Saving Seafood

West Coast lawmakers try again for drilling ban

February 10, 2021 — U.S. senators from the West Coast, looking to build on the Biden administration’s pause on new offshore oil leases, are again pushing for a ban on drilling off Washington, Oregon and California.

At the end of January Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, both D-Wash., introduced the “West Coast Ocean Protection Act” to permanently ban offshore drilling in federal waters off the West Coast. Cantwell is a senior member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and in a position to push the measure there.

Murray and Cantwell say their intent is to make permanent an existing moratorium on drill leasing in those federal waters, to prevent a repeat of the Trump administration’s attempt to reopen them for oil and gas exploration.

“The Pacific Ocean provides vital natural resources for Washington state, and offshore drilling puts everything from local jobs and ecosystems at risk,” Murray said in a Jan. 29 joint statement with Cantwell. “We need this permanent ban to safeguard our coastal environment and our state’s economy, including fisheries, outdoor recreation, and so much more.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman

JACQUELINE SAVITZ: A pause on offshore drilling is a good first step. Let’s make it permanent.

February 3, 2021 — President Joe Biden hit the ground sprinting on his first day of office. On day one he rejoined the Paris Agreement, and now he has announced a pause on offshore oil and gas leasing. It’s exciting to hear the president’s plan to return science to policy decision-making, even advancing his science adviser to a cabinet-level position. These encouraging moves will certainly translate to more effective action on climate.

Oil and gas are killing us. Burning fossil fuels is driving climate change, which is causing a wave of extinction and disasters that devastate property and the environment, and cost human lives. But President Biden has committed to aggressively address the climate crisis, which gives me great hope that we can work together to permanently protect our climate and coasts from offshore oil and gas.

Permanently ending new offshore oil and gas leasing in U.S. waters would prevent the release of a catastrophic amount of greenhouse gas emissions, which are driving ever larger and more intense wildfires, hurricanes and floods. A new report from Oceana estimates that permanent protection against offshore drilling would prevent 19 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions and $720 billion in damages to people, property and the environment.

Read the full opinion piece at USA Today

Canadian Government Invests in Research Assessing Impact of Oil on Pacific Salmon

December 17, 2020 — The Government of Canada announced on Tuesday $349,948 in funding will be provided to the University of Guelph for a “two-year research project to evaluate how Coho salmon, in the early stages of life, are impacted when exposed to diluted bitumen (dilbit) – a crude oil found in natural oil sands deposits that is mixed with a lighter diluent.”

The Honourable Bernadette Jordan, Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard announced the funding and explained that the research builds on previous University of Guelph projects looking at impacts dilbit exposure has on salmon.

Read the full story at Seafood News

Lawsuit claims Gulf of Mexico drilling permits violate Endangered Species Act

October 23, 2020 — Environmental groups went to federal court Oct. 21 with a lawsuit claiming the Trump administration is violating the Endangered Species Act by an inadequate interagency consultation on oil and gas operations in the Gulf of Mexico.

The San Francisco-based legal foundation Earthjustice filed the action on behalf of the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth and Turtle Island Restoration Network. The lawsuit attacks an assessment of the hazards that offshore oil and gas drilling and production pose to endangered marine species, issued in March by the National Marine Fisheries Service.

In an earlier 2018 lawsuit filed in a federal court in Florida, Earthjustice and other groups complained NMFS and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had unreasonably delayed developing a new biological opinion – or “BiOp” in the argot of federal bureaucracy – to evaluate impacts as required by the Endangered Species Act.

The law requires certification that government actions – such as permitting offshore drilling – won’t harm endangered species. The last biological opinion was issued in 2007; BP’s Deepwater Horizon accident and oil spill in 2010, with its sweeping environmental impacts and losses of marine life, triggered the process for a reassessment of the dangers.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Suit: Feds ignore risk of huge spills to endangered species

October 22, 2020 — Environmental groups asked a federal court Wednesday to throw out the Trump administration’s assessment of oil and gas activity’s likely effects on endangered species in the Gulf of Mexico, saying it dismisses the chance of another disastrous blowout like the BP spill of 2010.

