Saving Seafood

Opinion

This Supreme Court case could restore oversight to bureaucratic rulemaking

June 8, 2023 — Every year, new rules and regulations are made and interpreted by the federal agencies that make up the American regulatory state. These rules and regulations fill some 74,000 pages of the Federal Register and serve as a hidden tax on the American people who pay for regulations in the form of higher taxes and fewer economic opportunities. The continuous creation of rules by federal agencies often disregards the will of Congress and pushes the boundaries of their statutory missions.

Fortunately, that may be about to change. On May 1, the Supreme Court of the United States announced it would hear Loper Bright Enterprises et al. v. Raimondo , which deals with a National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) rule on fishery inspectors. This rule would force fishermen to invite federal inspectors on their ships to observe operations and require them to compensate the inspectors for their time. Unsurprisingly, fishing company Loper Bright Enterprises decided to appeal the case to SCOTUS. The court’s decision to accept this appeal could signal the justices’ willingness to revisit a nearly 40-year-old legal doctrine established in the landmark 1984 court case Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council , which the NMFS has used to justify its new rule.

Read the full article at the Washington Examiner

Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association testimony from recent BOEM task force meeting

May 26, 2023 — Testimony from MCFA’s Emily Coffin, Seafood and Fisheries Policy Coordinator, at BOEM’s Gulf of Maine Intergovernmental Renewable Energy Task Force meeting in Augusta on May 10-11.

My name is Emily Coffin, I’m a 5th generation fisherman out of Brunswick and work for the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association. We are an industry-founded organization that advocates for fishing communities and we believe in stewarding our marine resources for a sustainable and vibrant fishing future.

I’m here today to express my concern over the data collection approach with respect to the National Centers for Coastal Oceans Science (NCCOS) spatial modeling as well as the equity issues within the greater process of offshore wind development.

BOEM has asked fishermen for their fishing data, which is of high value, but the NCCOS model has not yet provided transparency about how exactly that data will be used. 

If BOEM values community engagement, support from the industry sector, and stakeholder participation, they will make a more significant effort not only to include and invite but seek out fishermen who share their data and answer that effort by returning information on where that data goes and how much it matters.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

OP ED: EXPANDING EXISTING PRI MONUMENT WILL NEGATIVELY IMPACT THE AMERICAN SAMOA ECONOMY

May 24, 2023 — I’m taking this opportunity to reply to the Op-Ed written by William Aila, Jr. and Rick Gaffney and published by Samoa News on Wednesday, May 17, 2023.  Aila and Gaffney represent the Pacific Remote Islands Coalition (PRI), proponents of the proposed Pacific Remote Islands National Marine Sanctuary.

The Hawaiian environmental advocates have erroneously stated that expanding the existing PRI monument boundaries throughout the EEZ and excluding commercial tuna fishing by the American Samoa based U.S. flag purse seiners will not negatively impact the economic viability of StarKist’s large-scale tuna cannery in American Samoa. They claim that opposition to past environmentally-based fishing area closures would lead to cannery closures, and nothing happened. They are dangerously wrong!

American Samoa previously had two active canneries. One of those, Samoa Tuna Processors, closed at the end of 2016, not long after the loss of much of the traditional fishing grounds of the American Samoa based U.S. flag tuna purse seiners.

Three things happened that reduced those traditional fishing grounds: Kiribati[1] reduced the number of fishing days available to US purse seiners to 300 days, President Obama expanded the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument which closed the U.S. EEZ around Jarvis Island, a rich traditional fishing ground for the U.S. fleet; and, the U.S. Government voluntarily gave up 760 high seas fishing days in the Western and Central Pacific[2].

This perfect storm on unrelated events took away almost half of the American Samoa U.S. flag purse seiner fishing grounds. As a consequence, two things happened. The U.S. purse seiner fleet based in American Samoa was reduced from 40 to 12 boats and Samoa Tuna Processors closed its doors.

Read the full article at Samoa News

A Welcome Supreme Court Review of Chevron Deference

May 3, 2o23 — Few Supreme Court doctrines have been stretched more by regulators and lower-court judges than Chevron deference, which says judges should defer to regulators’ interpretations when laws are supposedly ambiguous. The High Court agreed Monday to give Chevron a much-needed legal review.

