Donald Trump Archives - Page 39 of 104

Environmental groups sue Trump, saying he can’t open marine monument to fishing

June 18, 2020 — Environmental groups are suing President Trump over a decision to open a national marine monument off the coast of southern New England to commercial fishing, arguing the president’s proclamation violates federal law.

The president announced the decision during a June 5 visit to Maine.

The lawsuit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., says that under the U.S. Antiquities Act a president can only create protections for national monuments and does not have the right to remove them – only Congress can.

In a statement Wednesday, Bob Vanasse, executive director of Saving Seafood’s National Coalition for Fishing Communities, a fishing industry advocacy group, noted that the proclamation will still require commercial fishing to be managed under the Magunson-Stevens Act, a federal law governing marine fisheries, and does not modify the monument in any other way.

“(The Conservation Law Foundation) argues that President Trump’s modification of the monument created by President Obama is illegal,” Vanasse said. “But President Obama exercised the power to modify monuments created by his predecessors to expand Pacific marine monuments created by President Bush.

“It would seem that CLF’s position is that it is legal for a president to modify monuments created by a predecessor when CLF agrees with the modification, but illegal when CLF disagrees with the modification.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Return of Fishing in Atlantic Marine Monument Spurs Legal Challenge

June 18, 2020 — Two weeks after President Donald Trump opened the door to commercial fishing in scientifically important ocean waters off the coast of Cape Cod, environmentalists shot back Wednesday with a federal complaint.

“From our perspective, President Trump seemed to know, actually, very little about what the purpose of the monument was or what it was trying to accomplish when he signed his proclamation,” Conservation Law Foundation senior counsel Peter Shelley said in a phone call Wednesday.

“We’ve been in there for 40 years,” Jon Williams, owner of the Atlantic Red Crab Company, told Trump. “And so if the environmental groups can deem the place pristine and we’ve been operating in that area for 40 years and they can’t find any evidence where we’ve done any damage, I would say we’ve been pretty good stewards of that 5,000 miles.”

Coinciding with Wednesday’s lawsuit, the New England Fishing Management Council unveiled new steps it has taken to protect fragile corals, specifically by prohibiting the use of bottom-tending commercial fishing gear in areas where corals are common.

“We’ve said from the beginning that fishery management councils are best suited to address the complicated tradeoffs involved in managing fisheries, and we appreciate regaining our control to do so in the monument area,” John Quinn, chairman of the council, said in a statement.

“The monument area will not be ‘wide open to industrial fishing,’” Tom Nies, the council’s executive director, said in a statement.

“The council worked hard to walk that fine line between providing strong habitat and coral protections in the area while balancing the social and economic impacts to the industry,” Nies continued. “We don’t think the recent criticism from the environmental community since the announcement of the second monument proclamation is entirely warranted. Existing fishery management measures provide strong protections for Lydonia and Oceanographer Canyons, and with the coral amendment, we’re preventing commercial fishing from expanding beyond its historical footprint. The council took this step while carefully weighing the associated impacts. We look forward to the implementation our amendment.”

Read the full story at Courthouse News Service

Environmental groups sue Trump administration for allowing commercial fishing in protected waters

June 17, 2020 — Environmental groups filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration on Wednesday, challenging its recent decision to allow commercial fishing in nearly 5,000 square miles of protected waters off Cape Cod.

The Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation and other groups said President Trump’s decision to open the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument — the only such protected waters off the East Coast — violated the Antiquities Act, a 1906 law that President Obama used to create the monument in his last year in office.

Fishing groups had lobbied for the change, saying the restrictions had cost the industry millions of dollars. In a meeting with fishermen in Bangor, Trump told them: “This action was deeply unfair to Maine lobstermen. You’ve been treated very badly. They’ve regulated you out of business.”

Critics of Obama’s decision to use the Antiquities Act said the move circumvented federal law established in the 1970s to regulate fisheries.

“President Obama swept aside our public, science-based fishery management process with the stroke of a pen,” said Bob Vanasse, executive director of Saving Seafood, a Washington, D.C.-based group that represents commercial fishermen. “That was a mistake, and whatever anyone thinks about President Trump is irrelevant.”

He also criticized the Conservation Law Foundation for its interpretation of the law.

