Saving Seafood

New Yorkers rally against offshore drilling plan

February 16, 2018 — ALBANY, N.Y. — Wearing fish-shaped caps and armed with a megaphone, New York state’s leading environmental advocates protested President Donald Trump’s plan to open offshore areas to oil and gas drilling on Thursday as federal energy officials held an open house on the proposal near the state Capitol.

The group, wearing caps shaped like sturgeon, salmon and other vulnerable ocean species, included Aaron Mair, past president of the Sierra Club, and Judith Enck, the regional Environmental Protection Agency administrator under former President Barack Obama. They said Trump’s plan could devastate the environment while leaving potential renewable energy sources untouched. They called on Congress to pass a law blocking the proposal.

“We all remember the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe,” Enck said into a megaphone, referring to the 2010 rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico that triggered the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. “We cannot afford that reckless activity in the Atlantic.”

Inside, federal energy officials handed out information packets and briefed members of the public on the president’s decision last month to open most of the nation’s coast to oil and gas drilling as a way of making the U.S. less dependent on foreign energy sources. Several dozen people had trickled through at the midpoint of the four-hour open house. Members of the public were encouraged to submit written comments.

William Brown, chief environmental officer at the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, said he welcomed comments from opponents to the plan.

Read the full story from Associated Press at the Seattle Times

 

Rep. Moulton: NOAA cuts ‘recipe for disaster’

February 16, 2018 — President Donald Trump’s proposed budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration cuts more than $1 billion from the agency that manages the nation’s fisheries and coastal ecosystems, explores space and forecasts weather and changing environmental conditions.

On Thursday, U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton of Salem criticized the proposed cuts, saying the proposed 14 percent decline reflects the administration’s shallow understanding of the importance of NOAA’s programs to coastal communities, maritime industries and the national resources the agency is tasked to protect.

“It’s a recipe for disaster,” Moulton said of the withering budget cuts.

A spokeswoman at NOAA’s Gloucester-based Greater Atlantic Region Fisheries Office said the agency would have no comment on the budget proposal.

Still, the numbers remain unnerving — and the opposition more unified among a disparate band of conservationists, fishing stakeholders and political forces — when the cuts within the cuts are explored.

Local groundfishermen, already buffeted by heightened regulation, shrinking quotas and climactic changes, fear the cuts will kill any possibility that NOAA will continue reimbursements for portions of their at-sea monitoring costs in 2018.

Conservationists, such as Oceana, have railed against the deep cuts in ocean-funded research, such as the 33 percent cut in the National Ocean Service.

“The president’s proposal would cripple NOAA, the nation’s premier agency for ocean management and research,” Oceana said in its statement responding to the Trump budget proposals. “Major NOAA programs would suffer massive cuts.”

Read the full story at Salem News

 

In New Jersey, opponents of offshore drilling gear up for a fight

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

 

Trump Budget Would Zero Out Funding For Puget Sound Recovery, Again

February 14, 2018 — Members of Congress who represent Puget Sound are pushing back against the Trump administration’s budget for 2019 in part because it would zero out all federal funding for cleanup and recovery of the iconic ecosystem.

The proposal cuts all funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s geographic program for Puget Sound, as well as for a national estuary program and for Pacific salmon recovery through National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fisheries. The administration says it wants local governments to take on the responsibility and continue recovery efforts.

The missing money totals more than $30 million, says Sheida Sahandy, Executive Director of the state’s Puget Sound Partnership, which coordinates cleanup. Those funds are leveraged with money from other state and local sources to get work done, so she says the cuts would be “crippling.”

“We’re at tipping point for, for example, the Orca,” she said, referring to the dwindling population of southern resident killer whales, which has reached its lowest number in 30 years. Only 76 are left in the wild.

“We are fearing extinction around the corner and stopping our efforts at this point in their tracks would essentially mean that we’re giving up on saving them,” Sahandy said, adding that the orcas are only the most obvious example of what’s at stake.

