Saving Seafood

Committee votes to let states receive more money from offshore drilling

September 14, 2018 — A House committee voted Thursday to increase the money coastal states receive from offshore oil and natural gas drilling off their coasts.

The bill, from Rep. Garrett Graves (R-La.), would give Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama half of the fee and royalty payments that companies give the federal government to drill for oil and gas in a set of new wells in the Gulf of Mexico.

That would be an increase from the current 37.5 percent, which last year amounted to 0.4 percent of the government’s total income from offshore drilling going to Louisiana last year, or $11 million, Graves said.

At a meeting of the House Natural Resources Committee, Graves framed the issue as one of shoring up states’ coasts. All of the money Louisiana gets from offshore drilling goes to coastal resilience, and Graves said his bill would mandate a quarter of the money go for that purpose for all four states.

“We’ve got to stop the stupidity of spending billions of dollars after disasters instead of millions before,” Graves said.

The panel passed the bill by voice vote after an intense debate over whether Gulf states should get special treatment for the drilling that occurs off their shores.

In one exchange, Rep. Raul Grijalva (Ariz.), the panel’s top Democrat, wanted the money to go to all coastal states for resilience, not just the Gulf of Mexico ones.

Read the full story at The Hill

Trump’s Offshore-Drilling Plan Is Roiling Coastal Elections

August 7, 2018 — Carteret County sits in a region of North Carolina known as the Crystal Coast. It’s celebrated for its charming lighthouses, sun-bleached beaches, and relaxed atmosphere. The population is 89.9 percent white and staunchly Republican.

Donald Trump won the county in 2016 with 71 percent of the vote. But he has touched off an insurrection among the GOP faithful here on the issue of offshore drilling, which the county almost universally views as a threat to tourism. In that, Carteret is typical of areas up and down the Eastern Seaboard, where opposition to the Trump administration’s proposed plan to allow offshore drilling in nearly all U.S. coastal waters has become a top issue in the 2018 midterms. While coastal Republicans’ support for Trump remains strong, their opposition to drilling underscores the limits of that support when local pocketbook and quality-of-life issues are at stake.

“We’re very conservative here,” said Tom Kies, the president of the Carteret County Chamber of Commerce. It’s “a very Republican county.” But people are very aware “how important tourism, and the quality of life, is for our market,” he continued. “That really is our lifeblood.”

Read the full story at The Atlantic

Groups sue over offshore drilling expansion in Gulf, will also defend Atlantic

July 18, 2018 — Environmental groups on Tuesday sued the Trump administration over its expansion of offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and said they are prepared to do the same if lease sales are announced for the Atlantic coast.

“This lawsuit is specific to lease sales happening in the Gulf, but we are prepared to defend the Atlantic from offshore drilling as well,” said Maggie Caldwell of New York City based Earthjustice.

The group filed the suit on behalf of the Gulf Restoration Network, the Sierra Club, and the Center for Biological Diversity.

The suit alleges the administration moved to expand drilling to 78 million more acres of the Gulf of Mexico, without fully analyzing the risks to people, wildlife, and the environment.

The lease sales targeted in the suit are the largest ever offered for oil and gas development in U.S. history, the organizations said.

It was in response to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s (BOEM) announcement last week of its next lease sale on August 15.

Read the full story at the Press of Atlantic City

Environmental group reaches out to local businesses in fight against offshore drilling

July 2, 2018 — A group of concerned citizens visited businesses Saturday in Wilmington, Carolina Beach, and Wrightsville Beach asking them to publicly oppose offshore drilling.

The Don’t Drill NC Coalition organized the Coastal Day of Action.

“We have a number of concerned citizens, volunteers that are coming out to help us with our day of action,” said Drew Ball, director of Environment North Carolina.

Ball cited North Carolina’s coastal jobs, tourism economy, and fishing industry as reasons to avoid offshore drilling.

“North Carolina has a lot to lose if this plan moves forward,” said Ball. “(North Carolina) supports well over 30,000 jobs directly because of our clean coast, and we have a huge fishing industry, and a huge tourism industry, and all that would be put at risk if there were offshore drilling. When you drill, you spill, and we know that no matter what.”

Read the full story at WECT

Trump’s plan for the oceans? More business, less protection

June 26, 2018 — Sea levels are rising, fish are chasing warmer waters north, $300 billion worth of goods are coming into or departing from American ports every year. It’s a dynamic time for coastal communities.

But with the stroke of a pen last week, President Donald Trump put the brakes on a comprehensive plan — years in the making — to balance the environmental, recreational and economic interests competing for the future of the oceans surrounding the U.S.

The Trump Administration is presenting a new executive order as a fundamental adjustment away from unnecessary levels of bureaucracy and toward an ocean policy that puts national security, job creation and corporate aspirations above all else.

The shift has been warmly received by fishermen and other business groups. Conservationists, however, are anxious that attitudes about ocean use will regress.

It’s quite a change of direction from the two terms under President Barack Obama.

Commercial fishermen have been strong critics of the previous policy and were happy to see it sink.

John Connelly, president of the seafood industry’s National Fisheries Institute, said in a statement that the Obama plan “excluded the perspective of the men and women who work the water.”

The National Ocean Policy created “additional levels of bureaucracy and uncertainty that threatened to reduce the overall productivity of our industry by forcing small business owners to divert limited resources away from their operations in order to deal with this unnecessary and ambiguous regulatory maze,” said Jim Donofrio, executive director of the Recreational Fishing Alliance, which is based in Bass River.

Garden State Seafood Association executive director Greg DiDomenico told the Press that “it’s safe to say we are encouraged” by Trump’s attitude toward ocean policy.

