Saving Seafood

Trump administration announces new set of Section 301 tariffs against major seafood trade partners

June 3, 2026 — The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has announced plans for a new set of sweeping Section 301 tariffs against 60 separate economies.

The USTR said it will impose duties on 59 different countries and the entire European Union for what it calls a failure to enforce prohibitions on the importation of goods produced with forced labor. In its publication to the Federal Register, the USTR said it will propose a tariff rate of between 10 and 12.5 percent depending on the commitments the countries or blocs have made to opposing forced labor.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Trump administration planning to dismantle Ocean Observatories Initiative

June 3, 2026 — The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump is dismantling a deep-ocean observation system put in place over a decade ago, leaving gaps in scientific data that assists in everything from storm forecasting to fishery health.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) consists of six different underwater monitoring arrays that the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) said is the most advanced continuously-operated observing systems in the world. Using hundreds of different instruments, the arrays provide openly-accessible data to oceanographers, researchers, educators, and the public.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

MASSACHUSETTS: It Was Supposed to Be a Lifeline for a Blue-Collar Town. Then Trump Returned.

June 1, 2026 — The dock that launched U.S. offshore wind is mostly empty now. The 200-foot-tall tower pieces that loomed like skyscrapers over a harbor of fishing trawlers are gone. So too are the house-sized gearboxes and turbine blades stretching the length of a soccer field.

The big turbine parts were supposed to represent a new era in a city where fish houses and abandoned factories line the waterfront. They were assembled here, sent out to sea and installed as part of Vineyard Wind, the largest renewable energy project built to-date east of the Mississippi River. All that was left on a recent April day were empty blade racks, a pair of red cranes and three broken blades.

It wasn’t supposed to look like this.

Vineyard Wind was supposed to be the first of many. Instead, it may be the only offshore wind project ever built in New Bedford.

This city of Portuguese, Latino and Cape Verdean residents is ground zero for America’s offshore wind industry, a test case of whether a blue collar fishing town can forge a new economic future by raising massive turbines out at sea.

Read the full article at Politico

Companies join a deep-sea mining rush after Trump executive order, as regulators fast-track permits

May 21, 2026 — In the year since President Donald Trump signed an executive order promising to create a deep-sea mining industry from scratch, businesses have raised millions of dollars from investors, stock prices have soared and federal regulators have raced to fast-track a permitting process.

At least nine companies are in talks with the government for access to seabed minerals, according to an Associated Press review. Sections of the seafloor from American Samoa to Alaska could be auctioned for offshore mining this summer and through the fall.

All the action suggests the U.S. may soon give the green light for companies to commercially mine the seabed — something that’s never been done in international waters.

But a close look at some of the companies involved reveals uncertain track records and histories spattered with legal disputes, while major questions about how the minerals would be processed and refined remain unanswered. Watchers of the nascent industry are skeptical the promised riches will ever materialize.

Read the full article at The Associated Press

MASSACHUSETTS: Port cities try to weather shifting winds

May 21, 2026 — Forty-Two Acres of vacant industrial land — a patchwork of asphalt, weeds, and grass — sit waiting in Salem’s harbor. In the center is a coal power plant, shut down in 2014 after a decade of community activism, and a natural gas plant, retired in 2018. The city identified the lot, roughly 30 football fields in size, to be the site for Salem’s offshore wind terminal, which would be the third in the state after the New Bedford Marine Commerce Terminal opened in 2015 and the city began its phased opening of the Foss Marine Terminal in 2023.

But strong political winds have, at least for now, changed the course for Salem.

For the city’s climate advocates, the prospective terminal represents decades of work toward a cleaner, renewable energy future, one that the state has been putting money and policy behind for years and that has promised to bring thousands of jobs and other community investments. Salem and New Bedford both received millions from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) to develop the sites of retired fossil fuel power plants into terminals that would serve as logistics and operations centers for the construction of offshore wind. But wind projects have long been struggling to get off the ground. During the Biden administration, global supply chain disruption, climbing inflation, and high interest rates drove up costs for developers. The Trump administration’s anti-wind actions — issuing executive orders that block new projects, pausing existing leases, and rescinding grants — drove both cities further from the economic boon they expected.