The Court agreed to hear Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which concerns an obscure regulation under a 1976 fishing law. The Magnuson-Stevens Act lets the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) require fishing vessels to carry federal observers on board to enforce the agency’s fishing regulations.

In three narrow circumstances, the law also permits the agency to require vessels to pay the salaries of government monitors. In February 2020 the agency went further and required some vessels to foot the bill for government monitors when those narrow circumstances don’t apply. This would cost fishermen about 20% of their annual revenue.

Read the full article at the Wall Street Journal

Comments to The Light: Intense reaction to wind/fishing investigation

April 25, 2023 — New Bedford Light readers reacted strongly to our investigation into offshore wind and what impacts it could have on the fishing industry, and to the opinion piece critical of the story.

Here’s what you had to say:

“Wind is renewable but turbines are not. They require massive amounts of fossil fuel to produce and the destruction of massive amounts of habitat. Climate change is a symptom of industrial development. So these machines will only compound the problem. Energy capturing devices kill wildlife and no amount of greenwashing can change that fact. Destroying the planet to save it makes no sense.”

— Carl van Warmerdam

“I’m sorry to say that this is a pretty weak story. There are many people here making dire claims — but I don’t see any evidence. This would be OK if this technology were new, but it most certainly is not. Britain and in particular Denmark, which has a large fishing fleet, has a lengthy offshore wind track record. Instead of just quoting lots of upset people, why not dig up the scientific evidence from those long-extant projects? Tell us what damage these turbines have done in salt water environments there, and then tell us how those projects will compare to what’s projected here. By now you should be presenting us with lots of evidence rather than just sowing the seeds of fear. Additionally, I’d like to know a lot of the data about offshore turbines and birds and bats. I was very surprised to know that there’s lots of evidence of bats out on some of these turbines. What’s going on there? If you’re gonna do a ProPublica thing, you need to dig a couple of layers deeper here.”

— Wendy Williams

“The cod are gone, fished to the point of collapse. The water is warming and lobsters have moved out. Sea level rise threatens our shores and cities. It is either stop burning carbon or render large areas of the planet uninhabitable. Wind turbines offer a path to that goal. We need to do this.”

— William Trimble

“Offshore wind is a boondoggle that will only benefit government fat cats, China and a few investors. It will NEVER produce significant steady reliable electrical power. The power can’t be stored, it will require rapid start/stop backup power to compensate for when the wind does not blow, the equipment has an at best 10-15 year working life cycle and can’t be recycled effectively. The impacts on the biosphere near it (air currents and temperatures, ocean currents and temperatures, sediments, nutrients, electromagnetic fields near turbines and cables, bottom ecosystem damage, etc) will be immense to $500+ million fisheries. Also it requires rare earth minerals that are NOT sustainably and fairly harvested.”

 — Andy Carr

Read the full article at the New Bedford Light

Winning the fight for the lives of whales

April 23, 2023 — Massachusetts officially declared April 24 as Right Whale Day to raise awareness about the endangered. North Atlantic right whales, the state’s official marine mammal.

Right whales have been coming to Cape Cod Bay in April for as long as there has been a Cape Cod Bay. These sandy, shoaly waters warm faster than deeper, dark-bottom ocean realms. In the Gulf of Maine, a sea beside the Atlantic Ocean, seawater rotates counterclockwise fastest in April, driven by river water coming off the land. Nutrient-rich waters are upwelled on the threshold of Stellwagen Bank, defining the east boundary of Massachusetts Bay and drift on into Cape Cod Bay where phytoplankton blooms, feeding zooplankton feeding right and sei whales. Forage fish, including sand lance, herring, and mackerel eat zooplankton and are then scooped up by gaping-mouthed minke, fin, and humpback whales.

It’s time for the National Marine Fisheries Service to slow down to 10 knots or less the speeds of all vessels. Ships were slowed down from March 1 to April 30. There were no vessel-related right whale deaths during the spring season from 2008 until 2016.

On May 5, 2016, a right whale calf was found dead off Morris Island in Chatham. It was the first right whale fatality by ship strike since speed restrictions were implemented in 2008. The 30-foot-long calf weighing about 10,000 pounds was the eighth right whale born to a whale named Punctuation. Mother and calf were observed swimming together in Cape Cod Bay on April 28. As a result, speed restrictions were extended in the Race Point area after April 30.

