December 20, 2024 — Jerry Leeman III is a fifth generation Maine fisherman and looks the part: broad shoulders, muscular hands, scraggly black beard with streaks of gray. Sitting at the head of an empty boardroom table in his South Portland office, he rails against the buildout of offshore wind currently getting underway in the Northeast.
Leeman has read the government’s environmental assessments and he’s heard scientific experts say turbines won’t destroy the marine ecosystem — but he doesn’t trust them.
“So you’re going to tell me somebody fresh out of college that got a degree knows more about your region and your fishery than [fishermen] who have spent 40 years [on the water]?” he says. “Who is the expert?”
Plenty of fishermen in the Northeast feel they’re being squeezed out of existence by federal regulations and offshore wind development. But Leeman has a bigger platform than most. He founded and now leads the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association, better known as NEFSA.
Since forming in early 2023, the nonprofit has become a rising star in the offshore wind opposition movement. In a matter of months, the group seemed to be everywhere — from Facebook to Fox News to federal meetings — making claims about offshore wind that marine scientists and wind energy experts say are misleading or flat out wrong.
NEFSA’s anti-wind, anti-government regulation message resonates with many in the fishing community. But the scrappy group has also been turbocharged by the $1.1 million it received from a nonprofit linked to Leonard Leo, the conservative powerhouse and co-chairman of the Federalist Society.
Leo is perhaps best known for giving then-candidate Donald Trump a list of potential Supreme Court justices in 2016, though his activism for conservative causes extends far beyond that; he recently said in an NPR interview that, after decades of successfully working to shift the country’s courts to the right, he’s now on a mission to “crush liberal dominance” in other spheres of American life.
Leeman and other leaders at NEFSA say the nonprofit acts independently of its funders. But its affiliation with Leo places it within a growing network of anti-offshore wind organizations aided by conservative groups, many of which are known for casting doubt on climate science.