Who We Are

We are a group of academics and community members seeking to provide useful resources to those seeking to understand the pros and cons of offshore wind. We receive no funding from wind industry interests.

Barbara Sullivan-Watts, Ph.D. Biological Oceanography, M.S. Environmental Engineering. Senior Marine Research Scientist, Emerita, Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island since 1980.   Author or co-author of 46 peer reviewed publications.

That is me in the blue coat working with a graduate student collecting one of our weekly samples from Narragansett Bay to document changes in plankton over time. The changes in marine species related to warming are unmistakable as are changes in the Bay itself. Not that long ago upper Narragansett Bay iced over in winter, precluding sampling from a boat. That much ice is a rare event now. Another change is that I am retired but still working to protect New England’s marine ecosystems. I can find no greater contribution to society right now than offering my 50 years of experience toward helping you understand the issues surrounding offshore wind. Like all my fellow oceanographers, I love the sea and its ecosystems. We love being on boats and in the lab, sleuthing into the secrets of the beautiful creatures of the sea. But most of all we love being able to make a difference that is helpful to both humans and sea life.

Today, we oceanographers face the dual challenge of keeping our eyes on the big picture of what we know is stressing ocean species the most, human caused climate change, while simultaneously bringing our knowledge to bear on responsible development of a new human intrusion, offshore wind, into the ocean space. Our current understanding, based on years of observing the oceans, can and will help mitigate local impacts of offshore wind. The turbines are tools at the ready to provide the energy we need while decreasing carbon emissions rapidly as the IPCC explains is needed: “rapid and deep and, in most cases, immediate greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors this decade.” IPCC AR6 2023

So, you see, I am asking you to dive along with me into questions surrounding offshore wind development and to trust in my experience to dig into the scientific literature and then provide the best answers we currently have to determine the responsible path forward for offshore wind.

Stephen Porder, Ph.D. Associate Provost for Sustainability and Acacia Professor of Ecology, Evolutionary, and Organismal Biology and Environment and Society at Brown University.

I spent the last two decades studying ecosystems, how they work, and how humans are changing them. Since moving to Rhode Island in 2007, I have increasingly focused on how our state, and our region, can transition to a more sustainable future. I guide Brown University’s decarbonization and other sustainability efforts and work to leverage what we do on campus to build sustainability solutions in our Rhode Island community. 

I joined this group because I believe all of us have a role to play in building a better future, and am thrilled that the pieces of that future are falling into place, even as the threats remain large. Offshore wind is a big part of that success. Ten years ago, we were on a path to a world that was 8 °F warmer than it was at the turn of the 20th century. Such a world would have no ice at either pole, and the hill upon which Brown sits would become an island. With just the policies we have in place today, the world will be about 5°F warmer by the end of this century. That world is still a scary place - RI will lose many of its coastal communities and the ecosystems that we think of as home will be more like those of Virgina. Still, we’ve made a lot of progress in the past ten years, and our transition to a cleaner, cooler future is rapidly picking up speed! 

Rhode Island’s role in that transition is nothing short of inspirational. Globally, offshore wind is second only to solar power in the fight against climate change. But here in Rhode Island, it is the number one tool at our disposal. We were the first in the nation to install five offshore turbines, and we’ve learned from that first step. Now we need to build out hundreds more in order to power our state through the energy transition. This will bring cleaner air, lower global warming-causing emissions, and independence from the volatile prices and huge human and environmental costs of fossil fuel dependence. 

So - ultimately - I joined this group to help anyone who is interested understand how offshore wind can help us achieve perhaps the greatest achievement in human history - a transition to clean, renewable energy that will avert climate change at a pace never experienced in human history, or indeed in the history of our planet.

Baylor Fox-Kemper PHD, Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Science, Brown University.

I grew up in a factory town in the tidewater region of Virginia, at the meeting point of the Mattaponi, Pamunkey, and York Rivers, which occurs at the fresher end of the York River estuary.  I spent summers sailing, swimming and fishing on the Great Wicomico.  These flooded river estuaries empty into the Chesapeake Bay much as the Sakonnet, Providence, Seekonk, and Taunton rivers empty into Narragansett Bay.  

As a kid, I was worried by the thermal effluent of the paper company where my dad worked into the Pamunkey River–whether the snapping turtles and water moccasin snakes that I feared while swimming would be more or less common under these conditions.  The only scientists I knew were marine scientists who worked in the rivers and salt marshes nearby, so when I specialized in oceanography as a graduate student I think that was a distant reflection of my early days on the water.  Living for the past ten years near Narragansett Bay, my worry about thermal effluents revived, and I worked together with a Brown undergraduate from Massachusetts to quantify the effects of the Brayton Point Power Plant against those of climate change in the Bay (http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2021.705204).  You will find me out on the bay on most nice afternoons, exploring the currents or just looking for a nice anchorage to take a nap.

Scientifically, I grew to appreciate the role of ocean physics–tides, currents, waves, turbulence–on our changing climate and how it is modeled.  Through my work in climate and ocean modeling, I was selected to be one of three leaders of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chapter on “Ocean, Cryosphere, and Sea Level Change” (https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-9/).  The IPCC is the UN’s primary scientific response to climate change, but I recognize that work has a global focus instead of the local view that makes people aware of changes that affect them and helps them decide what to do in their own lives.  For this reason, I spend a lot of time collaborating with scientists around RI on coastal modeling.  Our focus is getting accurate models that can be used to better understand the consequences of local decisions and what climate change has in store for us on a more human scale.  Students are really drawn to studying change in places they can visit and see with their own eyes.  So, while I continue to develop the best climate models with international collaborations, I keep local science going with students as well.

J. Timmons Roberts, Ph.D. Professor in the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society

I learned about climate change back in the late 1980s when I was in graduate school, and started my first research on it in 1992. My whole life has been trying to understand the complex issue, and especially how we deal with it in a way that is fair and effective. 

I grew up in Cleveland, and my family went to Lake Erie each summer, until it was so polluted and the beaches so full of dead fish we stopped going. Major pressure from civil society groups pushed the government to create strict rules for polluters, and about fifteen years later the lake was so much cleaner people were coming for sport fishing. That experience showed me that pressure is needed, and that cleanup is possible. 

After studying I taught at Tulane University in New Orleans for a decade, and then at the College of William and Mary in Virginia for eight years. At Brown I founded a research team in which students and I work on policy-relevant issues. We’ve done studies and worked on legislation about how Rhode Island can address climate change since 2010. These have varied from studies of what risks we face to how we can do our fair share to reduce our emissions. Offshore wind rose to the top in the ways we can do so, and thrive as a state. Here I am doing my favorite thing, and which I fear we’ll lose entirely in Rhode Island: cross-country skiing.

Tina Munter, University of Rhode Island Undergraduate in Environmental and Natural Resource Economics

I grew up coming to Rhode Island in the summer, going to sailing camp and the beach every so often coming across bottles or bags in the water and bringing them home to throw out, never giving them a lot of serious thought until I began working at a beach lifeguard in the state. After starting that job, the consequences of negative, human-caused impacts on the world became more apparent - the DEM would come and test our water for bacteria and our E. Coli counts would be so high we would need to shut down for several days. Regardless of posting signage with bacterial counts and what illnesses it may cause, I had patrons push back on the fact that they weren’t supposed to go in the water. This reluctance to trust data made me interested in the factors influencing human behavior, and the consequences of disregarding rules that are meant to protect people.

In high school I became interested in environmental science and when I got to URI I realized that I could combine my interests in the marine environment with economics, because unfortunately, one cannot exist without the other. I hope to work with the valuation of coral reef ecosystems, and ensuring they are properly accounted for and managed in our economic systems because they truly are one of the great regulators of our oceans. 

Here you can see me during one of my summer internships, working for the URI Graduate School of Oceanography on the fish trawl. The fish trawl is a weekly survey of bottom fish and invertebrates in the Narragansett Bay and is one of the longest records of fish and invertebrate relative abundance in the world. It is also essential for monitoring the health of our bay and how climate change has been affecting our waters and the animals living within it.  

