December 12, 2025 — More than a year after a wind turbine off the coast of Nantucket malfunctioned, causing debris to wash ashore, the town and Vineyard Wind have struck a new agreement to improve transparency.
On Thursday, Nantucket officials announced they secured a series of commitments from the wind project coordinators to improve information sharing, communications, along with emergency planning and response.
December 11, 2025 — A federal judge has pushed back on the Trump Administration’s pause on wind energy projects carried out by federal agencies, raising new questions for offshore plans near Cape Cod — a ruling that some welcome, but disappointed others.
The finding, released from the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts on Dec. 8, does not cancel President Trump’s original executive memorandum calling for a pause on wind approvals, but it does call for ending federal agencies’ enforcement of his directives.
The Sierra Club Massachusetts is among those applauding the court’s finding. In May, the organization joined nine other environmental groups in a filing arguing that the administration’s “wind directive” was arbitrary and not based in science, lacked a clear purpose and timeline, and jeopardized climate goals and public health.
December 11, 2025 — In Maine, lobstermen last year took home over a half-billion dollars in revenue.
However, that fishery remains under threat as warming waters drive invasive species into lobsters’ habitats, species that both compete for resources and hunt the native lobsters. Working lobstermen’s ecological knowledge can be key in untangling these complicated dynamics, according to a Northeastern University professor of marine and environmental sciences.
Using an in-depth survey and interview process of lobstermen in Maine and Massachusetts, Northeastern University professor of marine and environmental sciences Jonathan Grabowski and his intercollegiate team studied the innate knowledge that lobster fishermen have of complex food-web relationships and animal interactions within and across different habitats. Their findings demonstrate that the insights of lobstermen, and local fishermen more broadly, provide an invaluable understanding of changing ecosystems as fishery management practices struggle to keep up.
Life as a lobsterman
Grabowski, who is also affiliated with Northeastern’s Coastal Sustainability Institute, and his team study how marine ecosystems function and change, but also how management practices impact fisheries. Coastal waters, their paper notes, are warming at a speed faster than management strategies can keep up with.
Cue the lobstermen, which, Grabowski notes, is the term the industry prefers for lobster fishermen of any gender. Most of those interviewed have decades of fishing experience. “More often than not, it’s north of 25 years,” Grabowski says, and it’s common to encounter lobstermen with over 50 years of experience.
December 10, 2025 — To walk down New Bedford’s Pier 3 is to view a time capsule of the historic fishing town, memorialized not just by plaques and monuments but by the decades-old, rusted trawlers parked stern to stern on the cramped commercial harbor.
By design, these boats spend more time tied up at the docks than they do on the open ocean. Some scallopers are trying to put them back on the water.
“You wouldn’t dare keep a plane grounded for 30, 40, or 300-plus days,” New Bedford scallop vessel manager and owner Tony Alvernaz said. “Boats are no different.”
For decades, scalloping permits have been tied to individual vessels, while regulations limit the number of days a particular boat can spend at sea. Now, a new proposal would allow owners of two or more boats to “stack” their scalloping permits on a single boat. With permit-stacking, a crew could take multiple trips on one vessel, and the boats’ owner could either sell or refurbish the oldest members of their fleet. Permit-stacking already exists in other fisheries, but for decades it has languished among scallopers, who fear stacking could lead to further industry consolidation.
In October, New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell penned a letter to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expressing early support for the new proposal to allow permit-stacking in scallop fisheries.
“Even the casual observer can’t help but notice that we have lots of boats in the dock,” Mitchell told The Light in an interview. “It’s pretty crowded, and so people wonder, ‘Well, why are they all there?’ Part of the answer is, ‘Well, they don’t fish all that much.’”
Mitchell’s endorsement of scallop permit-stacking contrasts with his position on a similar question three years ago.
In 2022, the New England Fisheries Management Council overwhelmingly struck down a similar proposal that would have allowed scallop permit holders to lease their scalloping permits to other vessel owners, essentially “stacking” multiple permits on a temporary basis.
Critics at the time worried that leasing would lead to greater industry consolidation as larger ventures bought up licenses, crowding out independent scallopers. Others worried that vessel owners would pass down the additional costs of leasing to their crews, as had already happened in the groundfish industry.
Mitchell was among those strongly opposed to the 2022 leasing proposal, traveling two hours to the Council meeting in Gloucester to speak out against it.
“This is at least the third time in the last decade that the largest ownership interests in the scallop industry have urged the Council to undo the bedrock one-boat-one-permit rule to reduce costs and increase profits,” Mitchell said in his 2022 testimony. “I oppose the proposal because it will inevitably lead to consolidation in the industry, and thereby reduce the industry’s workforce and lower demand for shore side services.”
What changed in three years? For one, the future of the scallop industry looks very different now than it did three years ago.
The 2022 leasing proposal came during a marked boom period for New Bedford scallopers. Three years later, scallop numbers have plummeted far below the brief heyday experienced in 2022, let alone the industry’s glory days of single-boat owner-operators in the 1990s. A growing starfish population — one of the sea scallop’s main predators — and overly optimistic resource management are the main causes of the scallop decline.