On April 13, 2017, a juvenile female right whale was found dead off Barnstable, where speed restrictions were in effect from Jan. 1 to May 15. This second right whale death was the first ship strike death documented in or near a seasonal management zone since the speed rule was enacted.

Read the full article at Gloucester Times

I’m a fishing boat captain. Green energy companies, government want to put me out of business

March 20, 2023 — Offshore wind energy might be killing whales, but there’s no question it’s killing American fishermen.

I’ve been a fishing boat captain for over 20 years. I live on an island in Maine and sail out of New Bedford, Mass. My brothers and cousins are lobstermen.

Fishing is the trade our family has plied for generations. We’re proud to practice the founding craft of our nation. When colonists first settled New England, they looked to the sea to sustain them. And so it is for our coastal communities four centuries on.

Read the full article at Fox News

Save us, Supreme Court, from runaway regulation

March 14, 2023 — Farmers and fishermen make their living the old-fashioned way — sweat and struggle. Increasingly they share another thing in common: oppressive bureaucratic oversight. If the Supreme Court can summon the courage this year, it can deal the bureaucrats a body blow and free millions of Americans from diktats from on high, each one of which makes their lives more difficult, more expensive and decidedly less free.

“Operating fishing vessels in the Atlantic is hard work.” So begins a brief to the high court on behalf of herring fishermen. In a new petition asking for the Supreme Court to review a case involving fishing for Atlantic herring, former solicitor general Paul D. Clement paints a picture reminiscent of last year’s Oscar-winning film “CODA.” You will be forgiven if you forgot that the movie featured two actors playing federally mandated monitors on the fishing boat where much of the drama plays out. The presence of the monitors — even the physical space they take up — is the sort of detail that makes a movie great, because it dives deep enough into the realities that reflect the lives made even more difficult by bureaucracy.

The role and cost of such monitors figure at the heart of Clement’s petition to roll back an out-of-control “administrative state.” Monitors figure as well in the tale of another bureaucracy — this one bedeviling the opposite coast, in California.

Read the full article at the Washington Post

Rep. Allison Hepler: More and better data can protect lobstering and right whales

February 28, 2o23 — The word “reprieve” is being used to describe the late-December federal action that produced a 6-year delay in implementing federal whale rules, as well as new funding for research and gear innovations in the lobster fishery. A reprieve is welcome, but it does not mean that the industry can step back and go about business as usual. Fortunately, that’s not what is happening.

This past summer, the National Oceanic and Aeronautical Administration (NOAA) had fast-tracked its implementation of rules around the endangered North Atlantic Right Whales, which would have made immediate and dramatic changes to Maine’s lobster fishery in two years rather than 10. In response, in the midst of our early-winter coastal storm that occurred just before Christmas last year, Maine’s federal delegation secured a 6-year pause in the implementation of those regulations, and also provided $55 million in funding for research and monitoring. This action was a welcome break for Maine lobstermen.

Science is at the heart of the work that needs to be done. Some of the funding will allow for continued research into better understanding the behavior and distribution of right whales as a result of the changing environmental situation in the Gulf of Maine. It is dramatically warming, and the whales’ favorite food is shifting east into Canadian waters. Organizations such as Bigelow Laboratories are likely to receive some of this funding to continue its research on the impact of this shift.

Read the full article at the Press Herald

 

Does offshore wind have a whale problem?

February 28, 2023 — Since Dec. 1, there have been 18 reports of dead whales washing ashore along the Atlantic Coast, according to the Marine Mammal Stranding Network.

With each dead whale washing ashore, the blood pressure of offshore wind critics has risen.  They believe the survey and construction work associated with building new offshore wind farms in the New England and New York regions may have contributed to the whale deaths.

Government officials say there is no relationship between offshore wind and whale deaths. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website maintains a section where it reports on the number of whales washing ashore since “unusual mortality events” started being tracked in 2016.

Since 2016, a total of 184 humpback whales have washed ashore.  A peak of 34 whale deaths was recorded in 2017.  Last year, there were 19 whale deaths. But so far this year, there have been 10 deaths recorded.  Five East Coast states – Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, and North Carolina – account for 81% of all whale deaths.  Four are sites of offshore wind work.

Read the full article at WorkBoat