“The record is clear that the highest political bidder during the Obama years was the environmental community, and that is why they succeeded in including a prohibition against commercial fisheries,” Vanasse said, noting that Obama did not ban recreational fishing in the protected area.

He and others in the fishing industry called Trump’s decision overdue. Before the ban, fishermen estimated that as many as 80 boats had regularly fished the area for lobster, crab, scallops, swordfish, and tuna. Fishermen said the closure has harmed their livelihoods.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

Deep-Sea Coral Amendment to Provide Sweeping Habitat Protection, Including in Canyons and Seamounts Monument

June 17, 2020 — The following is an excerpt from a release published today by the New England Fishery Management Council:

The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument was created on September 15, 2016 by a Presidential Proclamation, which included a ban on commercial fishing within the monument area. Fishermen in the lobster and deep- sea red crab fisheries, however, were given seven years to phase out their operations.

The proclamation superseded the Council’s ability to manage fisheries through its usual process under the Magnuson- Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA) within the marine monument’s boundaries.

A second Presidential Proclamation was issued on June 5, 2020 – the Proclamation on Modifying the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument.

This second proclamation removed the prohibition on commercial fishing and allowed management of fisheries within the marine monument to revert to the Council through the MSA process.

However, the Council has been concerned by some of the news coverage surrounding this most recent Presidential Proclamation. Several articles indicated that fishing in the marine monument will be unrestricted and lead to “devastating” habitat impacts and the resumption of destructive fishing practices.

“This is not true at all,” said Tom Nies, the Council’s executive director. “The monument area will not be ‘wide open to industrial fishing.’”

In the canyons and seamounts region, the Council’s Coral Amendment will:

Prohibit the use of bottom-tending commercial fishing gear within the designated deep-sea coral area, including otter trawls; beam trawls; hydraulic dredges; non-hydraulic dredges; bottomtending seines; bottom longlines; pots and traps; and sink or anchored gillnets; and
Protect the majority of coral habitats occurring in the canyons and on the slope in the New England region. The protected area will encompass 75% of plotted occurrences of corals, 75% of estimated soft coral habitat based on a habitat suitability model, and 85% of the areas with slopes greater than 30°. Steep slopes are a strong predictor of coral occurrence.

The prohibition on the use of bottom-tending gear types will provide substantial protection for deep-sea corals from being damaged by commercial fishing activities. The Council provided one exemption for red crab pots. The small-scale deep-sea red crab fishery has only four active vessels, and the canyons and slope are vital to its operation.

Read the full release here

ROB MOIR: The Monument Watch and How Trump Took the Bait to Strengthen Protections of Atlantic Ocean Realm

June 16, 2020 — The trap had been set up by boisterous environmental groups arguing with fishermen. Not seeing the forest for the trees, or rather the school for the fish, President Trump stepped squarely into it. He opened the Northeast Canyons and Seamount Marine National Monument to commercial fishing while strengthening protections of the ocean park area.

Deeply unfair, it’s a terrible thing, said the president addressing fishermen in Bangor. A representative of the Maine Lobstermen’s Union said he was “a little disappointed” so much time was spent on a monument that “has nothing to do with Maine.” The monument is 140 miles Southeast of Nantucket. Of greater interest are the millions of dollars lost in lobster exports due to the China tariffs. A hardship they hold Trump responsible for.

Lobstermen sued the government while continuing to work the resource. Just when the window for lobstering by the fourteen vessels was closing, Trump decreed they may continue. He maintained the status quo. The actually taking of fish is directed by the National Marine Fisheries Service with advice from the fishery councils. The quotas for catching fish or lobsters did not change, just the rhetoric.

Trump spared the NE Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument the damage he inflicted on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. Here, Trump took away from native American tribal nations, the twin buttes of sacred lands packed with ancestral Pueblo artifacts. He made these lands available, for a price, to cattle, mining, oil and gas drilling. The monument was broken into two parts. Bears Ears National Monument was reduced by 85%, down from 1.35-million acres. Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument was reduced to nearly half the size, down from 1.88-million acres. The resulting monuments now have a combined area of 201,876 acres. This is a reduction of 85% of monument acres.

Read the full opinion piece at Medium

Lawsuit demands Trump administration to impose vaquita-related sanctions against Mexico

June 11, 2020 — The Center for Biological Diversity and the Animal Welfare Institute have sued the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump in an effort to force it to implement sanctions against Mexico for its failures to protect the highly endangered vaquita porpoise.