In New Bedford, the influx of tenants that was hoped for never materialized. In Salem, the plan was to build two berths to receive ships carrying crew and materials for wind projects. But construction is stalled and there’s no start date in sight.

“We expected a lot of jobs, like a lot of life-changing … career sustainable jobs that were going to come from this, and that’s what hasn’t materialized,” said Sam Lambert, deputy chapter director for the Sierra Club’s Massachusetts’ chapter, of the Salem terminal and the offshore wind projects it might have supported.

In New Bedford, the terminal has had to shift its vision. It’s leaning on general cargo and marine construction for additional revenue.

“We were operating under a plan where, when the first [wind farm] gets first electricity, it would start doing its operation and maintenance work out of our facility,” said Andrew Saunders, president of the New Bedford Foss Marine Terminal. But with the current political climate, “the terminal has had to pivot in order to generate revenue, and figure out something of a different identity.”

Read the full article at Commonwealth Beacon

Fishermen could soon be allowed to hunt more sharks under Trump team proposal

May 20, 2026 — Atlantic fishermen could be allowed to catch even more sharks, if the Trump administration’s newly proposed updates to fishing regulations are approved.

The regulations would impact protections for the endangered blacknose shark, which has seen its population cut by more than half over the last quarter of a century. They would also raise the number of sharks recreational fishermen can catch per species and alter how big the sharks that are caught need to be.

The proposed changes are necessary to make it easier for recreational and commercial fishermen in the Atlantic Ocean by reducing the shark population, the administration says.

Read the full article at The Independent

A new mega-utility is at ground zero for AI. Here’s what could happen.

May 19, 2026 — Few energy companies have navigated the Trump era like NextEra Energy.

The White House selected the Florida-based power giant to build a pair of massive natural gas plants in Pennsylvania and Texas in March, as part of a wider $550 billion trade deal with Japan. But even as NextEra embraced President Donald Trump’s call for more gas, its executives made clear during their quarterly appearances before financial analysts that they believed renewables and batteries are the quickest ways to meet soaring energy demands from data centers.

Now, NextEra’s proposed $67 billion merger with Virginia-based Dominion Energy stands to test those competing strategies on the front lines of artificial intelligence.

Read the full article at E&E News

Trump administration asks NEFMC to kill rule forcing herring fishers to pay for at-sea monitors

May 14, 2026 — The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has asked the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC) to abandon a rule forcing commercial herring fishers to pay for at-sea monitors out of pocket.

“After careful consideration, we have determined that an action removing Atlantic herring monitoring requirements […] may be warranted to remove unused provisions that are not achieving their intended goals and, thereby, reduce regulatory burdens on Atlantic herring fishery participants,” NOAA Fisheries Assistant Administrator Eugenio Piñeiro Soler said in a 1 May letter to the council. “Because the herring [industry-funded monitor] program imposes costs on [NOAA Fisheries] as well as the herring industry itself in order to be effectively implemented, in the face of declining resources and the need to prioritize our activities to support the Administration’s goals and objectives of Executive Order 14276, it is unlikely that [NOAA Fisheries] will have the resources necessary to support this program.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Conservationists ask to defend US right whale speed rule in court

May 14, 2026 — A group of conservation organizations have filed a request to defend vessel speed limits designed to protect North Atlantic right whales from a legal challenge, questioning U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration’s willingness to fully defend the regulation in court.

“With lawmakers and the Trump administration trying to delay right whale safeguards for another decade, preserving the Vessel Speed Rule is more important than ever,” Conservation Law Foundation Senior Counsel Erica Fuller said in a release. “This rule is the only one that protects the few remaining right whales from vessel strikes. Weakening it would be a reckless abandonment of our responsibility to protect endangered marine life and the health of our oceans for generations to come.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource