Saving Seafood

As feds eye more wind leases off Virginia, fishing industries fear losses

June 23, 2022 — Today, two wind turbines turn off Virginia’s coast. But by the middle of the next decade, hundreds more may have joined them.

With a major push underway by President Joe Biden’s administration to develop 30 gigawatts of offshore wind as a way to reduce U.S. reliance on fossil fuels, federal officials are looking to dramatically expand the areas where wind farms can be built in U.S. waters.

Virginia is an epicenter of interest: Of 4 million acres of ocean identified as potential wind energy areas in a new Central Atlantic call area, most lie off the Virginia coast.

For the commonwealth’s fishing industries, already wary of what their business will look like once Dominion Energy’s 176-turbine Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project is constructed, the prospect of a much more expansive buildout of wind power throughout the rich fishing grounds off Virginia is sparking fears that the new industry will drive out the old.

“We know that when these lease areas are built out, it is going to be displacing fishermen, who are then going to be working smaller and smaller areas with more and more boats, which is going to lead to localized depletion,” said Tom Dameron, government relations and fisheries science liaison for Surfside Foods, a New Jersey-based commercial clam fishing company that last year landed roughly 10 percent of the East Coast’s entire surf clam harvest in Cape Charles.

Read the full story at the Virginia Mercury

Offshore wind industry boosted as New England governors team up with Biden

June 23, 2022 — The White House is launching a formal partnership with 11 East Coast governors to boost the growing offshore wind industry, a key element of President Joe Biden’s plan for climate change.

At a White House meeting on Thursday, Biden administration officials will meet with governors and labor leaders to announce commitments to expand important parts of the offshore industry, including manufacturing facilities, ports and workforce training and development.

The partnership comprises governors of both parties from Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

In working with states and the private sector, the White House said it will “provide Americans with cleaner and cheaper energy, create good-paying jobs and invest billions in new American energy supply chains,” including construction of wind turbines, shipbuilding and servicing.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

Don’t endanger aquatic ecosystems in the name of solving climate change

June 20, 2022 — In New England, too, we are being told that jeopardizing fishery-supporting ecosystems is the price we must pay to solve climate change. Here, the argument is coming from offshore wind proponents, who are working hand-in-glove with the Biden administration to set a course to install 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030 — from a baseline of almost zero in just eight years — and 110 gigawatts by 2050, with most of the initial development taking place off New England and the mid-Atlantic and limited environmental review taking place prior to the issuance of leases.

What would this scale of development look like? With today’s technology, 110 gigawatts would be almost 8,500 turbines — 137 times the size of the Vineyard Wind facility planned for south of Cape Cod. It would mean near-continuous construction on the continental shelf for three decades. While no one knows what the ecological impacts of such construction might be (and that’s precisely our point), evidence suggests they may include alterations of the acoustic and sensory environment, electromagnetic fields, and current and wind patterns, affecting a variety of species whose survival depends on these aspects of the underwater world.

Offshore wind off New England and mining in the Bristol Bay watershed are linked by more than just spurious ultimatums invoking climate catastrophe as the inevitable consequence of keeping these wild places wild. It also happens that offshore wind, which requires hundreds of miles of electrical cables measuring up to 11 inches in diameter, is the most copper-intensive of all renewable energy technologies. Every mile of cable laid across the ocean floor will spur greater pressure to mine copper in precious, irreplaceable places like Bristol Bay.

Read the full op-ed at The Boston Globe

Maine’s fisheries and agricultural delegation meets with buyers in Cuba

June 13, 2022 — Representatives of Maine’s fisheries, apples, seed potatoes and vegetable seeds traveled to explore export opportunities in Cuba. After a first visit in May, an expanded delegation will return in October.

Those delegates from Maine agricultural growers and fisheries met with buyers and officials from the Cuba Ministry of Agriculture (MINAG) to develop a pipeline of Maine agricultural products for export to Cuba.

The delegation was developed by Doyle Marchant, president of Cedar Spring Agricultural Co., at the direct invitation of the Cuba Ministry of Agriculture (MINAG).

“It was important for Maine growers and producers to act on this unique invitation for Maine to build a reliable source of products and begin a normalization of relations between the two countries,” said Marchant. “The primary currency in Cuba is not money but building trust that can benefit both Maine and Cuba.”

While in Havana, letters of support for the delegation from Maine lawmakers Sen. Susan Collins, Rep. Chellie Pingree, and Rep. Jared Golden were presented to Sr. Carlos Fernandez de Cossio, vice minister of Ministry of Foreign Relations for the Republic of Cuba. The meetings also coincided with an important announcement by the Biden administration to lift certain restrictions on Cuba.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Biden proposes making underwater canyon off New York a marine sanctuary

June 9, 2022 — Long ago, the retreat of ice age glaciers carved one of the largest underwater canyons in the world into the seabed about 100 miles from New York City. Now, hundreds of species live there, including sperm whales, sea turtles and deep-sea corals.

On Wednesday, the Biden administration announced that it intends to designate the area a new national marine sanctuary, which would give it some of the same protections afforded to national parks.

The Hudson Canyon — spanning nearly 7½ miles wide and more than two miles deep in some places — rivals the Grand Canyon in scale. The push to add it to the National Marine Sanctuary System reflects the Biden administration’s broader effort to safeguard critical habitat threatened by development and global warming by conserving 30 percent of the nation’s land and waters by 2030.

“A sanctuary near one of the most densely populated areas of the Northeast U.S. would connect diverse communities across the region to the ocean and the canyon in new and different ways,” Rick Spinrad, who heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said in a statement. “As someone who grew up in New York City and went on to a career in ocean science, I am excited about how this amazing underwater environment can inspire shared interest in conserving our ocean.”

