A county in New Jersey unanimously voted against an offshore wind farm proposed along its coastline, citing the development’s potential negative environmental and tourism impact.
The Cape May Board of Commissioners voted (pdf) 4-0 this week on an ordinance oppose farms that are being developed by a Denmark-based firm, Orsted, under its Ocean Wind 1 and Ocean Wind 2 projects. The county also indicated that it will seek legal avenues to block such projects and will appeal a New Jersey state utility permit that transfers property interests from county residents to Orsted.
The commissioners noted that upwards of 200 large windmills will be installed around nine miles off the coast of Cape May County and would be easily visible from its beaches. The project would also reportedly have two transmission line corridors with one substation located in Cape May County.
It also stated that Orsted did not listen to the county’s suggestions and attempted to “push aside” Cape May’s commissioners and transfer their authority to the “unelected members” of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities.
“At first, the County of Cape May was interested in trying to work with Orsted to find a way forward, perhaps with some modifications to the project to reduce visual, environmental and economic impacts,” Cape May County Board of Commissioners Director Len Desiderio said in a statement after the vote.
“We would like to see land-based offshore wind facilities and supply chain infrastructure built here in New Jersey, since that would create good opportunities for trade workers and others,” Desiderio also remarked. “But we cannot sit quietly by as hundreds of windmills are installed off our beaches as state and federal government agencies ignore our legitimate and serious concerns.”
Their resolution also said that the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy concluded that the construction of offshore wind projects along the East Coast won’t have much impact on the climate, according to a county news release issued on Thursday. The resolution, meanwhile, made reference to a study commissioned by Harvard University that windmill arrays may reduce sea breeze and trigger warmer ocean temperatures.
Desiderio also criticized Orsted. “As time went by, it became clear that Orsted was not interested in finding any compromise,” he alleged. “t is clear to us now that the approach among this foreign corporation and their partners in the state and federal governments is to build these things as fast as they can despite the potential for devastating environmental and economic impacts. On behalf of the people of Cape May County, we will not let that happen without a fight.”
Earlier in the week, the state Bureau of Ocean Energy Management issued its final environmental impact statement for Ocean Wind 1, which is the final step before it makes a decision on whether the project can go ahead.
Whale Deaths?
In March, a large number of Cape May residents turned out at a public forum to largely oppose the wind farm’s construction, according to local media reports at the time. It came as the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection issued a statement saying that wind farm projects are to blame for the whale deaths along the East Coast since late last year amid allegations that sonar mapping for the wind farms may have led to their deaths.
“As of March 2023, no offshore wind-related construction activities have taken place in waters off the New Jersey coast, and DEP is aware of no credible evidence that offshore wind-related survey activities could cause whale mortality,” the state environmental agency’s statement said.
However, data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicates that at least 30 whales have washed up along the East Coast since Dec. 1, a spokesperson told The Associated Press in March. On March 16, four Republican Congressmen held a hearing in Wildwood, New Jersey to call for a pause on all offshore wind projects.
Rep. Christopher Smith (R-N.J.) called for a pause on such work until the U.S. Government Accountability Office can investigate the “sufficiency of the environmental review processes for offshore wind projects.” He was joined by fellow Reps. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.), Andy Harris (R-Md.), and Scott Perry (R-Pa.) in promising additional hearings and demands for information, and claiming federal agencies have ignored expressions of concern by one of their own scientists about the effects of wind farms on whales.
A federal agency, the Mammal Marine Commission, issued a report (pdf) earlier this year that said the deaths are “not new, nor are they unique to the U.S. Atlantic coast.” It also claimed that “there is no evidence to link these strandings to offshore wind energy development.”
Cape May County, with a population of about 95,000 people, is the southernmost county in New Jersey.
The Epoch Times has contacted Orsted for comment.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
