May 11, 2023 — 19th-century whalers sailed the world’s seas hunting their giant prey for oil-producing blubber. But they were also fueling the New England economy — at its peak in 1880, the industry was bringing in $10 million a year, the equivalent of about $296 million today.
Panel: Climate change, not wind prep, is threat to whales
April 25, 2023 — Climate change, spurred by the burning of fossil fuels, is the biggest danger to marine life including whales, a panel of Democratic officials and environmental groups said Monday.
The gathering, held in an oceanfront conference room as a half-dozen dolphins frolicked in the ocean behind them, also strongly criticized a bill in the House of Representatives containing numerous incentives for oil and gas companies, and which eliminates several environmental protections currently in effect.
It also was a retort to opponents of offshore wind development, who claim that preparation for wind farms off New Jersey and New York are killing whales along the U.S. East Coast. Numerous federal and state agencies say there is no evidence that the deaths are related to offshore wind survey work.
The event came a week after U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. and other New Jersey Congressional Democrats wrote to the White House Council on Environmental Quality “demanding real solutions in response to the death of marine mammals off New Jersey’s coast.”
Biden admin is rushing to industrialize US oceans to stop climate change: ‘Environmental wrecking ball’
April 25, 2023 — The Biden administration is pushing full steam ahead to massively expand offshore wind development across millions of acres of federal waters, actions that critics warn would have dire ecological and economic impacts.
Days after taking office, President Biden issued an executive action ordering his administration to expand opportunities for the offshore wind industry as part of his aggressive climate agenda to curb greenhouse gas emissions and stop global warming. Months later, he outlined goals to deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030, the most ambitious goal of its kind worldwide.
“Two years ago, President Biden issued a bold challenge to move America towards a clean energy future,” Deb Haaland, the secretary of the Department of the Interior (DOI), said earlier this month. “The Interior Department answered that call and is moving rapidly to create a robust and sustainable clean energy economy with good-paying union jobs.”
In May 2021, the DOI’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) approved the 800-megawatt Vineyard Wind project 12 miles off the coast of Massachusetts, marking the first ever large-scale offshore wind approval. Then, in November 2021, the agency approved the 130-megawatt Southfork Wind project off the coast of Long Island, New York, the second commercial-scale offshore project.
El Niño is coming, and ocean temps are already at record highs – that can spell disaster for fish and corals
April 18, 2023 — It’s coming. Winds are weakening along the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Heat is building beneath the ocean surface. By July, most forecast models agree that the climate system’s biggest player – El Niño – will return for the first time in nearly four years.
El Niño is one side of the climatic coin called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. It’s the heads to La Niña’s tails.
During El Niño, a swath of ocean stretching 6,000 miles (about 10,000 kilometers) westward off the coast of Ecuador warms for months on end, typically by 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1 to 2 degrees Celsius). A few degrees may not seem like much, but in that part of the world, it’s more than enough to completely reorganize wind, rainfall and temperature patterns all over the planet.
El Niño watch issued by NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center
April 16, 2023 — El Niño, a recurring climate pattern that periodically disrupts entire ecosystems of marine life and can influence weather events in the United States and across the globe, will “likely develop” again this summer, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced on Thursday.
The agency’s climate prediction center had earlier issued an El Niño Watch as part of its latest weather outlook assessment for April 2023, which forecasted the upcoming shift in ENSO, the acronym scientists use to describe an alternating system of contrasting climate phenomena called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle. This kind of advisory is issued when weather conditions favor the development of El Niño within the next six months, according to NOAA.
Weather conditions are currently considered neutral, as they have been since a particularly lengthy term of La Niña — El Niño’s converse, which is often associated with worsening drought and more severe hurricanes — ended at the beginning of March. At the time, climate scientists said there was an estimated 60% chance that El Niño would emerge by the fall season.
Aquaculture is crucial in fight against climate change, but lack of public awareness is a major hurdle
April 5, 2023 — For thousands of years, humans have used aquaculture to raise aquatic animals and plants—and now, research has shown that the practice can help increase the worldwide food supply with low greenhouse gas emissions.
Oral histories date aquaculture to 4000 B.C., according to a lesson from North Carolina State University’s Sea Grant program. The first known written record of aquaculture dates back to the fifth century B.C., with the practice likely originating in China.
The practice has existed in what is today the United States for thousands of years, Peter Kareiva, president and CEO of the Aquarium of Pacific, noted.
“Native Americans had clam gardens, where they terraced the coast, and native Hawaiians had special fish ponds,” he said. “It’s an old technology, but more recently with modernization, it’s the fastest growing food sector in the world.”
