The Weekend Wonk: RFK Backs Down on Tylenol – Moves on to Wind Turbines

Pseudo science is the wrecking ball that Project 2025 is using to move America back to the Middle Ages, and maximally empower the world’s most ruthless and lawless oligarchs.

And it’s been pretty effective.
Ask around, and I suspect almost everyone has now heard that “Tylenol causes autism”, while almost no one will have heard that the very charlatans who spread the disinformation have now disavowed it.
Rinse and repeat.

The Hill:

“We’ve all said from the beginning that the causative association between Tylenol given in pregnancy … is not sufficient to say it definitely caused autism, but it is very suggestive,” Kennedy said. 

“And so there should be a cautious approach to it, and that’s why our message to patients, to mothers, to people who are pregnant, the mothers of young children, is consult your physician, and we have asked physicians to minimize the use to one that’s absolutely necessary,” Kennedy added.  

The secretary’s comments came more than a month after he and Trump held a press conference in September to specifically warn pregnant women against taking the medication, without citing any scientific evidence. 

Reuters:

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff to probe the potential harms of offshore wind farms, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The move is part of a broader push by the Trump administration to scrutinize offshore wind development, which Trump himself has repeatedly criticized.

In late summer, the Department of Health and Human Services, headed by Kennedy, instructed CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, to prepare research about wind farms’ impact on fishing businesses, the report said.

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Below, one of my favorite climate denial debunkers, Peter Hadfield or “Potholer54” on his YouTube channel, takes on the whales and wind turbines shibboleths.

So, make a big splash with unfounded accusations, then quietly back down, seems to be the template.

Providence Journal:

“There’s absolutely zero evidence of any effect from what’s gone on so far at the wind farms and any serious impacts on whales,” said University of Rhode Island marine mammal biologist Robert Kenney. 

Kenney, an emeritus marine research scientist at the Graduate School of Oceanography who has studied whales, dolphins and other marine vertebrates for 35 years, describes the conjectures linking offshore wind to whale mortality as misinformation. 

Fed up with hearing so much on the subject over the past year as offshore wind construction has picked up off Massachusetts and Rhode Island, he wrote an article recently in Rhode Island Naturalist debunking the claims. 

The title: “Science says that wind farms are not killing whales.” 

Construction of offshore wind farms can be very loud. The piles that anchor wind turbines to the ocean floor must be driven deep into the sediments. To do that, they are essentially hammered into place. The sound from each strike can travel far underwater and has been detected by microphones at very low levels up to 60 miles away. 

But developers are required to employ marine mammal monitors to look out for whales near the construction zones. They also use acoustic sensors in the water to detect whales. If the animals stray too close, construction activities are suspended.  

Developers employ other methods to reduce impacts on marine mammals, such as bubble curtains that dampen the sound of pile driving. They also ramp up the sound of pile driving to give animals time to move away from any disturbance.  

And swimming away is just what whales would do were they to encounter sounds that are too loud, said Kenney.  

He said the worst-case scenario would be temporary hearing loss if a whale were in the direct vicinity of pile driving, but he emphasized that such a situation would be unlikely considering the precautions that are being taken.  

We understand the physics of underwater sound really well,” he said. “We know what’s going on. You can measure the source level of a sound. You can calculate the distance it travels underwater. The sound sources that are out there, they are not loud enough to kill marine mammals.” 

University of Rhode Island acoustician James Miller agreed with Kenney about the speculation blaming offshore wind for whale deaths. 

“There’s really no scientific basis for any of the stuff we’ve been hearing over the past year or two,” he said. 

Miller, chair of URI’s ocean engineering department, has studied sounds from the construction of every offshore wind farm in the United States, starting with the nation’s first, the Block Island Wind Farm, the five-turbine test project completed in 2016.  

He followed that up with work on the two-turbine Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project and has continued with studies of Vineyard Wind and the South Fork Wind Farm, the two projects that have been in construction off Massachusetts and Rhode Island since last year. 

Miller said that whales are tough animals that aren’t bothered by most man-made sounds in the ocean. The only proven exception is explosive dredging using dynamite, which was employed in Canada many years ago. There’s also inconclusive evidence tying military sonar to beaked whale strandings, according to Discovery of Sound in the Sea, a website Miller and other experts in ocean acoustics maintain.  

Pile driving is very loud, but Miller said that because the waters are relatively shallow where the South Fork and Vineyard projects are being built, the sound is absorbed by the ocean floor and doesn’t travel as far as it would in deeper waters. 

And the mitigation measures do help. His studies of bubble curtains found that they shave off about 10 decibels of noise from pile driving. 

The species of most concern during offshore wind construction is the North Atlantic right whale, which is critically endangered. Developers have worked with advocates, government agencies and scientists to schedule pile driving to avoid the winter months when the whales are migrating through Southern New England.