Saving Seafood

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

 

Attorneys general urge offshore drilling plan’s cancellation

February 2, 2018 — The top lawyers for a dozen coastal states want the U.S. Interior Department to cancel the Trump administration’s plan to expand offshore drilling, warning it threatens their maritime economies and natural resources.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and her fellow attorneys general, all Democrats, wrote Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on Thursday about his agency’s proposed five-year oil and gas leasing plan that opens new ocean waters.

“Not only does this irresponsible and careless plan put our state’s jobs and environment at risk, but it shows utter disregard for the will and voices of thousands of local businesses and fishing families,” said Healey in a prepared statement. “My colleagues and I will continue to fight this plan.”

Healey first announced her opposition to the plan in an August 2017 letter to Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. The Northeast Seafood Coalition and the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association agreed with her that the Interior Department’s plan to expand offshore drilling threatens Massachusetts’ $7.3 billion commercial fishing industry — the third largest in the country — and more than 240,000 jobs in the state.

The plan also could devastate the state’s robust recreation and tourism industries, according to Healey, as well harm the state’s coastal environment and protected endangered species, including the Northern Right Whale, which feeds in the waters off of Cape Cod and Nantucket, according to the comment letter. There are only about 460 critically endangered Northern Right Whales remaining worldwide.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

 

Ed Markey: Plan will spur ‘huge fight’ over offshore energy drilling

January 9, 2018 — BOSTON — The state’s environment, tourism and fishing industry could be threatened by President Donald Trump’s plan to open up more coastal areas to offshore drilling, according to U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, who said the proposal puts “nearly every single mile of coastline in the United States in the crosshairs of an oil spill.”

“Nothing is sacred,” Markey told reporters from the Kennedy Federal Building. “All of the United States is going to be open for the oil industry to be able to drill. That is something that the American people will want to have resolved on the floor of the House and Senate, and that is something that I am going to guarantee him that he will see. This is going to be a huge fight across our country.”

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on Thursday announced a proposal that would make more than 90 percent of the national outer continental shelf available for oil and gas exploration. Currently, 94 percent of federal offshore acreage is off-limits, according to the American Petroleum Institute.

The 380-page draft plan includes a note that Gov. Charlie Baker does not “support inclusion of areas adjacent to Massachusetts,” and Attorney General Maura Healey “strongly opposes opening up any of the Atlantic or any other new areas to oil and gas leasing.”

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management estimates there are 89.9 billion barrels of oil and 327.5 trillion cubic feet of gas that have yet to be discovered on the outer continental shelf, including 4.6 billion barrels of oil and 38.2 cubic feet in the Atlantic portion of the shelf.

According to the American Petroleum Institute, Atlantic oil and natural gas development could deliver $51 billion in new government revenue, nearly 280,000 jobs and 1.3 billion barrels of oil equivalent per day for domestic energy production by 2035.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

 

Rep. Bill Keating to file bill to resolve dispute between Chatham and feds

June 17, 2016 — CHATHAM, Mass. — U.S. Rep. William Keating, D-Mass., has agreed to file legislation that town officials hope will end a dispute over who owns and manages the ocean off the Nantucket Sound side of Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge.

“We think, once and for all, it will put to bed any contention about the boundary issue and we can continue as we have for over a hundred years to manage that area,” Chatham Selectman Seth Taylor said Wednesday after he and town manager Jill Goldsmith left a meeting with Keating and his staff.

When it released its draft management plan for the refuge in April 2014, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service claimed it owned more than 717 acres of beach on the Atlantic side that the town believed it owned instead. Service officials also argued the refuge includes waters that fall within what it considers its western boundary.

The Fish & Wildlife Service and the town were able to agree on most of the disputed portions of the management plan. They settled on a boundary on the Atlantic side that returned much of the 717 acres to the town; the service decided to allow almost all of the fishing activities it had originally claimed were detrimental to the protection of shorebirds and wildlife.

But the two sides couldn’t find common ground on the western boundary.

The town and the state contended the legal documents that took the property in 1944 to establish the refuge, and a subsequent wilderness declaration in the 1970s, defined the boundary as the mean low water mark. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey threatened litigation, arguing the refuge never controlled anything below the mean low water mark.

Read the full story in the Cape Cod Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Fishermen need Mass. Attorney General Maura Healey’s help

March 2, 2016 — When touring the North Shore a year and a half ago, then-candidate for attorney general Maura Healey made it a point to mention her family ties to Gloucester, Newburyport and the region’s fishing industry. The implication was that, if elected, fishermen would have a powerful ally on Beacon Hill, or at the very least someone who understood the unique difficulties facing the industry.

Now, Healey is well into her second year as attorney general, and it is time to make good on her promise to protect the industry from federal overreach.

We are talking specifically about the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s at-sea monitoring program, which places observers on fishing vessels to record details of their catch and make sure the federal government’s byzantine regulations are strictly followed.

The most galling aspect of the program, however, is the requirement that fishermen pay for their overseers. By some estimates, the cost could run as high as $710 a trip. Fishermen are already on a razor’s edge; forcing them to pay out and extra several hundred dollars a trip will undoubtedly kill off many of these small businesses for good.

Last week, state Rep. Ann-Margaret Ferrante and state Sen. Bruce Tarr reached out to Healey, asking for her help.

“We request that your office explore all appropriate legal means to support our fishing families and ports through vehicles such as the current pending case,” they wrote in a letter to Healey, referring to a lawsuit filed by fisherman David Goethel in U.S. District Court in New Hampshire aimed at stopping the mandatory monitoring. “We are interested in Mr. Goethel’s plight because his situation is comparable to that of fishermen and Gloucester and the statewide fishing industry.”

Read the full opinion piece at Gloucester Daily Times

Monitor Costs Shift to Fishermen March 1

February 29, 2016 — Cape Ann lawmakers Bruce Tarr and Ann-Margaret Ferrante walked a thin line last week when they sat down and penned a letter to state Attorney General Maura Healey on the issue of at-sea monitoring.

The state Senate minority leader and state representative, respectively, wanted to enlist Healey’s support in the legal campaign to block NOAA Fisheries’ plan to shift the cost of mandated at-sea monitoring (ASM) to groundfish permit holders on March 1 and they knew they were racing the clock.

They also didn’t want to overplay their hand by pressuring Healey to follow a specific course of remedy, such as having Massachusetts become an intervening plaintiff in the ongoing federal lawsuit filed by New Hampshire fisherman David Goethel seeking to block NOAA Fisheries’ plan to transfer the responsibility of funding ASM to the fishermen as of Tuesday.

“We didn’t want to pre-suppose any method of support,” Tarr said. “We just believe that this plan represents such an injustice that it would be a serious mistake not to look at every option and we wanted to make sure the commercial fishing industry is represented.”

So, Tarr and Ferrante carefully worded their letter, asking the state’s senior law enforcement official to explore any available legal avenue for supporting the industry effort that Goethel’s lawsuit has emerged to most poignantly represent.

“We request that your office explore all appropriate legal means to support our fishing families and ports through vehicles such as the current pending case,” they wrote, referring to the Goethel lawsuit that was filed in U.S. District Court in Concord, New Hampshire. “We are interested in Mr. Goethel’s plight because his situation is comparable to that of fishermen in Gloucester and the statewide fishing industry.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times