If there’s any silver lining, it’s that her agency has been through this once before.

Last year, the President’s budget proposed nearly identical cuts. Congress ultimately pushed back, reinstating all $28 million in the geographic program for Puget Sound in the 2018 budget.

But Sahandy says it will take a lot of advocacy once again. She says Washington state is so far away from the capitol that many well-meaning members of Congress need to be reminded why their support is critical.

Read the full story at KNKX

 

After turbulent 2017, states want to control snapper fishery

February 14, 2018 — A year after the Trump administration likely broke the law by allowing overfishing of red snapper, five Gulf of Mexico states now want special power to manage the species in federal waters in 2018 and 2019.

They’re likely to get their way, too.

Unlike last year, the new plan would not allow sports anglers in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama to exceed federal quotas, but the states would get the authority to call the shots in setting their own fishing seasons in federal waters.

Daryl Carpenter, the owner of Reel Screamers Guide Service in Grand Isle, La., and president of the Louisiana Charter Boat Association, can’t wait, saying the federal management system is broken and “has failed to come up with any type of fix.”

“It’s too dominated by non-interested groups, by your green groups who want to hug and cherish the fish,” he said. “You can get nothing done in the federal system. … I’m 100 percent in favor. The states need to take control of this and get the federal government out of our damn life.”

Critics say that ceding control to the states would be a mistake, arguing that federal officials long have led the way in rebuilding the red snapper population and remain the most qualified to do the job.

“The federal management process is the most open and transparent, no matter how frustrating,” said Shane Cantrell, executive director of the Charter Fisherman’s Association and the owner of Galveston Sea Ventures in Galveston, Texas.

All five states are pushing the idea as an experiment that would be allowed under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976, the nation’s premier fishing law.

They want NOAA Fisheries to give them “exempted fishing permits.” Those permits allow fishing that would normally be banned under federal law, usually as pilot projects done in the name of research.

“It allows us to exempt certain fishing activities from the regulations,” said Roy Crabtree, administrator for the NOAA Fisheries Southeast Region in St. Petersburg, Fla.

“How well will it work? Well, time will tell,” Crabtree said. “But I think a lot of people will argue that we’ve had some quota overruns in the past and we’ve had a lot of dissatisfied customers, so I think we do need to try something different.”

Many state officials say that NOAA is all but certain to sign off on the exempted fishing permits, after Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby got Congress to include language in a fiscal 2017 appropriations bill that directed the agency to come up with a pilot program to give states more control.

After the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council voted on Feb. 1 to approve the plans, Alabama officials said they were one step closer to taking over management of the red snapper.

Read the full story at E&E News

 

Rhode Island: Ocean State Officials Pledge to Halt Offshore Drilling

February 13, 2018 — NARRAGANSETT, R.I. — Rhode Island’s governor and members of Congress are calling for an all-out effort to oppose President Trump’s plan for offshore drilling along the Eastern seaboard. They warned of the environmental and economic risks to the state’s fishing and tourism industries. They urged the public to submit comments on the proposal to the Bureau of Ocean Management (BOEM) and to show their opposition at a scheduled Feb. 28 public workshop in Providence.

Referencing the six commercial fishermen in the audience at at Feb. 12 press event, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said he planned to advance a bill signed by all New England senators to ban offshore drilling off the New England coast. Whitehouse called the offshore drilling proposal a “dumb idea” and blamed the fossil-fuel industry for directing the Trump administration to enact it.

“This will not happen. Whatever it takes to prevent it, we will see takes place,” Whitehouse said.

Gov. Gina Raimondo promised to lobby governors of coastal states to pass resolutions opposing the offshore drilling plan.

“This is backwards. We ought to be moving forward for offshore wind farms, not backwards for offshore oil drilling,” she said.