Under current conditions, the boats at Pier 3 will spend over 300 days of the next year at the docks, fishing for fewer days to catch fewer shellfish.
In his October letter, Mitchell outlined what he felt was different about the current proposal and why he was less concerned about consolidation under the new stipulations. His main concern, he said, was that the current situation — boats lined up rafted one against another — was untenable.
December 10, 2025 — A federal judge on Monday struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order blocking wind energy projects, saying the effort to halt virtually all leasing of wind farms on federal lands and waters was “arbitrary and capricious” and violates U.S. law.
Judge Patti Saris of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts vacated Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order blocking wind energy projects and declared it unlawful.
Saris ruled in favor of a coalition of state attorneys general from 17 states and Washington, D.C., led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, that challenged Trump’s Day One order that paused leasing and permitting for wind energy projects.
Trump has been hostile to renewable energy, particularly offshore wind, and prioritizes fossil fuels to produce electricity.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell hailed the ruling as a victory for green jobs and renewable energy.
December 10, 2025 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:
Atlantic Herring Management Board members from the states of Maine, New Hampshire and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will meet via webinar on December 15, 2025 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m., to discuss days out measures for the remainder of Season 2 (October 1 – December 31) for the 2025 Area 1A fishery (inshore Gulf of Maine). Days out measures include consecutive landings days for Season 2. The webinar and call information is included below:
December 9, 2025 — A federal judge on Monday ruled in favor of Massachusetts and more than a dozen states that sued the Trump administration in May over President Donald Trump’s day-one offshore wind memo. The directive has frozen permitting since January, pending a comprehensive review by federal agencies.
The states argued the memo is unlawful and has caused significant harm – stymieing domestic investment, jeopardizing states’ abilities to supply enough electricity, and creating an “existential threat” to the industry.
Judge Patti B. Saris seemed to agree with their legal claims: “The State Plaintiffs have produced ample evidence demonstrating that they face ongoing or imminent injuries due to the Wind Order.”
On the flip side, she delivered sharp criticism of the federal government’s arguments and the wind memo itself, writing that it fails to adequately explain or support such a significant change in course from the agencies’ prior permitting practices.
“Whatever level of explanation is required when deviating from longstanding agency practice, this is not it,” Judge Saris wrote.
“The Court concludes that the Wind Order constitutes a final agency action that is arbitrary and capricious and contrary to law,” she wrote. “Accordingly, the Court allows Plaintiffs’ motions… denies the Agency Defendants’ motion…, and declares unlawful and vacates the Wind Order” in its entirety.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell in a statement Monday called the ruling a “critical victory.”
December 8, 2025 — NOAA Fisheries has announced two new slow zones for right whales, including Cape Cod Bay. The restrictions are in place through December 20th after the whales were discovered last Friday. The other slow zone is east of Ocean City, Maryland, using a buoy that was operated partly by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. […] The post NOAA Fisheries implements slow zone after right whale detection in Cape Cod Bay appeared first on CapeCod.com.
December 4, 2025 — Sixty-two towers. Sixty-two nacelles. One-hundred eighty-six blades.
Those are the pieces that comprise Vineyard Wind, an 800-megawatt offshore wind project nearing completion after more than two years of construction.
By The Light’s accounting, the project has two towers and two nacelles left to ship out from the Port of New Bedford. That leaves the blades — an estimated 33 of which, as of last month, have yet to top some turbines, and an unknown number that may still need to be removed and replaced.
As batches of blades have traveled across the seas, to and from New Bedford, France, and Nova Scotia, and been installed on turbines, the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has continued to investigate what caused one of the blades to fail in July 2024.
In January 2025, the Biden administration ordered Vineyard Wind to remove all blades manufactured at a factory in Gaspé, Quebec, where the broken blade was built. BSEE gave Vineyard Wind permission to finish construction using blades from a different factory in Cherbourg, France.
December 4, 2025 — More than a year after the Biden administration issued the final permit for a pair of proposed offshore wind projects near Massachusetts, the Trump administration is trying to take it back.
On Tuesday, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management filed a motion in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. to “remand,” or reconsider, its approval of the construction and operations plan for the projects, New England Wind 1 and 2. The plan is the last major permit an offshore wind project needs to begin construction.
The motion is the latest move by the Trump administration to target the offshore wind industry in the U.S., and it comes just a few weeks after a federal judge in a different, but similar, case ruled that the government could take a second look at the construction and operations plan it approved for SouthCoast Wind, a proposed wind project also near Massachusetts.
The federal government’s motion to reconsider New England Wind’s permit says its prior approval “may have” failed to account for all of the project’s impacts. The filing cited a relatively new interpretation of the federal law known as the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act that changes the criteria to evaluate offshore wind projects.
“Agencies have inherent authority to reconsider past decisions and to revise or replace them,” the government’s lawyers wrote.
But Kate Sinding Daly, senior vice president for law and policy at the Conservation Law Foundation, said this is not how the permitting process is supposed to work.