Blue State’s Green Energy Push Threatens Iconic ‘Sacred’ Food Source

Inside the Massachusetts State House hangs a five-foot wooden fish known as the Sacred Cod. It has watched over the House of Representatives for generations, a reminder that cod was once central to the state’s economy and identity.

The Sacred Cod dates to 1784, when Boston merchant and former legislator John Rowe gave it to the House as a tribute to Massachusetts fishermen. Rowe owned the Eleanor, one of the ships involved in the Boston Tea Party. The carving has moved around Beacon Hill over the centuries, but has hung in the House chamber since 1895.

It represents more than quaint colonial nostalgia. Cod built Massachusetts. It supplied ports, shipyards, processors, merchants and fishing families. Cape Cod bears its name. Gloucester and New Bedford remain among America’s most important fishing ports; New Bedford leads the nation in seafood landing value.

Yet the real cod is not doing nearly as well as its wooden stand-in.

Atlantic cod stocks were hammered by overfishing in the 1980s. Massachusetts now regulates cod fishing tightly in the name of rebuilding the population. The state’s 2025 Atlantic Cod Management Transition plan emphasizes stock recovery using “the best available science.” In the Southern New England Cod Management Area, fishermen generally cannot retain cod caught in Massachusetts waters.

That makes the state’s enthusiasm for offshore wind development in and around sensitive fish habitat difficult to square.

When the Trump administration moved in January 2025 to pause new offshore-wind leasing and review federal wind permits, it cited, among other things, the need to protect marine life and maintain “a robust fishing industry for future generations.” The pause offered Massachusetts and federal regulators a chance to reconsider whether industrial construction belongs near one of the region’s most important marine habitats: Cox’s Ledge.

Instead, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell celebrated in June when Democratic-appointed federal judges invalidated the Trump administration’s wind-permitting pause. Campbell praised the ruling as protection for Massachusetts’ investments, jobs, reliable energy, and climate objectives.

Those investments are enormous. Massachusetts has poured at least $311 million into this endeavor, including investments in New Bedford ports to support the offshore-wind supply chain. The projects operating off the Massachusetts and Rhode Island coasts are largely developed, financed, or imported by foreign companies, including Denmark’s Ørsted and Spain’s Iberdrola and its subsidiary Avangrid.

At 28.14 cents per kilowatt-hour in May, New England had the nation’s highest regional average residential electricity price outside Hawaii, according to the Energy Information Administration. Massachusetts averaged 28.82 cents, while Rhode Island was higher at 29.46 cents. Massachusetts electricity rates per kilowatt hour rose another 13.4% in August after rising by roughly the same amount in August 2025.

Other than renewables being associated with higher electricity bills, another more urgent question perhaps is whether Massachusetts is sacrificing a historic working fishery in pursuit of a wind buildout whose environmental tradeoffs remain unsettled.

A key battleground here is Cox’s Ledge. It sits roughly 20 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard and is a longstanding spawning and nursery area for Atlantic cod and other commercially important species like scallops. NOAA Fisheries in 2024 designated it a Southern New England Habitat Area of Particular Concern, elevating its importance in federal environmental review.

That designation came after the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management had already leased nearby federal waters for offshore wind in 2015. Projects including Revolution Wind, Sunrise Wind, Vineyard Wind and SouthCoast Wind either overlap with, sit near, or affect the wider Cox’s Ledge ecosystem.

Cod return to familiar spawning areas. Their courtship and reproduction depend in part on sound. Researchers have warned that pile driving, vessel traffic, sediment disturbance, and underwater noise warrant serious attention in sensitive habitats. Yet the state and federal governments that limit fishermen in the name of rebuilding cod stocks are permitting large-scale industrial construction in the same waters.

“There have been a lot of regulations in the state in order to protect the codfish spawning area,” says Willy Hatch, a longtime Falmouth fishing captain with Machaca Charters. “You definitely cannot fish for cod there, but you can install a large construction site there.”

Offshore wind developers argue that their projects are reviewed, permitted, and mitigated. They are also required to conduct environmental monitoring. But fishermen are skeptical. They see industrial vessels, pile-driving operations, rock placement, cable construction, and turbine fields expanding across working water.

The 2024 Vineyard Wind blade failure on Nantucket made that concern less abstract for the locals. Debris from a broken GE Vernova blade washed ashore and forced beach closures. The episode raised questions about offshore turbine durability, cleanup responsibility, and the release of composite material into the marine environment. It also gave coastal residents a preview of what happens when a project has a mechanical failure at sea.

Dan Turner, a Massachusetts Maritime Academy alumnus and founder of Blue Whale Technologies, a company that designs and builds marine-debris and microplastic ocean filtration systems, says erosion of turbine blades deserves more scrutiny. Offshore blades face salt, wind, and severe weather. “The impact of offshore wind is not well understood,” he says. “This could become an experiment that goes wrong with lasting repercussions.”