The CBD and AWI said the sanctions are “long overdue,” accusing the U.S. Department of the Interior of failing to respond to a 2014 petition they filed under the Administrative Procedure Act requesting the United States “certify” Mexico under the U.S. Pelly Amendment for Mexico’s “ongoing failure to halt illegal fishing of and international trade in endangered totoaba fish.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

China unlikely to consider lowering of lobster tariffs, despite Trump’s threat

June 11, 2020 — On Friday, 5 June, at a meeting with commercial lobstermen from the U.S. state of Maine, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to impose new tariffs on imported Chinese and European Union goods if they did not eliminate their tariffs on U.S. lobsters.

At the meeting, Trump appointed U.S. Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Director Peter Navarro the task of identifying additional Chinese and European products to hit with tariffs as a means of pressuring Beijing to eliminate all tariffs on American lobsters.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Environmental groups fight rollback of marine monument protections

June 10, 2020 — Environmentalists are vowing they will sue to reinstate fishery closures to a marine national monument 130 miles southeast of Cape Cod that President Donald Trump removed by executive order last Friday at a meeting held in Maine.

The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument was created by President Barack Obama in 2016 using the Antiquities Act of 1906, a process President George W. Bush used to create a national marine monument off Hawaii in 2006, as well as 15 presidents dating back to Theodore Roosevelt. The Antiquities Act was used, proponents said, because it can be put in place more quickly than fisheries regulations that can take years, if not decades, to be implemented. Also, the protections are in theory permanent, whereas other fisheries regulations are often amended.

“We’re taking them to court,” said Peter Shelley, senior counsel at the Conservation Law Foundation. “It’s a matter of putting the paperwork together and getting the strongest case possible.”

“It’s very clear that the president can establish these areas, but he has no authority to modify or remove them,” said Gib Brogan, fisheries campaign manager at Oceana.

Similar cases are being fought around two other national monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, both in southern Utah. Trump stripped both monuments of federal protections by dramatically reducing them in size in December 2017 to allow for mineral extraction, mining, and off-road use.

Brad Sewell, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s oceans division, said his organization also intends to challenge the Northeast Canyons rollback in court.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Maine Voices: Trump rights a wrong by reopening marine monument to fishing

June 10, 2020 — President Trump used the occasion of a visit to Maine last week to do right by an industry that hasn’t had much good news lately when he reopened to commercial fishing nearly 5,000 square miles of ocean south of New England that President Barack Obama closed in 2016.

Stay tuned. In the process of righting a wrong, Trump’s action, announced at a Bangor roundtable, has once again set hair on fire in the environmental community, tested the limits of presidential power and set the stage for litigation.

Obama created the area, known as the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, just a few months before he left office. He portrayed the monument, the only one in the Atlantic, as a hedge against climate change.

Spanning four canyons and three seamounts, the monument is home to cold-water corals, endangered whales and turtles and numerous fish species.

If Trump’s action was controversial, it should be seen as no less so than the process that created the monument. Fishing in U.S. territorial waters is managed by the National Marine Fisheries Service, which is charged with providing productive and sustainable fisheries based on the best available science. NMFS works with regional councils to ensure all stakeholders are heard and that its regulations have “ground truth.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

JOHN FIORILLO: Offshore aquaculture has Trump’s backing, but that’s just the beginning

June 9, 2020 — When it comes to unprecedented moments in seafood industry history, May’s executive order from President Donald Trump is certainly near the top.

The needs and desires of the US fishing and aquaculture sectors have traditionally not been the focus of Oval Office inhabitants, making Trump’s May 6 proclamation a truly unique moment.

It’s not uncommon for US presidents to use executive orders to unilaterally pursue policy objectives, but that doesn’t lessen the significance or the potential of Trump’s “Promoting American Seafood Competitiveness and Economic Growth” decree as far as its impact on the seafood industry, particularly the US aquaculture sector.

While the order seeks to streamline fisheries regulations and promote more fair seafood trade, much of the value of this executive order will be determined by whether the United States evolves into the aquaculture powerhouse it has been threatening to become for nearly 30 years.

Read the full opinion piece at IntraFish