… The following day, Stevenson laid out his case in an expansive and mostly empty ballroom. It’s too expensive, he argued from a lectern, 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.

Stevenson stopped short of blaming wind companies for the spate of whale carcasses that had washed up on New Jersey and New York beaches just weeks prior. He agreed with the scientific evidence that ​“vessel strikes” — not wind development — were the biggest threat in that region. Still, the potential for harm to whales could be a powerful tool in federal court, he speculated, as well as in the court of public opinion.