January 8, 2025 — It was a little after 11 o’clock Tuesday morning when Gov. Maura Healey said on GBH Radio that she hoped President-elect Donald Trump would not do much that would disrupt Massachusetts’ pursuit of clean energy.
An hour later, Trump put that notion to rest when he doubled down on his intention of setting “a policy where no windmills are being built” and pointed a finger at Massachusetts during a press conference in Florida.
“They’re dangerous. You see what’s happening up in the Massachusetts area with the whales, where they had two whales wash ashore in, I think, a 17-year period and now they had 14 this season. The windmills are driving the whales crazy, obviously,” Trump said as he opposed both onshore and offshore wind generation as costly, polluting, and harmful to the environment.
There has been an “unprecedented” number of whale strandings along the south shore of Massachusetts this year, officials from the Plymouth-based nonprofit Whale and Dolphin Conservation said. A female humpback whale washed up on Rexhame Beach in Marshfield the day after Christmas, the group said — the sixth large whale carcass to wash up between Weymouth and Plymouth since July.
An official from the group Green Oceans told WJAR last week that the juvenile humpback whale that was stranded along Richmond Pond Beach in Westport was “the 13th whale that has washed up dead in the past three weeks from Massachusetts to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.”