Saving Seafood

EPA ‘open to reconsideration’ of Alaska’s Pebble mine — DOJ

July 8, 2025 — Some Trump administration officials are open to reconsidering its prior opposition to the contentious Pebble mine in Alaska’s pristine Bristol Bay watershed, which is a prime salmon habitat, according to federal lawyers.

Attorneys with the Department of Justice said in recent court filings that EPA officials are considering a veto the agency issued in 2023 under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act that halted the open-pit copper and gold mine. The mine has drawn considerable pushback given it would be built near the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery.

“Agency officials remain open to reconsideration, and Defendants and [Pebble Limited Partnership] are negotiating to explore a potential settlement,” Adam Gustafson, acting assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division, wrote in a Thursday legal filing.

Read the full article at E&E News

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act includes several seafood provisions

July 8, 2025 — U.S. President Donald Trump has signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, an omnibus piece of legislation enacting the president’s policy preferences into law.

While the U.S. Senate made substantial changes to the bill before passing it, several seafood provisions included in early versions of the legislation survived the final cut, and a few additional carveouts were added for the Alaska fishing sector during last-minute negotiations.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Trump plans tariff pause, threatens higher tariffs on BRICS countries, South Korea, and Japan

July 7, 2025 — U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to add an additional 10 percent tariff to any country aligned with BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and then later threatened 25 percent tariffs as of 1 August on China, South Korea, and Japan, just before the White house announced his intention to extend the “liberation day” tariff pause to 1 August.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told media on 7 July that Trump was planning to sign an order to extend the pause on the steepest tariffs until 1 August. She also said Trump was planning to send letters to other countries about the new rates they would face if they did not negotiate new deals with the U.S.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

MARYLAND: Gov. stands behind offshore wind for OC coast

June 27, 2025 — As President Donald Trump continues to tweet against windmills, Maryland’s governor says his office hasn’t been in communication with the White House over a proposed offshore mid-Atlantic wind farm that’s in the final stages of approval at the state level.

“No, we haven’t had any communication with the Trump administration on this project specifically,” Moore said in an interview Tuesday with OC Today-Dispatch. The governor is in Ocean City for the annual summer conference of the Maryland Municipal League.

“I know some of the challenges that the administration has and we hear them loud and clear,” he added. “The thing that I want for everybody to hear loud and clear is that in the state of Maryland, we have got to come up with more energy options. We’ve got to come up with a more sustainable and affordable way for people to be able to harness energy. We have to do more to invest in our grid. We have to do more to make sure that we are not solely reliant on individual or independent sources of energy.”

Moore added he’s looking forward to working with the federal government “to figure out just where exactly they are, and what they will support and fund, because federal involvement does matter in these projects, we cannot deny that.”

During his 2024 campaign, Trump said he’d end offshore wind with an executive order “on Day 1.” Once he took office in January, the President continued to make overtures about stomping out offshore wind projects, calling them “an economic and environmental disaster” that only work with government subsidies.

Read the full article at OC Today-Dispatch

Fisheries council tightens its belt as funding comes ‘in dribs and drabs’

June 25, 2025 — The North Pacific Fishery Management Council, a federal board that helps oversee federal fisheries off Alaska’s coast, is scaling back operations due to uncertainty over federal funding.

The council meets five times a year to help set fishing policies, like quotas, regulations and bycatch restrictions. But federal budget cuts under President Donald Trump have whittled down the organization’s resources, forcing them to scale back their activities.

At a meeting earlier this month, the council said it had received less than half of its federal funds. They got another payment last week, but Executive Director David Witherell said they’ve still only received about two-thirds of their annual funding. Typically, the council receives full funding by March.

“This is a highly unusual situation that we’re in,” Witherell said. “We can normally be able to plan our meeting schedule for the year and not have to worry that the Council offices might have to close because we run out of funds to pay staff.”

The funding is disbursed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as part of a four-year grant. This is the first year of that grant cycle — and Witherell said they’re starting from zero, with no rollover from the previous year.

He said the council has been told to expect another installment once Congress finalizes a federal spending plan. But for now, there’s no timeline and no guarantee.

“The funding this year has been coming in dribs and drabs, and it’s making it challenging to reserve meeting spaces and to know that we have the funds to host a meeting,” Witherell said.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

Offshore wind stalls as Trump’s hostility deepens

June 23, 2o25 — President Donald Trump was at a bill signing last week when he veered onto one of his favorite topics: wind energy.

“The windmills are killing our country by the way,” the president said before signing bills to block California’s gas car phase-out. Wind turbines are “garbage,” he said, as well as “bullshit,” “horrible” and “very expensive to paint.”

