David Stevenson wears many hats. He heads up the so-called American Coalition for Ocean Protection (ACOP). He’s the Director of the Center for Energy & Environmental Policy at the Caesar Rodney Institute. He’s a former Dupont Co. executive, was a member of the Trump Administration’s EPA Transition Team, and serves on the Heartland Institute’s Board of Policy Advisors.
Stevenson and ACOP claim that they are trying to save the right whale from extinction. But earlier this year, their real motives became clear, when WBUR, — Boston’s NPR — reported on a study from the Brown University Climate Development Lab that found the American Coalition for Ocean Protection was part of a “panoply of anti-renewable organizations” working in a “coordinated effort to combat the threat of offshore wind to the fossil fuel industry.”
In fact, WBUR reported that ACOP was founded by Stevenson’s The Caesar Rodney Institute, a Delaware-based libertarian think tank with a long history of opposing renewable energy. The Caesar Rodney Institute publicly supported a federal lawsuit brought by a Nantucket group in 2021.
“While the institute takes every opportunity to disparage offshore wind energy, it has promoted offshore drilling for oil.”
“As the Brown report makes clear, ACOP’s member organizations, like those of Save the Right Whales, include what appear to be grassroots groups that have popped up in locales from North Carolina to Maine. The coalition also counts several think tanks with a history of climate change skepticism among its members and a pronounced ideological bias against renewable energy.”
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