The White House is considering a new proposal that would build an offshore wind factory on land owned by a Native American tribe.
If the Biden administration were to move forward with the project, it would shrink a marine sanctuary that the Native American tribe has proposed so that the wind factory could be constructed. What’s worse, that factory would be owned by one of the Democratic Party’s major donors.
The Washington Free Beacon reported recently that a few weeks ago, the White House issued a proposal that would cut roughly 1,400 square miles of the coastline and ocean from a national marine sanctuary that has been planned in the Pacific Ocean so that infrastructure for a wind turbine project would be accounted for.
One of those factories would be owned by Invenergy, a private green energy company that’s led by CEO and founder Michael Polsky. Since 2016, Polsky has made campaign contributions to Democrats that have exceeded $400,000 total.
In both 2022 and 2020, Polsky donated $72,000 to the campaign committee of House Democrats, the Free Beacon reported. He also donated $75,000 to the 2016 presidential campaign for Hillary Clinton, and $35,000 to the Democratic National Committee.
He’s donated a total of about $500,000 to various political causes in the last seven years, and about 80% of those funds have been sent to Democrats.
Employees at Invenergy donated about $120,000 to the 2020 presidential campaign for President Joe Biden, though Polsky didn’t make any contributions to that campaign, according to campaign contribution data.
The Free Beacon reported that Invenergy also allocated $2.4 million for lobbying efforts to convince federal agencies, Congress and the White House to pass favorable policies to them – just in 2023 alone.
Companies that specialize in renewable energy, such as Invenergy, would obviously profit from the White House’s wind turbine proposal. Yet, environmental groups have shot back, saying projects such as these kill whales and birds – some of the species that the marine sanctuary is trying to protect.
The marine sanctuary, which would be 7,600 square miles, was first proposed in 2015 by the Northern Chumash Tribal Council. The Biden administration announced recently, though, that it wanted to build a wind turbine offshore in that same area, though.
The tribunal council said that the proposal by the White House would essentially reduce 1,400 square miles from the offshore marine preserve and 29 miles of the coastline.
There’s a public comment period on the Biden administration’s proposal, which closes on October 25. After that time, the final boundaries for the proposal could be set.
When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration proposed the alternative boundary that would pave the way for the wind turbine project, it did say that “certain concentrations of this infrastructure may not be compatible with a national marine sanctuary.”
Environmentalists have said that wind factories that have already been built offshore on the U.S. East Coast might be killing whales. The Biden administration, though, has said these concerns are just “misinformation,” even though more than 70 whales have been killed since December.