The National Marine Fisheries Service’s 700-page analysis greatly underestimates both the likely number and size of oil spills, according to the suit filed by Earthjustice for the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, and Turtle Island Restoration Network.

Even though the study was prompted by the 2010 spill, it “essentially pretends the Deepwater Horizon spill never happened — that there was nothing to learn from that disaster,” Earthjustice attorney Chris Eaton said in an interview Tuesday.

Read the full story at The Post and Courier

Mid-Atlantic Seismic Blasts Halted

October 14, 2020 — Oil and gas drilling companies are standing down from seismic testing in the Atlantic Ocean this year, to the relief of environmental groups and wildlife advocates in the Chesapeake Bay region.

The industry said in a status conference before the U.S. District Court in South Carolina that it will not move ahead with testing for oil and gas reserves this year. The current seismic blasting authorizations expire November 30, and renewing them would require another round of environmental review and public comment.

Bay Bulletin first reported two years ago the federal approval for five companies to do seismic surveys in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Maryland and Virginia, as a first step to gas and oil offshore drilling.

Read the full story at the Chesapeake Bay Magazine

Federal government allowing permits for seismic blasting in Atlantic Ocean to expire

October 12, 2020 — All manner of marine life, from plankton to the largest of whales, will be spared from months of nonstop thunderous seismic blasts that could kill or harm them because the oil and gas explorers and the federal government are allowing their permits to expire on Nov. 30 — and it would take at least a year for them to obtain new ones — should they wish to, environmentalists say.

“If you had told me two years ago 2020 would begin and end without any seismic air gun testing I would have been elated; that’s why I’m elated now,” Steve Mashuda, the Seattle-based managing attorney for oceans at Earthjustice, said by telephone.

The San Francisco-based nonprofit is one of several environmental nonprofits that in December 2018 sued in a South Carolina federal court to stop the tests — twice as loud as a jet engine — sought from New Jersey’s Cape May to Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Though New York and New England were not included, the blasts are so powerful they travel thousands of miles. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and a number of other East Coast local, state and federal officials opposed them — the first step in the Trump administration’s initial plan to open the Atlantic Ocean to oil and gas firms.

Read the full story at Newsday

Seismic airgun blasting efforts halted in Atlantic Ocean for now

October 5, 2020 — The oil industry will not pursue seismic airgun blasting to investigate offshore petroleum locations in the Atlantic Ocean because permits cannot be reviewed in time.

The Coastal Conservation League, an environmental organization based in Charleston, South Carolina, announced the news after a status conference on the lawsuit that seeks to halt the underwater blasting.

The blasting, which involves loud pules of compressed air into the water column and deep into the seabed, to find oil and gas formations deep under the ocean floor, can disturb or injure whales, sea turtles, and other marine life, according to the New Jersey-based Clean Ocean Action.

But in the August 22, 2014 edition of “Science Notes,” a newsletter published by the federal government’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, an agency representative wrote that in more than 30 years of air gun use, “there has been no documented scientific evidence of the noise … adversely affecting marine animal populations or coastal communities.”

Read the full story at WHYY

Trump’s SC offshore drilling moratorium doesn’t stop seismic testing, feds say in lawsuit

September 23, 2020 — The federal government said in a court filing Monday that a new Trump administration ban on oil drilling off the south Atlantic coast doesn’t stop companies from requesting to search for oil in those waters.

The case involves two consolidated lawsuits challenging permits issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service that allow seismic testing companies to disturb marine life.

The testing involves shooting air gun blasts at the ocean floor to map whether fossil fuels lie underneath. It has been shown to harm sea life such as whales.

The litigation fell into question briefly when President Donald Trump announced earlier this month he was ordering a 10-year ban on drilling off the coasts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.

Read the full story at The Post and Courier