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Biden administration proposes Hudson Canyon marine sanctuary

June 9, 2022 — A new marine sanctuary off the northeast United States is proposed by the Biden administration, part of a suite of measures for public lands announced Wednesday.

The Hudson Canyon, the largest submarine gorge off the U.S. Atlantic at up to 2.5 miles deep and 7.5 miles wide, lies about 100 miles offshore of New York Harbor and runs 350 miles through the edge of the continental shelf.

The waters are home to federally protected whales, turtles and deep sea corals, and the scene of commercial and recreational pelagic fisheries. The sanctuary proposal raised alarms among East Coast longline fishermen, who worry it could restrict their swordfish and tuna fishery.

“Hudson Canyon’s grand scale and diverse structure – steep slopes, firm outcrops, diverse sediments, flux of nutrients, and areas of upwelling – make it an ecological hotspot for a vast array of marine wildlife,” according to a synopsis issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The American Sword and Tuna Harvesters, a group of commercial pelagic fisherman, said a Hudson Canyon sanctuary designation could set a course for a similar conflict again.

“Simply put, a commercial fishing ban in the Hudson Canyon has the potential to cause the collapse of the East Coast commercial fishery,” the group said in a statement early June 9.

“This is another disappointing action from an administration that claims to be committed to science, working families, and communities. But it is unfortunately not out of character,” the group said. In June 2021 “our attempts to arrange a meeting with Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to discuss the harm to our fishers from reimposition of a commercial fishing ban in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument were rebuffed.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Biden pitches Atlantic coast ‘Grand Canyon’ as marine sanctuary

June 8, 2022 — The White House today endorsed designating the Atlantic coast’s largest undersea canyon as one of the nation’s next underwater parks, but stopped short of enacting immediate protections that could guard the “ecological hotspot” from commercial fishing, energy development or other threats.

The Biden administration announced it will begin the process for safeguarding the Hudson Canyon — which sits 100 miles off the coasts of New York and New Jersey and rivals the Grand Canyon in scale — in a series of actions to mark today’s World Oceans Day.

In addition to kicking off the designation of a new national marine sanctuary, the White House vowed to develop a “whole-of-government Ocean Climate Action Plan” on ocean-based climate mitigation and adaptation strategies.

NOAA will oversee the designation process for the Hudson Canyon, which would become part of an existing group of 15 underwater parks that includes both freshwater and ocean sites.

But that process, which includes public comment, the drafting of environmental impact statements and management plans, and potential rulemaking, is not a swift one, with a final decision taking two to three years.

Bob Vanasse, executive director of industry group Saving Seafood, praised the decision to utilize the sanctuaries act rather than take executive action.

“I appreciate that they are using the Marine Sanctuaries Act to do this, which allows input from affected ocean users and will allow for actual science to be considered, which is exactly why we objected to and continue to object to the marine monument designation,” Vanasse said, referring to the ongoing legal battle over the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts site (E&E News PM, Oct. 8, 2021).

Last fall, Biden restored commercial fishing prohibitions to the Atlantic Ocean monument that former President Donald Trump had struck down in 2020.

Read the full story at E&E News

 

Huffman, Graves want Biden to make “strong statement” against IUU

June 6, 2022 — Two U.S. lawmakers pushing the federal government to take broader action against illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing are asking U.S. President Joe Biden to take action ahead of a key international conference.

U.S. Representatives Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) and Garret Graves (R-La.) sent the letter on 2 June 2022, saying the country has the opportunity to demonstrate leadership in the fight against IUU ahead of the United Nations Ocean Conference in Lisbon, Portugal, which starts on 27 June. The conference – as well as June being World Oceans Month – presents an opportunity for the U.S. to make a “strong statement,” they said in the three-page letter.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

Alaska Republicans open to EPA Pebble mine veto

May 27, 2022 — The Biden administration’s move to veto the contentious Pebble gold and copper mine in Alaska’s Bristol Bay watershed may soothe the state’s Republican senators who in the past have pushed back against federal intervention.

GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan said he and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, both staunch supporters of mining in Alaska, are still digesting the agency’s proposal to impose a Clean Water Act veto against mining in the watershed (Greenwire, May 25).

Sullivan suggested his opposition to federal intervention could be muted if EPA’s decision was based on Pebble LP’s most recent proposal. When the Obama administration tried to veto the project, the company had yet to enter the permitting process. The agency used a watershed assessment and publicly available information about the company’s intentions.

Indeed, Sullivan told E&E News his past opposition was based on EPA moving forward with a “preemptive veto.” In 2014, he said, there was “kind of a vague declaration that the EPA had the power to veto any project on state of Alaska land, that they deem vetoable.”

“Most people, myself included, and the whole Alaskan delegation, were vehemently opposed to that, because they didn’t have the legal authority to do it,” said Sullivan. “If this is based on the project, not the 2014 watershed assessment, it’s very different.”

Read the full story at E&E News

ALASKA: EPA proposes protections for world’s biggest sockeye salmon fishery

May 26, 2022 — The Biden administration announced Wednesday that it will protect waters in Alaska that are home to one of the world’s biggest salmon spawning grounds, the culmination of a long-running dispute that pitted Alaska Natives against mining interests.

The proposal from the Environmental Protection Agency is a potentially fatal blow to a plan to mine in the Bristol Bay watershed for gold, copper and other valuable metals.

Bristol Bay, which sustains an annual run of 37.5 million sockeye salmon, helps support a $2 billion commercial fishing industry as well as a way of life for Alaska Natives, who have vigorously opposed the construction of the Pebble Mine.

The EPA’s action, if finalized, may finally put an end to a more than decade-long legal and political tussle over the fate of this corner of southern Alaska as President Biden strives to protect a greater share of the nation’s wilderness.

Read the full story at The Washington Post