Modern fisheries raise various species in large enclosures in bodies of water, Kareiva said. Other operations farm algae and shellfish—mostly clams, mussels and oysters, which require less equipment and work because they remain stationary and do not require feeding by the farmers.
For decades there has been a stigma associated with seafood farming, Kareiva said, including diseased fish escaping and infecting wild fish as well as concerns about efficiency.
“Often they were being fed fishmeal,” Kareiva said. “So you’re catching fish to feed fish, and the amount you had to feed them to get new fish meat was not that efficient.”
Advances in the industry, however, have made aquaculture much more sustainable and efficient, Kareiva said, which is important because in the fight against climate change, it should play a major role due to its resistance to unusual weather phenomena on land and the massive amounts of emissions generated by land-based food production. But a lack of public eduction continues to shroud seafarming in outdated misconceptions.
Pacific Territories Are Getting Millions To Address Climate Change. Is It Enough?
April 5, 2023 — In American Samoa, the oceans are rising and the land is sinking.
Even the territory’s largest private employer — the StarKist tuna cannery that provides nearly 80% of all private employment — sits along the water’s edge.
That makes recent federal investments in island infrastructure all the more important, especially when it comes to climate resiliency.
But a lingering question is whether it will be enough.
Earlier this year, representatives from the U.S. Government Accountability Office traveled to American Samoa to meet with members of the territory’s newly formed climate resilience commission, chaired by Lt. Gov. Talauega Eleasalo Vaalele Ale.
They discussed, among other things, the challenges American Samoa and other Pacific Island territories face when it comes to competing against states for federal funding.
“As a small island in the middle of the ocean, we feel the effects of climate change every day,” Talauega told GAO officials. “We see it in the rising tides and we feel it in the increased heat in the day. We are mindful of the constant change and have refocused our efforts through this commission.”
Report on growing specter of climate change warns of threats to StarKist and regional economy
April 4, 2023 — A report on Climate Change in the Western Pacific recently released by the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council drills down on the effects of climate change on American Samoa and warns that the loss of StarKist and the tuna industry due to the implications of climate change would be devastating not only to American Samoa but also to other Pacific communities it supports — particularly Samoa, Niue, Tokelau and Tonga.
In the report, the University of Hawai‘i Sea Grant, says American Samoa’s sea level rise of 2.64.6 feet by 2100 would severely impact coastal infrastructure.
As reported earlier by Samoa News, infrastructure in American Samoa is extremely vulnerable to sea level and was worsened by the rapid sinking of the islands, triggered by the 2009 Samoa earthquake and predicted to last for decades. This subsidence is estimated to lead to roughly twice as much sea level rise by 2060 as what was already predicted from climate change alone.
“As sea level continues to rise, the future of businesses like the StarKist Samoa cannery, located at sea level in Pago Pago Harbor, are in question,” stated the report.
“Loss of this industry due to the implications of climate change would be devastating to American Samoa and the communities it supports.”
Tuna exports from American Samoa are valued at approximately $353 million per year, with canned tuna from StarKist American Samoa comprising 99.5% of the total, the report details.
CALIFORNIA: California’s salmon fishers warn of “hard times coming” as they face canceled season
April 3, 2023 — Sarah Bates, the captain of a fishing boat in San Francisco, had a feeling something was wrong with the chinook salmon population back in December.
“The fish weren’t coming up the river, and to a certain extent, we were just waiting,” Bates, 46, told CNN. “We thought the run was late. And then at some point, it just became clear that fish weren’t coming.”
But she and other fishermen weren’t sure how bad it could be. It later turned out that catchers along much of the West Coast likely won’t be fishing for salmon at all this year.
“Salmon is my livelihood. It’s my main fishery,” she said. “And it’s the main fishery for a lot of folks in Fisherman’s Wharf. So, I think there are a lot of us that have some hard times coming.”
In early March, West Coast regulators announced that they may recommend a ban on salmon fishing this year. It would be only the second time salmon fishing season has been canceled in California.
Companies bid $264M in Gulf oil sale mandated by climate law
March 30, 2023 — Oil companies offered a combined $264 million for drilling rights in federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday in a sale mandated by last year’s climate bill compromise.
The auction was the first in the Gulf in more than a year and drew strong interest from industry giants including Chevron, BP and ExxonMobil. But it could further test the loyalty of environmentalists and young voters who backed President Joe Biden in 2020 and were frustrated by this month’s approval of a huge drilling project in Alaska.
Developing the Gulf leases would produce up to 1.1 billion barrels of oil and more than 4 trillion cubic feet (113 billion cubic meters) of natural gas over 50 years, according to a government analysis. Burning that oil would increase planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions by tens of millions of tons, the analysis found.
A legal challenge to the sale from environmental groups is pending in federal court.
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