The Trump administration is apparently seeking to study whether there are any health impacts of offshore wind, an energy source that has been the subject of the president’s ire.
Bloomberg News reported this week that Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to look into the matter.
Asked about the effort, HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard described it as being on hold because of the ongoing government shutdown.
“Like other important HHS initiatives, work on this report has been halted solely due to the Democrat-led government shutdown,” Hilliard told The Hill in an email.
President Trump has long opposed wind energy and has claimed that noise from wind turbines causes cancer.
A 2011 literature review found that “no peer reviewed articles demonstrate a direct causal link between people living in proximity to modern wind turbines, the noise they emit and resulting physiological health effects.”
The Trump administration has also repeatedly put up barriers for renewable energy, including by seeking to cancel offshore wind farms that were already approved.
Bloomberg reported that electric magnetic frequency from undersea cables is one area that HHS staff have looked into.
Other energy sources, including those favored by Trump, have been linked to health consequences. For example, studies have linked coal to lung cancer and oil and gas fracking to leukemia in children.