Saving Seafood

Judge denies US Wind request to halt Trump administration attacks

December 18, 2025 — A federal judge has declined to issue an injunction that would have protected US Wind from what it says are Trump administration attempts to kill its planned wind farm off Ocean City, for which it already has permits.

U.S. District Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher in Baltimore noted in her decision — handed down Tuesday — that US Wind technically could move forward with constructing its wind farm off of Delmarva.

Even though President Donald Trump’s (R) administration has announced its intention to reevaluate the crucial Construction and Operations Plan (COP) approval issued to US Wind during the waning days of President Joe Biden’s (D) administration, it has not actually revoked the permit, Gallagher wrote in her ruling.

In a previous decision, Gallagher preliminarily rejected a request from the Trump administration to remand the permit back to the U.S. Department of the Interior for reconsideration. Gallagher ruled that the government needed to present more information in order for her to make a ruling. But she allowed the department to carry on with any “internal review” of the permit, as desired.

Read the full article at Maryland Matters

Ecosystem shifts, glacial flooding and ‘rusting rivers’ among Alaska impacts in Arctic report

December 17, 2025 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued its annual Arctic Report Card on Tuesday, which documents the way rising temperatures, diminished ice, thawing permafrost, melting glaciers and vegetation shifts are transforming the region and affecting its people. The agency has released the report for 20 years as a way to track changes in the Arctic.

“The Arctic continues to warm faster than the global average, with the 10 years that comprise the last decade marking the 10 warmest years on record,” Steve Thur, NOAA’s acting administrator for oceanic and atmospheric research and the agency’s acting chief scientist, said at a news conference Tuesday.

The report card is a peer-reviewed collaboration of more than 100 scientists from 13 countries, with numerous coauthors from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. It was officially released at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in New Orleans, where Thur and other officials held the news conference.

The report is the first under the second Trump administration, at a time when the federal government’s commitment to documenting Arctic climate change has diminished: The president has repeatedly called climate change a hoax and federal departments are cancelling climate change-related research and projects, as well as scrubbing climate information from public view.

Under directives from the Trump administration, NOAA no longer provides information that the National Snow and Ice Data Center once used to monitor sea ice and snow cover, for example. The Colorado-based center now relies on satellite information from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency for its sea ice reports, and it has reduced its analysis.

Read the full article at Alaska Beacon

Chevron’s demise could snarl Trump environmental agenda

December 16, 2025 — A new slate of environmental rollbacks from the Trump administration are poised to serve as early tests of a recent Supreme Court ruling that limited federal agencies’ power to defend their rules against legal attack.

Over the last few weeks, EPA and the Interior Department have floated rescissions of protections for federal waters, vulnerable species and climate change.

Each proposal presents a dramatic change in position from earlier regulations, and in the absence of Chevron deference — which gave agencies the benefit of the doubt when statutes are unclear — the Trump administration will have to make the case that its approach is the best interpretation of federal law.

Read the full article at E&E News

MARYLAND: Maryland Calls for Offshore Wind Proposals Days After Court Victory

December 15, 2025 — The State of Maryland celebrated the victory in the courts against the Trump administration’s order halting licensing for wind energy projects by launching a new call for Power Purchase Agreements (PPA) from the licensed developers. The state reiterated its commitment to wind energy despite the ongoing struggles with federal regulators.

Maryland published the details of the call open to leaseholders. The state will be conducting an information conference this upcoming week. Proposals are due by January 16.

At the beginning of the week, the 17 states and the District of Columbia, which had filed a complaint in May, won a court order that vacated Donald Trump’s Executive Order halting sales and licensing for the wind power industry. The January order had directed federal agencies to pause their effort and to begin an open-ended review of the process. The administration argues that wind power was unfairly advantaged by the Biden administration and that licensing was rushed without full consideration of the impact of the projects.

A U.S. District Court Judge, however, found that the order was “arbitrary and capricious.” U.S. District Court Judge Patti Saris in Massachusetts found that the Executive Order violated the Administrative Procedures Act that governs how agencies administer programs.

