David Stevenson stood in a circle of friends and colleagues in an Orlando, Florida, hotel lobby. Everyone but him wore a lapel pin that read “I 
Fossil Fuels.”
Stevenson has dedicated the better part of a decade to obstructing a source of clean energy that can help replace the fossil fuels that are baking the planet. In fact, that’s why he was at the Heartland Institute’s conference: to rail against offshore wind farms.
Stevenson laid out his case in an expansive and mostly empty ballroom. It’s too expensive, he argued from a lectern, and the United States was not effectively assessing its environmental impact. He suggested a plan to get the public to care about this issue: putting whales front and center.
Stevenson stopped short of blaming wind companies for the spate of whale carcasses that had washed up on New Jersey and New York beaches just weeks prior. He agreed with the scientific evidence that “vessel strikes” — not wind development — were the biggest threat in that region. Still, the potential for harm to whales could be a powerful tool in federal court, he speculated, as well as in the court of public opinion.
We parted ways after two days together at the conference, and I ultimately decided not to write a story about Stevenson. He seemed like little more than a gadfly to an increasingly powerful, multibillion-dollar offshore wind industry. I didn’t think much of it when he told me at the time that the industry would “crumble” before it even reached South Carolina.
The once high-flying offshore wind industry has been brought to its knees this year by President Donald Trump. In just the past few months, the Trump administration halted a nearly finished wind farm, clawed back $679 million in offshore wind grants, and moved to cancel permits for three other massive wind farms. Multiple fully permitted projects have been shelved. New development in the U.S. seems impossible.
A January 2025 study by a Brown University research group placed Stevenson at the center of the network of activists and political operators driving America’s anti–offshore wind movement. The data showed he had an outsize influence in galvanizing lawsuits and public protests against wind farms. The analysis also tied Stevenson to a larger web of “dark money” networks that are financially backed by the fossil-fuel industry.