In October 2022, Biden administration officials received a letter about a proposed offshore wind project from a “concerned citizen” in Little Compton, Rhode Island.
Lisa Quattrocki Knight was one of more than 120 people and organizations who wrote to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to oppose Revolution Wind, a major offshore project seeking federal permit approvals. She said she was dismayed that a wind project could destroy the “coastline and coastal habitats.”
Nearly three years later, Quattrocki Knight is gaining new attention as president of Green Oceans, a nonprofit with connections to national anti-wind energy organizations and a half-million-dollar budget. The group secured a meeting in May with a senior official in the Trump administration as it works to halt offshore wind projects.
The group’s allegations about wind energy inhabit a wide spectrum, from marine life to intermittency to the costs of decommissioning projects once they’re built. Green Oceans’ legal recommendations for canceling project permits have also been reflected in federal policy announcements.
“What are we doing by industrializing the ocean?” Quattrocki Knight, a doctor, said at a conference in Massachusetts last year. “These are driven by state mandates, not by science.”
Opponents of offshore wind were galvanized during the Biden administration, which approved 11 offshore wind projects. Several Northeast states have incorporated plans for offshore wind electricity into their decarbonization goals.
The environment changed when President Donald Trump took office in January for a second term. The president has targeted offshore wind projects in recent months, and the administration aligned with Green Oceans in August when it ordered construction on the Revolution Wind project — which was about 80 percent completed — to come to a halt.
The developers — a venture of Danish energy company Ørsted and BlackRock — have since sued the administration, as have the attorneys general in Rhode Island and Connecticut. On Wednesday, the attorneys general in Rhode Island and Connecticut asked a federal court to walk back the administration’s stop work order.
Green Oceans was founded by a group of coastal residents in Rhode Island and Massachusetts in 2022, pitching its aim as environmental protection. Its earliest business filings emphasized a wish to protect ocean ecosystems from the “smallest microorganisms to the largest whales.”
Quattrocki Knight and her husband, Stephen Knight, purchased a $7.3 million beachfront home in Little Compton in 2020, according to local records. In a 2023 story from POLITICO’s E&E News, Quattrocki Knight called herself a “very liberal Democrat.”
Green Oceans did not make Quattrocki Knight available for an interview or discuss her current political leanings. But it provided a description of the group’s work. Green Oceans lists six officials on its website, including Quattrocki Knight.
“Our mission is to protect the health of the oceans and the life that depends on it,” Barbara Chapman, a trustee and spokesperson for the group, said in an email, adding that Green Oceans seeks to “stop offshore wind projects that are poorly sited.”
But the group’s all-out opposition to wind project plans that were developed during the Biden administration and its skepticism about renewable power as a solution to climate change have left Green Oceans with few friends within the environmental movement.
“Anyone serious about protecting our ocean and its role in supporting life on Earth understands that climate change is an existential threat, and we need all hands on deck,” Jeff Watters, the Ocean Conservancy’s vice president of external affairs, said in an emailed statement. “We can advance offshore wind and protect marine biodiversity, and there are plenty of established best practices to do that.”
He said a similar balance is not possible with oil and gas, citing past oil spills and pipelines left on the ocean floor. Oil industry players say they are committed to advancing safety practices.
Green Oceans is affiliated with coalitions such as the National Offshore-Wind Opposition Alliance and the Save Right Whales Coalition, according to its website. Neither the alliance nor the coalition responded to a request for comment.
Environmental researchers have noted that Green Oceans’ networks opposing wind energy have ties to fossil fuel interests and conservative legal groups, and their arguments often overlap.
“Increasingly, it seems like they’ve been aligned with a network of think tanks” that “exist to resist the adoption of legal limits on greenhouse gases, and promote fossil fuels and nuclear power,” said Dave Anderson, policy and communications manager at the Energy and Policy Institute, a pro-renewable energy organization that investigates the lobbying efforts of utilities and traditional energy companies.
‘Protecting the ocean’
Green Oceans’ opposition to offshore wind has landed the group in circles traditionally aligned against renewable energy.
Green Oceans filed a friend of the court brief in a lawsuit before the Supreme Court. The proponents in the case — a set of fishing groups — were represented by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which is aligned with the Trump administration’s efforts to upend federal climate regulations. A spokesperson for the Texas-based foundation declined to comment. TPPF has been linked to prominent fossil fuel companies and donors for years.
Rhode Island-based Green Oceans has also voiced support for natural gas as an alternative to wind power, according to research from Brown University’s Climate and Development Lab, which conducts research to inform action on climate change.
“I can’t think of many true environmental groups that would be out there promoting natural gas in particular” given its greenhouse gas emissions, Anderson said.
He said Green Oceans and other groups like it get “a lot of in-kind support and promotional support from these preexisting networks of think tanks and advocacy groups that have been traditionally aligned with the fossil fuel industry.”
A volunteer for the group, Lauren Knight — no relation to Quattrocki Knight — signed on to a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum opposing offshore wind from the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and the Caesar Rodney Institute, which is a member of the state-based network of right-wing think tanks known as the State Policy Network.