Robert D. Kenney, Ph.D. Biological Oceanography, Emeritus Marine Research Scientist at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography. He has published over 75 articles in refereed scientific journals and chapters in books, in addition to well over 350 reports, meeting abstracts, articles in conference proceedings, and popular articles.

I am a marine ecologist and biological oceanographer with 45 years of experience in research on North Atlantic right whales, other baleen whales, smaller marine mammals, sea turtles, and other marine megafauna. I came to the URI Graduate School of Oceanography in 1978, earned my Ph.D. in 1984, and never left. My undergraduate degree took me 12 years—starting at Michigan and finishing at Cornell. In between I served in the Navy—tracking Soviet submarines by listening to them (and to a few whales) from P-3C patrol planes. I retired in 2012, but since then have continued working part-time on a variety of research projects.

I was born in Michigan; grew up mostly around Buffalo, New York; and also have lived in New Jersey, Illinois, Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland, Iceland, New Hampshire, and (finally) Rhode Island. When I figure out how to retire completely, I’ll be moving to a farm in Vermont. I have served on many national, regional, and state advisory panels; committees; and environmental non-profit boards—added all together it comes to over 200 years of volunteer service. I am still an active member of the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team that has been working since 1996 to reduce entanglements of whales in commercial fishing gear to sustainable levels. In 1986 I was one of nine scientists (from URI, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, New England Aquarium, Center for Coastal Studies, and Marineland of Florida) who created the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium (www.narwc.org) as a venue for sharing information and collaborating on research on right whales. The Consortium has since grown to include hundreds of academic, research, non-profit, fishing industry, and government collaborators from Florida to Atlantic Canada—all dedicated to the conservation of one critically endangered whale species.

Whales are dying, and that is a sad fact, but in my expert opinion there is absolutely zero scientific evidence that offshore wind projects along the U.S. East Coast have any connection with the on-going whale mortalities. But we can point the finger at climate change and warming oceans. The three most significant impacts driving the decline of the North Atlantic right whale population are entanglement in fishing gear, collisions with vessels, and declines in reproduction caused by climate-driven changes in food supplies. Any impacts of temporary behavioral disturbance from the sounds of sonar surveys or even from pile-driving are so far down on that ranking as to be negligible. We have the ability to deal with all three, and have been addressing the first two, although not with the speed or urgency that the situation requires. We know what will be necessary to deal with the third—switching our economy over from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, including offshore wind. It may be true that one wind turbine or one wind farm will not have a substantial effect on its own, but we need to start somewhere. A journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step.

Isabella Garo, Environmental Studies and Political Science Concentrator at Brown University

I spent much of my childhood in the German countryside in a tiny village of about 350 people. My family had been stationed there as a result of my father's career in the Air Force, and my time in Germany was the longest I had ever lived in one place. I loved walking through the woods that surrounded my home and splashing around in the stream that ran through the village. The people of the German countryside have an incredible appreciation for their environment that certainly rubbed off on me.

We were then stationed in England for most of my time in high school. My senior year began in the lead-up to a national election, and the hot-button issue at the time was climate change. Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future strikes had put climate change on the political radar of almost everyone in Europe that year, and this was especially true for younger people who would be voting for the first time in this election. I was hopeful and excited to see British voters elect a party with a rigorous climate action plan. But this excitement came crashing down when the Conservative party -- which had the weakest climate policy of any major British party -- won in a landslide. I realized then what a great challenge climate change would pose, and the day after that election I decided to pursue a degree in environmental studies to make myself part of the solution.

I am now majoring in environmental studies and political science with a focus on environmental justice and climate policy. In the past, I worked as an environmental intern on an Air Force base, which gave me some insight into how the military collaborates with other governmental bodies to manage everyday environmental issues. I am thrilled to now be pursuing solutions through research, and I am excited to see where this research takes us as we navigate the energy transition.

Web Designer : Iman Khanbhai, Environmental Science and Economics at Brown University