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whaling
The History of Whaling Shows Energy Transitions Are Possible
The actual whalers gave ground just in time to save many of the species they’d been hunting from extinction. Would that their spiritual heirs in the fossil fuel industry recognized the even greater tragedy stalking the planet at present.
Oct 29, 2025
I was invited to give a talk at the New Bedford Lyceum last weekend, a long-running forum that has hosted among others Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Herman Melville. I have no idea how well I did (I’m no Douglass and no Lincoln and no Melville), but I do know that the main beneficiary of the trip was me. That’s because I arrived at the venue—the New Bedford Whaling Museum—a few hours early, and got to study the truly remarkable exhibits.
The museum is both crammed full (not one scrimshaw cane, not 10, but closer to 100) and incredibly shipshape, with everything neatly in its place, including a half-size model of a whaling ship (see picture above). Since I’ve been writing recently on the rise of renewable energy, I was fascinated to reflect on the story of how whale oil grew into a huge 19th century energy source—it included the same kind of iterative technological developments (an African-American blacksmith in New Bedford came up with a new kind of swivel harpoon much harder for the whale to shake) and real breakthroughs (imagine even imagining that you could figure out how to build a big firepit for melting blubber into oil in the bottom of a wooden ship).
The most interesting part of the story, however, may have been what happened as the whale oil era expired. In the late 1850s Edwin Drake, drilling in Titusville, Pennsylvania, struck oil—it started a rush into what was originally called "rock oil" to distinguish it from the more familiar stuff coming from harpooned cetaceans. It was clear quite quickly that simply in terms of volume and price, the new stuff was going to win out. (Apparently the Pennsylvanians sent some early examples of their product up to New Bedford for analysis).
So what did the whaling industry do? Did it pool all its (considerable) resources and try to elect a president who would ban oil drilling on land? Did it get one of its own appointed secretary of the interior so he could shut down all hydrocarbon exploration on public lands? Did they persuade the White House to use coercive tariffs to insure a foreign market for their product? Did they print up a lot of government posters showing strong and manly whalemen in an effort to sway public opinion?
Had he been around in the 19th century, Wright would doubtless have been the spokesman for Big Whale.
Not so much. They appear, for better for worse, to have been capitalists. Which is to say, they took the capital they’d made sending out whaling vessels and used it instead to finance new ventures which took advantage of the novel and plentiful fuel sources now coming online. Whaling obviously continued, but not so much in New Bedford. Indeed, one whole wing of the museum documents the enormous textile mills and glass factories that sustained New Bedford’s prosperity well into the 20th century. (Once you’re done with the Whaling Museum, you can also visit the New Bedford Glass Museum).
This is all especially poignant right now, because New Bedford—fallen on harder times in recent decades—seemed poised to become a crucial port for the development of the new offshore wind industry, bringing the kind of economic stability that communities along the European coast have enjoyed in recent years. But… As the local paper (the wonderfully named New Bedford Light) observed recently:
By sight, the offshore wind industry seems to be moving forward on the East Coast. Gargantuan, bright white turbine towers stand tall against New Bedford’s busy waterfront, and poke above I-95 as cars whiz by over the Thames River in New London. But the future of the industry beyond these active projects is uncertain at best under a hostile Trump administration.
Trump’s energy team has shut down one renewable project after another—including an 80% complete windfarm off the coast of New England. Work has since resumed under a court order—but who knows for how long? And who would ever invest in this industry given the animus that the administration daily displays? Their effort to derail all clean energy is a gift to the fossil fuel industry. As former fracking exec and current Secretary of Energy Christopher Wright insists, “There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either.”
Had he been around in the 19th century, Wright would doubtless have been the spokesman for Big Whale. The irony is that the actual whalers gave ground just in time to save many of the species they’d been hunting from extinction. Would that their spiritual heirs in the fossil fuel industry recognized the even greater tragedy stalking the planet at present. Oh, and just in case you’re wondering, the Trump administration is now actively sabotaging our marine reserves. My these are bad people.
