Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to save the whales along with the ostriches.
The Secretary of Health & Human Services — who recently went to bat for nearly 400 ostriches threatened by the bird flu in Canada — doubled down Sunday on his contention that offshore windmills need to be banned because they threaten whales and other marine life.
The offshore contraptions also are a costly bust as a clean-energy alternative to fossil fuels, Kennedy told WABC 770 AM’s the “Cats Roundtable” program.
“We’ve had 109 whale groundings in the last 22 months. And they’re all in the proximity of these new offshore wind farms,” said the Kennedy scion — who once famously cut off a dead whale’s head on the beach and strapped it to the roof of the family’s car to bring it home to reportedly study it.
“In the 20 years before that, the average whale grounding was 2.6 per year,” he told host John Catsimatidis.
“Many of these [whales] are critically endangered species. … We are going to exterminate these whales,” RFK Jr. said. “When you put a windmill up, the cod disappear, the groundfish disappear. The fishermen are going out of business.”
He added that many of the offshore wind companies operating in the US are foreign-owned and partner with American firms to receive massive subsidies under former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
“The energy that they produce is three times the cost of an onshore wind plant. They make no economic sense,” Kennedy said.
President Trump has already issued an executive order blocking approval of all new offshore wind projects, which are opposed by residents and elected officials in New York and New Jersey shore communities.
The president did allow one controversial offshore wind project off Long Island’s coast to proceed, at the behest of Gov. Kathy Hochul and Big Apple Mayor Eric Adams. It had already received all the necessary approvals and promised an estimated 1,000 local jobs.
The project, known as Empire Wind 1, is just one cog in New York’s grander push to become fossil fuel-free by 2050 and is set to power 500,000 homes through green energy provided by wind turbines. But it faces steep criticism from Nassau County officials, who agree with Kennedy that the project threatens marine life and the local fishing industry.
Kennedy said Sunday that he speaks to Trump “all the time” about his opposition to offshore windmills.
As an environmental lawyer, he helped block a proposed offshore wind farm near his family’s compound in Cape Cod.
Trump himself is a staunch opponent of offshore wind, too, saying, “We’re not going to do the wind thing.
“Big, ugly windmills, they ruin your neighborhood.
“They destroy everything, they’re horrible, the most expensive energy there is,” Trump has said. “They ruin the environment, they kill the birds, they kill the whales.”
As for Kennedy and the ostriches, he has been appealing to Canadian officials to save the birds as part of a campaign with Catsimatidis.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has said it needs to kill hundreds of ostriches at the Universal Ostrich Farm in British Columbia to curb the spread of the avian flu there.
RFK Jr., who owns an emu, stuck his neck out for the birds and is hopeful that doesn’t happen. He said the ostriches survived the avian bird flu and they should be studied to determine how they became immune.
TV’s Dr. Oz, who works closely with RFK as the administrator of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, even offered his Florida ranch as a refuge for the ostriches.
“We want to get antibodies out of them. They survived bird flu. Why did they survive?,” RFK Jr. said.
“We need to know that because there are a lot of other birds that died from it.”
He blamed “bureaucratic corruption” and the lust for power for wanting to cull the ostriches.
