda would be a disaster for our communities and the planet.”

Five of Kennedy’s 10 siblings denounced his recent Trump endorsement, calling it a “betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear.”

Trump pressed oil executives earlier this year to steer $1 billion to his campaign and offered to immediately reverse dozens of environmental regulations and policies unfavorable to their industry if elected president.   

Kennedy remains on the ballot in the swing states of Wisconsin and Michigan, among other places, and has been named to Trump’s transition team should the former president be reelected. 

Reicher, who used to work with Kennedy at NRDC and has spent time kayaking with him in the U.S. and in South America, offered the following advice to any undecided voters.

“Stay very far away from today’s RFK Jr. if you’re interested in environmental protection,” he said.