Raimondo also restated her intent to have Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke follow through on his promise to meet her in Rhode Island and discuss the fossil-fuel project. Several East Coast governors called Zinke after he met with Florida Gov. Rick Scott. Scott apparently convinced Zinke to exempt his state from the offshore drilling plan. Although there is skepticism of the agreement after Zinke’s office backtracked somewhat on that promise and legal questions of such an exemption surfaced.

Whitehouse and Raimondo were asked whether a state or regional carbon tax would put economic pressure on Trump and the fossil-fuel industry. Both said they favor a national or multi-state fee on fossil fuels. However, Whitehouse said his carbon tax bill in the Senate won’t advance until the head of the Senate is a Democrat.

“The Republicans are keenly interested in trying to shovel this issue under the rug as much as they can to keep the fossil-fuel money flowing into their party. It’s a sad state of affairs,” Whitehouse said.

Raimondo said she favors advancing a carbon tax along with public pushback to offshore drilling.

Read the full story at ECORI

 

R.I.’s governor urges opposition to Atlantic offshore drilling plan

February 9, 2018 — Gov. Gina Raimondo is urging Rhode Islanders to speak up against a federal plan that would open waters off the state’s coast to drilling for oil and gas.

In an interview in her State House office, she said the Trump administration’s plan to overturn an Obama-era ban on offshore drilling along the nation’s East Coast poses a threat to Rhode Island’s commercial fishing industry and the beaches along the state’s 400 miles of coastline.

Raimondo said she requested the meeting with The Providence Journal to raise public awareness about the drilling plan. It was the first time in her tenure as governor that she has asked for such a meeting in regard to an environmental issue.

“I find the whole thing to be really quite alarming,” she said. “This might happen if we don’t oppose it loudly enough.”

In January 1996, the barge North Cape spilled 828,000 gallons of home heating oil off Moonstone Beach in South Kingstown, killing thousands of shore birds and millions of lobsters.

It is considered one of the worst environmental disasters in Rhode Island history, but the size of the spill was relatively small. The Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 in Alaska totaled 11 million gallons of crude while the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill may have released up to 20 times that amount into the Gulf of Mexico.

“The greatest concern would be an oil spill,” Raimondo said. “I was in high school when Exxon Valdez happened so I still remember that very vividly. The BP oil spill seems like it was yesterday. That could happen here. I think Rhode Islanders need to know that.”

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management estimates 90 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically-recoverable oil on the nation’s Outer Continental Shelf and 327 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Less than a tenth of the total potential resources are on the Atlantic coast.

The proposal released by the Department of the Interior in January would take effect from 2019 to 2024. Lease sales for the North Atlantic region would take place in 2021.

Read the full story at the Providence Journal

 

California says will block crude oil from Trump offshore drilling plan

February 9, 2018 — SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California will block the transportation through its state of petroleum from new offshore oil rigs, officials told Reuters on Wednesday, a move meant to hobble the Trump administration’s effort to vastly expand drilling in U.S. federal waters.

California’s plan to deny pipeline permits for transporting oil from new leases off the Pacific Coast is the most forceful step yet by coastal states trying to halt the biggest proposed expansion in decades of federal oil and gas leasing.

Officials in Florida, North and South Carolina, Delaware and Washington, have also warned drilling could despoil beaches, harm wildlife and hurt lucrative tourism industries.

“I am resolved that not a single drop from Trump’s new oil plan ever makes landfall in California,” Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, chair of the State Lands Commission and a Democratic candidate for governor, said in an emailed statement.

The commission sent a letter on Wednesday to the U.S. Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) urging the bureau’s program manager Kelly Hammerle to withdraw the draft proposal, saying the public did not have an adequate opportunity to provide input on the plan.

”It is certain that the state would not approve new pipelines or allow use of existing pipelines to transport oil from new leases onshore,” the commission wrote in the letter seen by Reuters.

California has clashed repeatedly with President Donald Trump’s administration over a range of other issues since last year, from climate change to automobile efficiency standards to immigration.

The Interior Department last month announced its proposal to open nearly all U.S. offshore waters to oil and gas drilling, sparking protests from coastal states, environmentalists and the tourism industry.

