Saving Seafood

States and clean energy: 3 issues to watch

June 16, 2023 — Statehouses across the country are enacting new energy laws this year, tackling issues that will directly affect President Joe Biden’s climate agenda even as Congress stands divided.

New laws signed in recent months and proposals still under consideration may affect the growth trajectory of low-carbon technologies including offshore wind and rooftop solar. In many cases, state plans may evolve over time along with national programs.

For emerging technologies like hydrogen, state lawmakers are trying to manage how the Biden administration’s ambitions will play out locally. Democrats have largely tried to implement Biden’s big-picture vision for promoting those technologies, while Republicans have sought to apply the brakes in some cases.

The state action is happening during an important period of implementation for last year’s Inflation Reduction Act and the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law.

“We expected states to look into follow-on” laws that would respond to policies contained in the Inflation Reduction Act, said Frank Wolak, CEO of the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association.

More laws of that kind are likely to emerge in additional state legislatures, he added. “I expect there’ll be others interested.”

The Treasury Department has recently rolled out guidance on how tax credits from the IRA could be claimed for rooftop solar projects and for U.S.-made offshore wind parts. And the Department of Energy is slated to award up to $7 billion of infrastructure funds for the first hubs of low-carbon hydrogen production, storage, transport and consumption this fall, for instance.

Both parties are angling to bring billions of dollars in infrastructure law funds to their states to support the first large demonstrations of low-carbon hydrogen. They include Republicans in Mississippi and North Dakota as well as Democrats in Hawaii and Washington.

Read the full article at E&E News

Officially bogus: Bottom trawling does not release as much carbon as airline travel

June 15, 2023 — Remember the headlines that claimed bottom trawling released as much carbon as all of air travel? We thought those claims were probably bogus when first reported, but Hiddink et al. 2023, a response paper published May 2023, now makes those claims Officially Bogus.

The original headlines came from Sala et al. 2021, a paper published in Nature that garnered more media coverage than any marine science paper of the past decade. We’ve covered the science and follow-ups over the last few years, but here’s a quick summary:

Sala et al. 2021 advocated for increasing the number of marine protected areas (MPAs) that restrict fishing. The paper used three different models that claimed benefits from MPAs:

  1. Food security – MPAs would increase food availability via more abundant fisheries.
  2. Biodiversity – MPAs would enhance ocean biodiversity.

Carbon/climate change – claimed that bottom trawling released as much carbon as all air travel, thus selling MPAs as a climate change solution via carbon sequestration. The paper suggested selling carbon credits from MPAs to fund the creation of more MPAs.

These three claims have quickly fallen apart, however. The original food security model was retracted, and the modified one by Sala et al. 2021 had similar issues. A response published last year points out that the biodiversity and carbon claims were based on the assumption that fishing disappears rather than being displaced. And now, Hiddink et al. 2023 demonstrates that the carbon model overestimated carbon benefits by 2-3 orders of magnitude, i.e., 100-1000 times.

Hiddink et al. 2023 notes two main reasons why the model in Sala et al. 2021 misfired:

  1. The fundamental assumptions of the carbon cycle were incorrect.
  2. The validation of those assumptions was also incorrect.

Here, we explain the carbon cycle in ocean sediment and discuss the potential for bottom trawling to contribute to carbon emissions. We also break down the carbon model from Sala et al. 2021 and show why it was incorrect based on Hiddink et al. 2023’s analysis.

Read the full article at Sustainable Fisheries

El Nino is bad news for salmon and steelhead

June 15, 2023 — The little troublemaker is back.

It’s bad-but-expected news for salmon and steelhead runs up and down the West Coast, including those that return to the Snake and Columbia rivers.

The NOAA Climate Prediction Center said last week that El Niño conditions are now present off the coast of South America, and they can be expected to gather strength by this winter.

According to a news release from the agency, the weather phenomenon is identified by the accumulation of warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean west of South America near the equator.

El Niño (little boy in Spanish) influences global weather patterns.

“Depending on its strength, El Niño can cause a range of impacts, such as increasing the risk of heavy rainfall and droughts in certain locations around the world,” said Michelle L’Heureux, climate scientist at the Climate Prediction Center, in the news release.

Read the full article at the Spokesman Review

Biden administration announces $2.6 billion toward coastal climate resilience

June 6, 2023 — The Commerce Department has announced it will put $2.6 billion toward coastal climate resilience in funds from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

The funds, announced on a Monday call with the press, will include about $400 million for tribal communities in support of habitat restoration, fish hatcheries and Pacific salmon, and those in the direct path of climate change.

Another $349 million will go specifically to climate resilience in fisheries, while another $60 million will go toward climate-resilience job placement and training.

Read the full at The Hill

New Jersey State Senator Michael Testa claims ENGO hypocrisy on offshore wind and whales

May 19, 2023 — The following transcript is excerpted from an interview by New Jersey State Senator Michael Testa on Fox & Friends:

Fox & Friends: GOP lawmakers in New Jersey want an immediate stop to offshore wind projects over growing concern about a spike in whale deaths. Since December alone, 32 dead whales have washed up on beaches along the East Coast. Republican state senators are asking for a 30 to 60 day pause on construction to see if it helps. Michael Testa is one of them and he joins us now.