“We’re not going to approve windmills unless something happens that’s an emergency,” Trump said. “I guess it could happen, but we’re not doing any of them.”

That near-total opposition to wind has been particularly catastrophic to the offshore industry, squelching investments and halting ongoing projects in their tracks at a time when Northeast states are desperate for more power. POLITICO’s E&E News found that about a dozen East Coast wind projects planned during the Biden administration are now in purgatory, potentially collapsing a portfolio that could power hundreds of thousands of homes.

More projects could falter if Republicans follow through with their plans in Congress to gut clean energy tax credits, industry advocates say.

“We’ve seen a chilling effect across the industry from the administration’s stance on offshore wind, and subsequent damaging executive orders,” said Katharine Kollins, president of the Southeastern Wind Coalition.

On his first day in office, Trump withdrew all federal waters from offshore wind leasing and ordered a review of all wind leasing and permitting. His executive order directs agencies to not “issue new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases, or loans for onshore or offshore wind projects pending the completion of a comprehensive assessment and review.”

The White House did not answer questions from E&E News about the status of that review. But analysts do not expect it to be completed.

“It was not written with the purpose of being transparent and encouraging,” said Jonathan Elkind, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “Anybody in the industry must assume that barring some wholesale change of heart, perhaps driven by new policy perspectives … from the Trump administration and from the president, it’s really hard to imagine how there’s going to be a lot of progress.”

Read the full article at E&E News

Judge allows lawsuit challenging Trump’s wind energy ban to proceed

June 20, 2025 — A lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s temporary ban on wind energy development throughout the United States can go forward, a federal court in Boston ruled Wednesday.

More than a dozen Democratic attorneys general sued over a Trump executive order suspending all federal wind energy approvals, citing the need for further review of their economic and environmental impact. U.S. District Judge William Young allowed the challenge to proceed against the Interior Department under the Administrative Procedure Act but dismissed several other claims based on different theories and involving other defendants.

Young said that his oral ruling from the bench was tentative and he reserved the right to alter his decision when he issues a written opinion.

Assuming Young’s oral ruling stands, both sides will submit motions for summary judgment that will be heard on September 4.

Read the full article at Courthouse News Service

Fishing council to ask Trump to lift fishing ban in Papahanaumokuakea

June 20, 2025 — The Western Pacific Fishery Management Council which sets fishing policies will ask President Trump to allow commercial fishing in the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in the northwestern Hawaiian islands. It’s the largest marine protected area in the world.

“That ask is to open waters of Papahānaumokuākea to commercial fishing. We may also include recreational fishing and subsistence fishing,” said Kitty Simonds, Western Pacific Fishery Management Council, executive director.

Simonds was in the Oval Office when President Trump signed the executive order in April to allow commercial fishing in a different preserve, the Pacific Island Heritage Marine National Monument around Johnston Atoll in the Central Pacific.

“It was very exciting for us,” said Simonds.

Read the full article at Hawaii News Now

Trump administration reverses aquaculture sector’s brief exemption from ICE raids

June 18, 2025 — U.S. aquaculture operations will not be exempt from the federal government’s increased worksite immigration raids, despite earlier reports that the administration of President Donald Trump would pause raids on large swaths of the food and hospitality industries.

In May, senior Trump officials instructed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to ramp up arrests, and the agency has responded by conducting more aggressive raids to find and detain undocumented people in the country.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Trump Withdraws From Agreement With Tribes to Protect Salmon

June 13, 2025 — President Trump moved on Thursday to withdraw from a Biden administration agreement that had brokered a truce in a decades-long legal battle with tribes in the Pacific Northwest.

The federal government has been mired in legal battles for decades over the depletion of fish populations in the Columbia River Basin, caused by four hydroelectric dams in the lower Snake River. Native American tribes have argued in court that the federal government has violated longstanding treaties by failing to protect the salmon and other fish that have been prevented by the dams from spawning upstream of the river. That legal fight is now expected to resume, with no brokered agreement in place.

In its statement announcing the withdrawal, the White House made no mention of the affected tribes and portrayed the issue falsely as revolving around “speculative climate change concerns.”

The tribes had called for the dams to be breached as a way to restore the salmon population, a proposal that has faced intense pushback because of the potential costs. A study found that removing the four dams was the most promising approach to restoring the salmon population, but also reported that replacing the electricity generated by the dams, shipping routes and irrigation water would cost between $10.3 billion and $27.2 billion.

Read the full article at The New York Times