Read the full story at Reuters

 

East Coast of U.S. Emerging Into a Hotbed for Offshore Wind

February 7, 2018 — Atlantic coast states might be protesting President Trump’s plan to expand offshore oil drilling, but they’re increasingly embracing a different kind of seaborne energy: wind.

States bordering the outer continental shelf are looking for carbon-free electricity, even as the Trump administration rolls back rules requiring it.

Last week, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) announced that his state will aim for 3,500 megawatts of installed offshore wind by 2030, enough to power 1 million homes. Massachusetts has a goal to build 1,600 MW of offshore wind power by 2027, and New York has committed to 2,400 MW by 2030.

At the same time, wind technology is quickly advancing, thanks to its popularity in Europe. Ten countries across Europe had deployed 12,600 MW of offshore wind power by the end of 2016. In the United States, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has issued 13 wind energy leases off the Atlantic coast. In late 2016, the first offshore wind farm in the United States came online about 4 miles off the coast of Block Island, R.I.

It’s unclear how the growth in offshore wind might be affected by Trump’s plan to open nearly all U.S. waters to oil and gas drilling.

But there are hints that the two types of development could come into contact on the open water.

According to BOEM’s draft proposed 2019-24 offshore oil and gas leasing plan, any drilling off the Atlantic Seaboard would have to be “coordinated” with current and future offshore wind development. The agency predicts that more wind projects are likely to be built between 2019 and 2024, when oil and gas lease sales are slated to be held.

Experts said it’s unlikely there would be direct competition for the same slice of ocean between the two industries. But that’s a hard question to answer.

Kevin Book, managing director of research for ClearView Energy Partners LLC, said it’s too early to know how offshore wind and oil and gas development might interact off the East Coast. Historically, offshore wind has been a nascent industry, and no one has drilled for oil in the Atlantic for decades. It’s been so long that developers have little idea what type of oil reserves lie under the sea, or if oil companies will want to tap them.

Read the full story from Scientific American/E&E news at IEEFA

 

Opponents, supporters react to Trump’s offshore drilling plan

February 6, 2018 — Environmentalists, fishermen, and state governments are signaling their opposition to the Trump administration’s proposed plan to reopen the ocean off Cape Cod and New England to oil and gas exploration.

“We are skeptical of anything the Trump Administration is doing in the marine environment or anything they are proposing to do,” said Conservation Law Foundation Vice President Priscilla Brooks.

A 2016 Bureau of Ocean Energy Management report estimated nearly 90 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 327 trillion tons of natural gas existed in mostly unexplored areas of the U.S. continental shelf. The new push for fossil fuel exploration and recovery was announced Jan. 4 with the unveiling of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s Draft Five Year Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program. It is part of President Donald Trump’s campaign pledge to make the U.S. more energy independent.

Currently, offshore fossil fuel exploration is controlled by a BOEM plan finalized near the end of the Obama presidency. Obama invoked a 1953 law, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, to give what he said would be permanent protection from drilling to the continental shelf from Virginia to Maine.

But there were doubts that Obama’s use of the 1953 law would hold up in court, and the new plan is meant to replace the current one. International Association of Drilling Contractors President Jason McFarland hailed the inclusion of the Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic and an expansion of Gulf of Mexico drilling areas as an important step in achieving the goal of U.S. energy dominance in the world.

“IADC has long argued for access to areas that hold potential for oil and gas development,” McFarland wrote in comments last month, citing a U.S. Energy Information Administration estimate of a 48 percent growth in worldwide energy demand over the next 20 years. “The number and scale of the recoverable resources is large, and can lead to thousands of new jobs and billions of dollars in investment.”

But the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association and the various fishermen’s associations have panned the proposal. Last week, the New England Fishery Management Council approved a comment letter to BOEM that requested Mid-Atlantic and Northern Atlantic lease areas be excluded from the exploration and drilling.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times