February 15, 2018 — Jim Lovgren is a third-generation fisherman and captains the Shadowfax. At the Fisherman’s Coop in Point Pleasant New Jersey recently, he watched as about a half-dozen men sorted freshly caught scup — or porgies — into bins.
“These fish they’ll be put in a cooler by tonight,” he said. “There could be 30,000 to 40,000 pounds of fish on the docks today. They will all be on their way to New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. We ship anywhere from Canada down past North Carolina.”
Lovgren grew up trawling the waters off Sandy Hook. He says the fishery is already stressed from rising ocean temperatures. While there used to be dozens of fishing boats here, Lovgren said today there’s only a handful. He worries that if oil and gas companies drill offshore, he’ll be put out of business.
“Blackback flounders are just about extinct in this area here,” he said. “That was a major fishery. yellowtail flounders, codfish, lobsters are disappearing off the Jersey coast and it’s all because the water’s getting too warm.”
Lovgren knows that burning fossil fuels is connected to climate change, warming oceans and his disappearing fish. Still, he said, he needs fossil fuel to trawl the ocean floor.
“Look, a fishing boat, it runs on diesel fuel. You have to have energy. We have to have energy.”
But President Trump’s offshore drilling proposal is an immediate threat to his livelihood, and he’s gearing up to fight it.
Lovgren, along with other fishermen, environmentalists, realtors, and local business owners, descended on a hotel near Trenton Thursday voicing their unified opposition to drilling for oil and natural gas off the coast of New Jersey.
The public meeting,hosted by federal officials from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, comes as the Trump Administration has proposed opening up the entire East Coast to offshore exploration.
But the proposal has little support along the Jersey coast.
“You start putting a bunch of oil rigs out there and it takes away places that we can tow, where we can fish,” Lovgren said. “The main concern is an oil spill.”
Talk to anyone who makes their living along the Jersey shore, whether it’s selling salt water taffy or renting shore houses, and they’ll tell you they don’t want another Deepwater Horizon along the East Coast. The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion off the coast of Louisiana in 2010 spilled an estimated 171 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, decimating the fisheries and driving away tourists.
“You know if we had a Deepwater Horizon spill down in Delaware,” Lovgren said, “it’s going to come right up off the Jersey shore. It’s going to wash right into Long Island onto the beach. It could be hitting Cape Cod and Nantucket. Now that could be devastating.”
Lovgren voted for President Trump, and still supports him. But not his proposal. He worries seismic testing, which is used to find the oil and gas reserves, would hurt whales and dolphins.
He’s also concerned about potential smaller leaks that don’t make headlines.
And he’s not alone.
Read the full story at NPR’s StateImpact Pennsylvania