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Anti-Whaling Activist Paul Watson Freed After Denmark Rejects Japan's Extradition Request
"My arrest has focused international attention on Japan's continuing illegal whaling operations and their intent to go back to the Southern Ocean," said Watson. "So, in fact, these five months have been an extension of the campaign."
Dec 17, 2024
The prominent anti-whaling activist Paul Watson was released Tuesday from prison in Greenland after Danish officials rejected a request by Japan to extradite him.
Watson was arrested in Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, in July due to a warrant issued by Japan in 2012, which alleged that Watson had interfered with a Japanese whaling vessel and caused injury to a crew member in 2010, according to The New York Times. He could have faced up to 15 years in jail if convicted.
"I am certainly relieved as this means I get to see my two little boys. That's really been my only concern this entire time. I understand the risks of what we do and sometimes you get arrested—although I am proud of the fact that I have never been convicted of a crime," Watson told the Guardian. Watson's two sons are aged three and eight.
To the outlet AFP, he said: "My arrest has focused international attention on Japan's continuing illegal whaling operations and their intent to go back to the Southern Ocean... So, in fact, these five months have been an extension of the campaign."
Watson, a Canadian American who co-founded Greenpeace and founded Sea Shepherd—a group that uses direct action to protect marine wildlife and oceans—was traveling in July with 25 volunteers on a mission to the North Pacific for the Captain Paul Watson Foundation (CPWF), which he started after leaving Sea Shepherd in 2022. When the vessel arrived in Nuuk, Greenland to refuel, Danish police arrested him.
The CPWF denounced the surprise arrest, which came as Watson planned to intercept a new Japanese factory whaling ship.
Watson was also featured in the Animal Planet television show Whale Wars that ran from 2008 until 2015, in which he led efforts to disrupt Japanese whaling on the high seas.
Japan has a long, complicated history with whaling. Whale meat was seen as an important protein for the country after World War II. Japan joined the International Whaling Commission, an international body that placed a moratorium on commercial whaling in the 1980s, in 1951. In 2019, Japan left the body and began catching whales commercially the same year, according to the International Whaling Commission.
In 2014, the International Court of Justice ruled against Japan in a case involving charges that Japan was using a scientific research program as a front for a commercial whaling venture in the Antarctic.
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Losing the Whales: How the Anti-Whaling Narrative Has Failed
The anti-whaling movement has failed to address the issues underpinning international negotiations over whaling, and now faces its greatest defeat.
Sep 16, 2024
Save the Whales. Perhaps the first famous conservation slogan. The end of pelagic commercial whaling was one of the original successes of the conservation movement in international diplomacy. The movement started in the USA, yet now, the two species of whale that are critically endangered are both found in U.S. waters. And we’re about to see the resumption of Antarctic commercial whaling, supported by the U.S. military-industrial-security complex. Crunch time is the meeting of the International Whaling Commission, or IWC later this month. “Lose the whales” is looking more realistic.
To understand how we’ve arrived here, we need to go back to 2010. The year Apple unveiled the first iPad. Taylor Swift released Speak Now. Wikileaks put out the “Collateral Murder” video. U.S. President Barack Obama declared the end of combat operations in Iraq, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the beginning of the USA’s re-engagement with East Asia. In November 2010, President Obama attended the meeting in Japan of APEC, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.
While there he had individual meetings with the (then) Prime Ministers of Japan, Naoto Kan, and Australia, Julia Gillard, the USA’s most important allies in the region. At the time, Japan and Australia were at loggerheads over whaling. A few months earlier Australia had started proceedings against Japan at the International Court of Justice that it was, with its “scientific whaling,” in breach of its obligations under the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW), the treaty underpinning the IWC. Australia won the case a few years later.
The return of pelagic commercial whaling is imminent.
As part of the movement against whaling, on November 5 2010, conservationists organized the “World Wide Anti-Whaling Day.” In Sydney, Australia, a protest was held at the Japanese Consulate. For the media coverage it received, it may as well not have happened. Concerns about Japanese whaling in Australia’s Antarctic whale sanctuary were running high, so this lack of media interest was unusual. However, the press had just covered another whaling “protest.”