Read the full story at the Asbury Park Press

 

Suit: Offshore drilling done in absence of required report

June 22, 2018 — Three conservation groups said in a lawsuit filed Thursday that federal wildlife agencies have failed for years to complete required consultations and reporting on the effects that oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico could have on endangered species.

The suit comes more than a decade since the last such report was done, and more than eight years since the huge 2010 BP oil spill, the groups said.

The Gulf Restoration Network, the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity released a copy of their lawsuit as it was being filed in U.S. District Court in Florida. Defendants named are the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The suit says the Endangered Species Act requires those agencies since 2007 to consult with the agencies overseeing Gulf drilling and to publish an opinion on the possible effects of such drilling on endangered species, including various species of whales and sea turtles.

Such consultations and reporting haven’t been conducted since well before the 2010 explosion of the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, a disaster that spilled millions of gallons into the Gulf, the lawsuit says. It added that the result is that hundreds of offshore oil and gas projects have been approved based on outdated information.

The lawsuit seeks an order requiring completion of a consultation in 90 days.

After the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which also killed 11 rig workers, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement decided a new consultation was needed and asked the two agencies to begin work on one in 2010, the suit says.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New Jersey Herald

Delayed seismic testing decision puts energy industry at odds with Trump administration

May 29, 2018 — WASHINGTON — The Trump administration’s long-awaited decision on whether to allow seismic testing for oil and gas beneath the Atlantic Ocean is causing heartburn for the the energy industry, which eagerly awaits the fulfillment of President Donald Trump’s push to allow offshore drilling in U.S. coastal waters.

Five seismic survey companies want federal permission to shoot loud, pressurized air blasts into the ocean every 10 to 12 seconds around-the-clock for months at a time over 330,000 square miles of ocean from Florida to the Delaware bay, in search of fossil fuel deposits beneath the ocean floor.

If approved, the activity would reverse an Obama-era denial of testing permits in the Atlantic Ocean and represent a major advance of Trump’s “America-First Offshore Energy Strategy.”

After the public-comment period ended in July 2017, many stakeholders expected the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to quickly approve the “incidental harassment authorizations” needed to move the permit applications forward.

But more than 10 months later, NOAA, one of two federal agencies that will decide the matter, still hasn’t approved the authorizations. The IHA would allow the seismic testing to harass or injure small numbers of marine mammals, which would otherwise be prohibited under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Read the full story at the Mclatchy DC Bureau

 

Why Alaska Is Crafting a Plan to Fight Climate Change: It’s Impossible to Ignore

May 15, 2018 — WASHINGTON — In the Trump era, it has mainly been blue states that have taken the lead on climate change policy, with liberal strongholds like California and New York setting ambitious goals for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Now, at least one deep-red state could soon join them: Alaska, a major oil and gas producer, is crafting its own plan to address climate change. Ideas under discussion include deep cuts in state emissions by 2025 and a tax on companies that emit carbon dioxide.

While many conservative-leaning states have resisted aggressive climate policies, Alaska is already seeing the dramatic effects of global warming firsthand, making the issue difficult for local politicians to ignore. The solid permafrost that sits beneath many roads, buildings and pipelines is starting to thaw, destabilizing the infrastructure above. At least 31 coastal towns and cities may need to relocate, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, as protective sea ice vanishes and fierce waves erode Alaska’s shores.

“Climate change is affecting Alaskans right now,” wrote Gov. Bill Walker and Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott in a recent op-ed in the Juneau Empire. “To underestimate the risks or rate of climate change is to gamble with our children’s futures and that is not a bet that we are willing to make.”

The state is still finalizing its climate plan. In October, Governor Walker, a former Republican who won election as an independent in 2014, created a task force headed by Lieutenant Governor Mallott that would propose specific policies to reduce emissions and help the state adapt to the impacts of global warming. The recommendations are due by September.

Read the full story at the New York Times

 

Study: Marine Protected Areas Won’t Matter

May 10, 2018 — New research from the University of North Carolina concludes that most marine life in marine protected areas will not be able to tolerate warming ocean temperatures caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

There are 8,236 marine protected areas around the world covering about four percent of the surface of the ocean. They have been established as a haven to protect threatened marine life, like polar bears, penguins and coral reefs, from the effects of fishing and other activities such as oil and gas extraction.

The study found that with continued “business-as-usual” emissions, the protections currently in place won’t matter, because by 2100, warming and reduced oxygen concentration will make marine protected areas uninhabitable by most species currently residing in those areas.

The study predicts that under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 emissions scenario, better known as the “business as usual scenario,” marine protected areas will warm by 2.8 degrees Celsius (or 5 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. Mean sea-surface temperatures within marine protected areas are projected to increase 0.034 degrees Celsius (or 0.061 degrees Fahrenheit) per year.

Read the full story at the Maritime Executive

 

Majority of voters oppose Trump offshore drilling plan: poll

May 8, 2018 — More than half of voters oppose proposed plans by the Trump administration to expand oil and gas drilling off coastal states, according to a poll out Tuesday.

The survey conducted by the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland found that 60 percent of voters surveyed are against the Interior Department’s plan to lift a ban on oil drilling along coastlines and expand drilling around Alaska.

Additionally, 70 percent of respondents supported states’ rights to request a drilling exemption through a waiver, the study found.

Support for lifting the ban on drilling largely fell along party lines. Democrats and independents opposed lifting the ban by 86 and 60 percent, respectively, and similarly supported granting states waiver authority by 86 and 65 percent, respectively. On the other hand, two-thirds of Republicans surveyed supported lifting the offshore drilling ban, with 56 percent of Republicans supporting state waiver rights.

When the study asked respondents who lived in one of the the 15 coastal U.S. states currently requesting an exemption, 88 percent of Democrats approved of their state’s request, as did 50 percent of Republicans.

Read the full story at The Hill