NOAA recorded commercial Atlantic-cod landings in New England at 1.4 million pounds in 2024, which was up from 1.08 million in 2022 and 2023. New Bedford’s much more valuable scallop business has faced declining quotas. It’s a mixed bag early out.

For those not connected to the fishing industry, the question is simply going to be whether electricity rates are affordable and whether the government is an honest broker regarding the tradeoffs and impacts.

The opposition is not pro oil and gas. They don’t want a giant oil rig off the coast either.

The Ørsted-owned Sunrise Wind project’s construction and operation plans include an offshore high-voltage direct-current converter platform. This could be one of those unknown impacts over time. The facility would use seawater in a once-through cooling system, drawing water through heat exchangers and discharging warmer water back to the Atlantic. EPA permit documents discuss the project’s use of sodium hypochlorite, generated from seawater to control marine growth in the cooling system, and identify heat and chemical discharges as Clean Water Act pollutants subject to permit limits and monitoring.

Rhode Island approved Sunrise Wind in 2023 only after determining that earlier plans did not adequately address effects on fisheries and marine habitat. The project, which began construction in 2025, stopped by Trump, and jump-started by a Boston judge, was reduced to no more than 84 turbines. It was required to avoid Cox’s Ledge “where practicable,” and directed to fund RI fisheries mitigation – basically a $17.6 million state fund to pay for future harms. Rhode Island’s Fishermen’s Advisory Board said the compensation was weak. They asked for $177.3 million. The Board’s entire leadership resigned in protest.

Visitors to the Newport mansions along the famous Cliff Walk, where the Vanderbilts and other robber barons once summered, can see about a dozen or so Revolution Wind turbines on a clear day on the horizon line; ocean view ruined. The Vanderbilts would have never approved. The mansions’ owner, the Preservation Society of Newport County, is suing BOEM. The case is still pending. Larry Ellison has never weighed in. He should have. His Beechwood Mansion has a clear shot of the offshore wind projects from his backyard.

William “Buddy” Vanderhoop, an Aquinnah Wampanoag charter fisherman in Martha’s Vineyard, says he can see the wind turbines from his house, too. He and other groups have teamed up to sue Vineyard Wind.

He says fishing conditions have changed. “It has (effed up) fishing so bad,” he says, adding that he has won 9 out of 10 bluefish derbies but last fall only caught one because the fish migrated elsewhere.

Fish tale? Who knows. The good news, I suppose, is that at least the fish seem to still be around.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice has been quiet since losing its legal battles.

“I think they are retooling their approach. I’m hearing a lot of different things. I assure you this is not a dead issue,” says Tyler Macallister. He is running against Democratic Rep. Bill Keating for Massachusetts’ 9th Congressional District as a Republican in the November midterms. The district stretches from the farm and beach town of Westport to all of Cape Cod up to historic Plymouth Rock.

Macallister is a commercial and charter fisherman from Mattapoisett. The Buzzard’s Bay town is where the whaling ship Acushnet was built, the vessel Herman Melville sailed on in 1841 before writing Moby Dick. Macallister also owned Turning Mill Energy, a solar installer and engineering company on the Cape. He is not anti-renewables, singing Exxon’s tune. Keating’s largest corporate donor is Iberdrola of Spain, Trump’s least favorite country in the EU.

“If Democrats win in 2028, we will see these projects expand even more,” predicts Susan Conley, a retired vice president from Fitchburg State College in Massachusetts and now a resident in Barnstable on Cape Cod. She says a lot of her neighbors are against offshore wind for its onshore implications. “You will be surprised to discover this issue is non-partisan over here.”

Perhaps the ultimate goal is to turn the choppy, windy waters of New England into the American version of the North Sea — Europe’s wind farm hub with 2,630 installed turbines. Commercial fishermen complained there, to no avail. There has been documented loss of fishing area by UK and Denmark fishermen since installation of the wind farms.

Massachusetts officials tell fishermen to accept strict rules for the sake of cod recovery. NOAA identifies habitat areas off the South Coast of the state that are worth special concern. Regulators acknowledge risks to commercial fishing and sea life from construction noise, vessel traffic, seabed disruption, underground cables, and cooling-water systems that dump heated chlorinated water into the ocean. But then that same government approves industrial-scale development in the same zone.

Scallops in New Bedford are now around $35 a pound, near record highs.

Offshore wind is unlikely to ever lower electric bills, something non-fishermen care about most.

Meanwhile, Rowe’s Sacred Cod remains safe inside the golden-domed State House on Beacon Hill. The real cod, and the people who make their living catching fish off Massachusetts, have no such protection.

Kenneth Rapoza is a former staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal in Brazil. He covered the BRIC countries for Forbes up until 2020 before becoming a Senior Analyst for the Coalition for a Prosperous America. He lives in Massachusetts, where on clear fall days, he can see Vineyard Wind turbines on the horizon.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.