MAINE MORNING STAR • December 17, 2025
David Stevenson saw himself as an outlier at the Heartland Institute’s 2023 International Conference on Climate Change. He leaned over during one session to tell me, cheekily, that he might be the “only person here who believes in climate change.” And yet, despite that belief, Stevenson has dedicated the better part of a decade to obstructing a source of clean energy that can help replace the fossil fuels that are baking the planet. In fact, that’s why he was at the Heartland Institute’s conference: to rail against offshore wind farms. The following day, Stevenson laid out his case. It’s too expensive, he argued, and the United States was not effectively assessing its environmental impact. He suggested a plan to get the public to care about this issue: putting whales front and center.