On the evening before, the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) organized a different action. The video remains available. They set up a fake whale in Sydney Harbor with a generic “stop whaling” message. As the video celebrates, this garnered huge coverage in the Australian media, so the action at the consulate the following day got none. Evidence of the conflict over whaling, between these two major U.S. alliesevaporated just in time for the presidential trip to Asia. Instead, the generic, unfocused “stop whaling” message occupied the airwaves. Organizers of the action at the consulate were livid.
Founded in 1969, IFAW was originally a small and effective NGO. It helped establish non-lethal studies as the way to do science on whales. In 1997 IFAW’s founder passed the organization on to a couple of former government officials, ex-senior managers of Peace Corps programs in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Under their direction, IFAW grew rapidly, including by taking over smaller NGOs internationally. Most conservation NGOs are short of money, and IFAW, suddenly rich, absorbed them.
The person who was heading IFAW’s whale program at the time of the stunt in Sydney Harbor has an unusual background for an employee of a conservation NGO. He was originally a German and Russian linguist with U.S. Army intelligence, enlisting in the early 1980s. After the army he moved to Mongoven, Biscoe, and Duchin (MBD), a company that specialized at infiltrating environmental NGOs for corporate clients, as detailed in an academic paper on their work for the tobacco industry. The title—“ [MBD]: Destroying Tobacco ControlActivism From the Inside”—tells the story. In a move that was the most radical conversion since Paul on the road to Damascus, he then immediately got the job as head of GLOBE USA, a collaborative of global politicians working on environmental issues. He moved to IFAW in 1996, immediately prior to the leadership changeover there. In 2007, coinciding with a U.S. government decision to come up with a process to “solve” issues in the IWC, he was appointed to IFAW’s new position of Global Whale Program Manager. Unlike other IFAW staff, he had little prior experience with the IWC.
The Sydney stunt is just one example, demonstrating how easy it is to direct media stories. IFAW remains the go-to organization for much of the mainstream media on whaling, and other whale conservation issues. IFAW’s messaging controls the anti-whaling narrative.
The anti-whaling movement has been operating under a set of assumptions over the past couple of decades. These include: whaling is a dying industry running on subsidies; acting forcefully against whaling will encourage a backlash in whaling nations; whaling can be replaced with whale-watching as an economic use of whales; and recently, that the Japanese withdrawal from the IWC was an “elegantly Japanese solution” that meant Japanese whalers would never again engage in pelagic whaling. Note that all but one of these links quote IFAW.
Given the new Japanese quotas for killing fin whales, the new ice-strengthened Japanese whaling factory ship, and the call to shut down the IWC, these assumptions are mistaken. Whaling is just one part of much bigger geopolitical machinations that revolve around the U.S. military maintaining its Japanese bases in the face of pubic anger there at the appalling behavior of some service personnel. And then the Japanese government uses access to bases as leverage to winning on whaling, in order to maintain their control over management of other, more important, pelagic fisheries.
Further, the anti-whaling movement has failed to heed warnings of problems in their midst. These were clear after Wikileaks released documents revealing the dealings between the U.S. IWC commissioner, and the Japanese government in 2009. Also clear from the Wikileaks cables is the way in which Australia and Japan’s relationships were impacted by whaling, and how this was a concern for the U.S. government. The NGO community treat this as irrelevant.
That U.S. IWC commissioner? Prior to her return to government, Monica Medina, also ex-military, also worked at IFAW.
On the Wikileaks documents, IFAW’s whale program leader wrote a blog post back in 2011. It includes: “...as I stare back at his face on the WikiLeaks homepage, that Julian Assange—who doesn’t look so well—is on a one-man mission, that the job he is tryin’ to do on us is about something other than saving whales or even promoting transparency in government, and that he really doesn’t much like us—as in U.S.”
The return of pelagic commercial whaling is imminent. The anti-whaling movement has failed to address the issues underpinning international negotiations over whaling, and now faces its greatest defeat. A major NGO focusing on whaling—one to whom many media outlets turn to for comment—has a track record of employing former U.S. military, and military intelligence, staffers. (And not just for whaling). Have these intelligence professionals failed to comprehend the geopolitical issues driving negotiations over whaling?
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