CFACT operates the Climate Depot, a website that casts doubt on mainstream climate science, and is funded by DonorsTrust, a major benefactor of conservative causes, according to tax filings in a ProPublica database. Both Green Oceans and CFACT are members of the National Offshore-Wind Opposition Alliance.
CFACT and the Caesar Rodney Institute did not respond to requests for comment.
Chapman, the Green Oceans spokesperson, said the group as a whole did not sign the letter. Green Oceans has a wide range of donors and has not accepted funds from “any energy-industry source,” she said.
“Framing Green Oceans as ‘aligned with fossil fuel interests’ is a manufactured talking point meant to silence legitimate environmental concerns,” Chapman, the Green Oceans spokesperson, said by email.
“The truth is simple: Green Oceans has no fossil fuel funding and no agenda other than protecting the ocean,” she added. “If other groups happen to share our concern on a given issue, that doesn’t change our independence.”
Lauren Knight said in a message that she is an avid sailor who is concerned about “offshore wind turbines’ negative impact on safety, navigation and the marine environment.”
In a statement on its website, Green Oceans praises Burgum for his efforts to “preserve the environment, protect our fisheries, and adopt a ‘commonsense approach to energy’ that does not destroy the one resource upon which this entire planet depends: the ocean.” Many environmental groups have slammed the Interior secretary for slashing environmental reviews and working to boost production of fossil fuels.
Green Oceans’ lawyers in lawsuits against Revolution Wind and South Fork Wind, a separate project that is in operation off the coast of Rhode Island, are Roger and Nancie Marzulla.
Roger Marzulla works on natural resources cases and previously worked in the Reagan administration. Nancie Marzulla worked in the Justice Department. The couple have become go-to attorneys for opponents of offshore wind and are also representing groups including CFACT and the Heartland Institute in a lawsuit against an offshore wind project in Virginia.
In an email, Roger Marzulla wrote that Green Oceans is opposed to Revolution Wind “because its construction and operation threatens the marine environment.”
“We believe in the rule of law, including compliance with reasonable environmental and natural resources protection regulations,” he said by email.
A Revolution Wind spokesperson declined to comment last week to E&E News about Green Oceans’ campaign against its project.
‘Raising a lot of concerns’
J. Timmons Roberts, a professor at Brown University who leads the Climate and Development Lab, has researched — along with his students — the network of fishing entities, think tanks and groups like Green Oceans that oppose offshore wind projects.
He said Green Oceans and similar groups employ a “deceptive maneuver” by highlighting the environmental impacts of wind projects without comparing them to those of fossil fuels and the harms of climate change.
The group’s members “know how to pull strings, and they’ve been successful at raising a lot of concerns among their neighbors and friends and others,” Roberts said in an interview. “What’s remarkable to me is the ambition of this little group from a little town in Rhode Island to go after changing federal policy on a major part of our energy system.”
In August, Roger Marzulla wrote a letter to Brown’s general counsel demanding the university retract and remove from the internet the lab’s research into Green Oceans. The firm said it was preparing to send reports of research misconduct to key university funders like the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.
“You’re threatening the whole scientific enterprise at a major American university to try to shut up one professor and his four undergraduates,” said Brown’s Roberts in an interview. “That’s an extraordinary thing to do.”
In a statement, Brown spokesperson Brian Clark said Brown supports academic freedom.
“One principle that is core to research at Brown is the ability for scholars to discuss contested topics and themes, and to have those topics openly debated,” he said.
A recent report from Green Oceans, titled “Cancelling Offshore Wind Leases,” criticized New England’s clean energy build-out as “ineffectual” for its “objective infeasibility.”
“There is essentially no evidence that six small, green states drastically recapitalizing electricity generation by prematurely substituting reliable fossil fuel capacity with intermittent [offshore wind] will have any positive effect on climate change outcomes,” the group said in the report, which was written by Planet A* Strategies.
Planet A* is run by Maureen Koetz, who has previously worked for a nuclear energy trade association and was a lawyer for former Republican Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico.
Green Oceans also hired consultant Christina Culver, of EdNexus Advisors, who communicated on behalf of the group with Adam Suess, the acting assistant secretary for lands and minerals management at Interior, according to internal emails.
“We’ll talk soon,” Suess wrote in response to Culver, who had shared the group’s “Cancelling Offshore Wind Leases” report ahead of their scheduled meeting.
The group’s report includes a section on “national security” concerns with offshore wind projects. The Trump administration has cited national security as a reason to halt construction of offshore projects.
Culver and Koetz did not respond to requests for comment.
Interior did not respond to a request for comment about its interactions with Green Oceans or the group’s effects on federal policy.
In an email to supporters Monday, Green Oceans called on its members to send letters to state officials in Rhode Island and Connecticut, criticizing the officials for trying to save offshore wind projects under construction like Revolution Wind.
Green Oceans also asked members to write to Burgum, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and the White House.
“Let them know that you oppose offshore wind and support their efforts to stop it,” the group said.
This story also appears in Climatewire.