So who exactly are the groups or the people who would be opposing a 30 to 60 day, very sensible pause to see what’s going on with the whales?

Sen. Testa: Well, it seems to be Ørsted, who’s the company that wants to have the wind farms, as well as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, which makes absolutely no sense to me because I always thought that those were the groups that were there to protect the whales and to create bumper stickers that say ‘save the whales.’ And I think that they’re being completely intellectually disingenuous here. We know that if this were an exploration for offshore oil drilling, that if one whale carcass were to wash up on one of New Jersey’s shores, they would be surrounding that carcass holding hands with, you know, tears streaming down their face, singing Kumbaya.

Fox & Friends: What is their explanation for not wanting to see an environmental impact on whales?

Sen. Testa: Well, their explanation is the reason that the whales and dolphins are washing up on our shores in record numbers is due to climate change. That’s why we need to rush to erect these massive wind farms, which, you know, quite frankly, a lot of people have now testified and believe are contributing to whales washing up on our shores in record numbers. But it’s always their cry. This is their mantra. This is climate change. And if you ever question their green energy agenda, you’re labelled a science denier, a climate change denier.

We also have to really question what the environmental impact is going to be to our commercial fishing industry as well as our recreational fishing industry and look, Cape May County, Atlantic County, Ocean County and Monmouth County, tourism is the lifeblood of their summer economy.What are these wind farms going to do if whales and dolphins continue to wash up on our shores?

We also don’t know what the erection of these massive wind farms [is] going to do to our ocean floor and what type of environmental long term environmental impact that is going to have on our oyster business, scallop business.

Watch the full interview here

Redfish, bluefish, no fish: Climate change threatens traditional fishing waters

May 17, 2023 — The chances of climate change causing significant disruption to saltwater fisheries are pretty high, according to a NOAA Fisheries climate vulnerability assessment that’s on its way to finalization.

All of the species examined, with the exception of the Atlantic sturgeon, are at a very high level of exposure to elements of climate change and many have a high sensitivity to those changes, like the gag grouper, goliath grouper, horseshoe crab, and each of the brown, pink and white shrimp species.

Red snapper, notably, has a moderate sensitivity.

“This is the most significant thing — these are the potential for species distributions to change by low, moderate, high and very high (probabilities),” said Roger Pugliese, a habitat and ecosystem scientist with the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council (SAFMC).

He presented at the SAFMC Habitat Protection and Ecosystem-Based Management Advisory Panel (AP) meetings this week.

Read the full article at Florida Politics

Shell or High Water: Rebuilding Oyster Reefs Is a Climate Solution

May 16, 2023 — On a recent spring evening at Crave Fishbar in New York City, the oysters resting on beds of ice hailed from Long Island, Virginia, Washington, Cape Cod, and British Columbia. But once they’d been slurped, all of their shells went to a single place­: New York Harbor.

As a participant in the Billion Oyster Project, Crave Fishbar is in its eighth year of collecting shells to help restore the oyster reefs in New York Harbor. The restaurant’s servers, who include many aspiring actors, tell the origin stories of the daily array of oyster options—the better the story, the greater the popularity of that brand, said Jeremy Benson, general manager of the Upper West Side location.

But the best story the team tells is that of the Billion Oyster Project, a nonprofit founded in 2014 that has organized 15,000 volunteers and 60 restaurants to restore oysters at 15 reef sites across New York’s five boroughs.

The effort seeks to bring back the harbor’s oyster population—which was destroyed by overharvesting and pollution in less than 100 years—by collecting used shells, installing them in critical locations, and “seeding” baby oysters on top to form reefs.

In addition to donating shells, Crave Fishbar employees have learned about the bivalve’s ability to clean the water and make shorelines more resilient to climate change. Every year, they join other volunteers who remove plastic forks from shell piles, clean cured shell, and load cages destined for the harbor, a body of water that The New York Times has described as “once an open sewer.”

Read the full article at Civil Eats

Carbon Is Robbing Crabs of Their Senses

May 14, 2023 — Pacific populations of sweet-tasting Dungeness crabs are on the decline, and researchers from the University of Toronto say they’ve found a potential culprit: acidic ocean water related to climate change. The acidic water affects how molecules bind to the crabs’ smell-detecting antennae, which they use to scavenge for food on the sea floor.

For the Dungeness, as with most crabs, its sense of smell is critical to its survival, as it has poor vision and relies on short antennae for finding food, mating and avoiding predators. The antennae “flick” through the water, allowing scent molecules to collide with nerve cells on the appendages, which transmit to the crab’s brain.

“Losing their sense of smell seems to be climate related, so this might partially explain some of the decline in their numbers,” says Cosima Porteus, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto-Scarborough, in a press release.

Read the full article at Discover Magazine

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.”

Read the full article at the Associated Press