Read the full article at The Maritime Executive

Awaiting Supreme Court decision, more US seafood suppliers file tariff lawsuits

December 12, 2025 — U.S. seafood import firms Mark Foods and Bristol Seafood have filed lawsuits over U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff program, following the lead of fellow seafood companies Netuno USA and Bumble Bee.

New York City, New York, U.S.A.-based Mark Foods and Portland, Maine, U.S.A.-based Bristol Seafood filed separate lawsuits against the U.S. government, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott in the U.S. Court of International Trade.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

ALASKA: Alaska Natives’ fight for fishing rights finds an ally in Trump team

December 12, 2025 — The Trump administration is now siding with Alaskan Natives and opposing the state in a long-running fight about subsistence fishing rights and the high-stakes meaning of the phrase “public lands.”

In a legal brief filed Tuesday, Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the Supreme Court to disregard the state of Alaska’s appeal of a lower court’s decision upholding an expansive view of the Native fishing claims. Sauer’s brief cited the power of precedent, noting previous rejections of efforts to limit the subsistence fishing rights granted under a 1980 federal law.

“Given the length of time this interpretation has been in effect, and Congress’s continuing authority to modify the current framework if it chooses to do so, there is no sound reason for the court to revisit the status quo at this juncture,” the solicitor general’s brief stated.

Read the full article at E&E News

MASSACHUSETTS: Federal court ruling restart blocked MA offshore wind. ‘No question’

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.

Read the full article at Cape Cod Times

‘Windmills are a disgrace’: Inside Trump’s war against a growing U.S. industry

December 11, 2025 — The day after President Donald Trump halted construction of a $5 billion wind project off the New York coast, the nation’s top offshore wind developers gathered for a regularly scheduled strategy session in Washington.

The mid-April meeting quickly became heated.

Michael Brown, an outspoken Scotsman who leads the developer Ocean Winds, expressed anger that the industry’s main trade association would not join a blue-state lawsuit challenging Trump’s freeze on offshore wind permitting. American Clean Power Association CEO Jason Grumet pushed back, saying the industry should preserve its political capital at a time when Congress was gearing up to eliminate former President Joe Biden’s clean energy tax credits.

The pair “were shouting at one another,” said one person at the meeting, who like most industry figures quoted in this story was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive business and political matters. Another attendee described it as “definitely contentious.” A third called it one of several confrontations among industry members over how to respond to Trump.

“I can’t even believe that that just happened,” one attendee recalled thinking.

In the end, the clean power group sat out the suit. But Trump’s assaults on wind only accelerated.

Read the full article at Politico

In a Baltimore courtroom, US Wind fights for its life against the Trump administration

December 11, 2025 — Offshore wind company US Wind battled the Trump administration in a Baltimore courtroom Wednesday, defending its Maryland project against the government’s plans to revoke and reconsider a construction permit issued under President Joe Biden (D).

For US Wind, the threat is existential, attorneys said Wednesday. Not only would the government’s revocation of the permit threaten to upend the project along Ocean City’s coast, it also could send the entire company heading toward bankruptcy.

“We’re not there yet,” US Wind CEO Jeff Grybowski said Tuesday outside the U.S. District Courthouse. “We’re in this fight because we made a promise to Maryland that we’re going to build the biggest renewable energy project in the state’s history.”

US Wind’s project is the closest to development along the Delmarva coast. Other companies — Ørsted and Equinor — have leases offshore, but do not have approved construction plans, like US Wind. But having an approved permit did not stop the Trump administration from trying to stop the project — one of a number of offshore wind projects that have been targeted, including some where stop-work orders have stalled construction.

Wednesday’s hearing is the latest twist in a case that began with the parties in entirely different roles. It began in October 2024, when Ocean City challenged the Biden administration’s approval of the permit, called a Construction and Operations Plan, or COP.

The Interior Department initially defended its issuance of the permit. But it reversed course after President Donald Trump (R) took office this year, and in September it asked U.S. District Court Judge Stephanie Gallagher to remand the permit back to the agency for reconsideration, saying it was not properly evaluated under Biden.

Read the full article at Maryland Matters

Federal judge throws out Trump order blocking development of wind energy

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.

Read the full article at ABC News