Offshore Wind Opponents Target Work of Brown University Researcher

(Bloomberg) -- Timmons Roberts is used to receiving legal complaints about his work examining groups who oppose offshore wind. 

What was surprising about the letter he received earlier this month wasn’t that one of those groups was asking Roberts and his employer, Brown University, to retract some of his research. It was that the group was represented by a Washington, DC law firm, that said it was preparing to send “coordinated reports” about his work to the US National Science Foundation and Energy Department. 

The move parallels the recent targeting of universities over alleged antisemitism and for their diversity initiatives, suggesting climate and clean energy research could be another line of attack.

Roberts’ research focuses on opposition to offshore wind and other forms of climate obstruction. In a 2023 report, he and his research team chronicled how arguments made by the group Green Oceans — based in Little Compton, Rhode Island — echoed claims made by fossil fuel-funded opposition groups. 

In response, Green Oceans enlisted a different law firm and asked him to take down the research, saying it was causing reputational harm. The group and Roberts met in May 2024, but there was no resolution. Roberts said his research was already in peer review at the time, and it was subsequently published in a journal later that year. (In its most recent letter, Green Oceans said Roberts “threatened to publish the same material in a peer-reviewed journal.”)

The group sent the latest letter via Marzulla Law, dated Aug. 11, 2025. Green Oceans asked for “immediate corrective action by Brown University” to take down three publications from Roberts’ group and conduct a formal review into “publishing and oversight practices.”

In the letter, Green Oceans also said it sent a request to the journal to retract the study, which was denied, as was a request for a local environmental newsroom to retract a story on the findings. 

Green Oceans declined to comment, saying the letter laid out its position. 

“Everything in this letter, practically, they’ve said before” in previous letters, Roberts said. But the warning about escalating the matter to the administration was a shift. The letter notes that “Brown University has received significant federal funding,” and that Green Oceans was drafting reports chronicling “the pattern of misconduct and institutional risks of continued association with research units that engage in political targeting.”

Roberts said his lab isn’t funded by the NSF or the Energy Department, nor is the Climate Social Science Network, an international constellation of researchers who study climate politics. The NSF declined to comment. The Energy Department didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

The letter “sounds like going to the Trump administration to do what in fact the Trump administration has done with universities: That is, threaten them and their funding,” Roberts said. He added that he’s been in touch with the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Climate Science Legal Defense fund, nonprofits that defend academic freedom.

In response to questions about how Brown was handling the new communication from Green Oceans, a university spokesperson said, “scholars shape their own research and course of instruction at Brown. 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.”

The letter was sent by Marzulla Law, a boutique property-rights firm run by husband and wife duo Roger and Nancie Marzulla. Both worked for the US Department of Justice under former President Ronald Reagan, and Roger Marzulla served as assistant attorney general in charge of the Environment and Natural Resources division. The firm has argued a number of anti-offshore wind cases, including one brought by Green Oceans challenging the Revolution Wind Project off the Rhode Island coast. Roberts published new research on Aug. 22 that includes exploring Marzulla Law’s connections with the offshore wind opponents. 

The firm didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

The request to take down research and the proposed escalation of the complaint to the administration is “extraordinary,”  said Veena Dubal, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine and general counsel of the American Association of University Professors. 

The Trump administration has assailed universities for a host of issues, including allegations of failing to confront antisemitism and promoting diversity programs. Columbia and Brown universities reached deals with the White House to unfreeze hundreds of millions of dollars in US funding. The University of Pennsylvania was the first to settle for allowing a transgender swimmer on the women’s team.

The NSF has cut more than 100 climate research grants since Trump took office and has said it “will not support research with the goal of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation.’” 

Researchers whose work doesn’t align with administration policy are finding “their jobs, their funding, their futures” at risk, Dubal said. 

The Trump administration has also taken actions to cut support for renewables, particularly offshore wind. Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has put forward a barrage of policies designed to stop offshore wind development. Those include halting the sale of new offshore wind leases and removing millions of acres of ocean that had been set aside for future wind projects.

The Interior Department on Aug. 22 halted the mostly built Revolution Wind project off the Rhode Island coast, citing the need for further review. Green Oceans opposes the project. 

In April, the administration temporarily stopped work on the $5 billion Empire Wind project off the coast of New York, sending a shudder through the industry. (It allowed construction to resume in May.) Trump has repeatedly attacked wind farms, saying they have ruined the views of some of his golf properties. 

Offshore wind has also been the subject of numerous attacks and lawsuits by local coastal residents. Those efforts have been successful in some cases; one notable example is Cape Wind, which was canceled in the face of opposition from wealthy homeowners on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket who included the Kennedy family and industrialist William Koch.

Kit Kennedy, a managing director for power, climate and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said there’s broad bipartisan support for wind — including from a majority of Republicans, according to a June poll commissioned by pro-offshore wind group Turn Forward — and that building more projects may help assuage any concerns. She said the Brown research has been “very, very valuable” to understanding anti-wind influence groups.

But according to Parrish Bergquist, an energy policy researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, the administration’s push against offshore wind may mean “we’re going to start to see deeper polarization on this, in a way that mirrors attitudes about climate change more generally.”

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