Saving Seafood

Top Natural Resources Republican asks Haaland for details on national monuments

March 29, 2021 — Rep. Bruce Westerman (Ark.), the top Republican on the House Natural Resources Committee, requested further information Monday from Interior Secretary Deb Haaland on the department’s review of the boundaries and protections of national monuments.

The Trump administration reduced the boundaries of two Utah sites, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.

Biden in January ordered a review of the boundaries with a report of its findings issued within 60 days. However, the department has since announced it will publish the report after Haaland completes a visit to the monuments in April, after the 60-day window.

“While the planned visit to Utah, as well as reports of DOI [Department of the Interior] aides meeting with stakeholders, are encouraging steps, many matters remain unclear. For example, there is uncertainty whether DOI plans to initiate a formal, public comment period and how local support for the Trump administration’s decision will factor into future analysis,” Westerman wrote.

Read the full story at The Hill

Deb Haaland Becomes First Native American Cabinet Secretary

March 16, 2021 — Representative Deb Haaland of New Mexico made history on Monday when the Senate confirmed her as President Biden’s secretary of the Interior, making her the first Native American to lead a cabinet agency.

Ms. Haaland in 2018 became one of the first two Native American women elected to the House. But her new position is particularly redolent of history because the department she now leads has spent much of its history abusing or neglecting America’s Indigenous people.

Beyond the Interior Department’s responsibility for the well-being of the nation’s 1.9 million Native people, it oversees about 500 million acres of public land, federal waters off the United States coastline, a huge system of dams and reservoirs across the Western United States and the protection of thousands of endangered species.

“A voice like mine has never been a Cabinet secretary or at the head of the Department of Interior,” she wrote on Twitter before the vote. “Growing up in my mother’s Pueblo household made me fierce. I’ll be fierce for all of us, our planet, and all of our protected land.”

Read the full story at The New York Times

NATIONAL LAW REVIEW: Expectations for Offshore Wind Under the Biden Administration

March 11, 2021 — President Joe Biden’s arrival at the White House in January was, as customary for any new executive branch leader, met by outsized expectations on the part of supporters and detractors alike. Among the countless areas of public policy set to be affected by the new administration, perhaps no one issue is more anticipated to be in play than energy and environmental policy.

The heightened set of expectations around energy policy began with the campaign, when Team Biden consistently placed climate change issues among its leading priorities — a trend that noticeably continued with Cabinet picks, as nominees for agencies from Defense to Transportation to Treasury cited climate considerations as key factors affecting their respective portfolios. On January 27, 2021, shortly after taking office, the Biden administration released a series of executive actions that included a stated goal of reaching a “carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035.”

Perhaps no single industry would be more critical to the realization of this far-reaching carbon-free goal than offshore wind, which has emerged in the United States over the past several years as a potentially game-changing source of clean energy generation, based on its earlier-moving success in Europe and elsewhere. In fact, along the country’s populous coastal areas, where fifty three percent of US residents reside, offshore wind presents the most viable option to build up renewable energy resources in the foreseeable future.

Read the full story at the National Law Review

Saving Seafood Statement on President Biden’s National Monuments Order

January 22, 2021 — Saving Seafood members believe that the lack of benefit from a prohibition on commercial fishing in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Monument, the harm to domestic sustainable seafood production and coastal communities, the lack of scientific evidence demonstrating any harm from decades of commercial fishing in the region, and the inherent unfairness of the Obama administration’s decision to ban commercial harvesting while permitting recreational fishing have already been well-documented in the press and reviewed by appropriate government agencies.

However, we appreciate that President Biden has requested a review of the Trump administration’s actions on the monument rather than issuing an immediate reversal. Our members look forward to discussing these issues with Rep. Deb Haaland as soon as she is confirmed as Interior Secretary, just as we met with Secretary Ryan Zinke and Secretary David Bernhardt.

Contrary to the dramatic tone of some press releases and online campaigns from conservation groups, the Trump administration action last June did nothing more than create parity between recreational and commercial fishing in the monument, allowing both recreational and commercial fishermen to harvest sustainably in accordance with the Magnuson-Stevens Act. The Magnuson-Stevens Act has been hailed by U.S. conservation groups and by international bodies as one of the most successful laws in the world for managing fisheries responsibly and sustainably.

Sustainable fishing has taken place in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts area for decades. Conservation groups and proponents of the monument have described the area where fishing has taken place as “pristine.” There is no evidence that commercial fishing has ever damaged these canyons and seamounts or the corals and other marine life that exist there.

Our members have worked diligently with officials and members of Congress on both sides of the aisle since secret proposals for an Atlantic Marine Monument were revealed in emails between conservation groups and former Obama administration officials through a public records request in 2015.

The region now encompassed by the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Monument is important to the offshore lobster, red crab, and swordfish and tuna fisheries. And displacement of the offshore lobster fishery from their historic location would likely harm the highly successful and sustainable Atlantic scallop industry. We appreciated that the Obama administration recognized that an immediate closure would have serious negative consequences to the red crab and offshore lobster fisheries, and were grateful for the seven-year extension which allowed those fisheries to continue to operate. Unfortunately, no such extension was granted to commercial swordfish and tuna fishermen, who were harmed from the time the closure went into effect until last summer when parity and fairness were restored.

President Biden has vowed to make science a central theme of his administration. In an online briefing introducing his team of top five science advisors before the inauguration, he said, “As president, I’ll pay great attention” to science and scientists.

As long as the review ordered by President Biden is conducted fairly and honestly, and in accordance with science and data, we believe the results should be to continue to allow sustainable fishing, both commercial and recreational, under the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

CHRIS MCCARTHY: Is Vineyard Wind Dead or Just Playing Dead?

December 17, 2020 — The New Bedford fishing industry is celebrating the announcement that Vineyard Wind has withdrawn from the federal permitting process and the process has ended.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, a part of the Department of the Interior, issued a statement on Tuesday, December 15, that finalizes the end of the permitting process to build an 800-megawatt wind energy turbine off of the coast of Massachusetts.

Because Vineyard Wind withdrew from the process on December 1, 2020, the permitting process “is no longer necessary and the process is hereby terminated.”

Termination of the process “is effective immediately” and that exact verbiage is used in the letter to the government by Vineyard Wind and by the government in its announcement.

Read the full story at WBSM

Biden’s administration should charge up the offshore wind industry

November 23, 2020 — Few industries stand to benefit more from the Biden administration’s arrival than clean energy, and the nascent offshore wind sector in New England could get a long-awaited boost as a result.

So far, construction has yet to start on any major offshore wind farm in the United States, as projects before the Trump administration were mired in permitting delays. Now, with a sympathetic ally in the White House, the floodgates could be poised to open.

President-elect Joe Biden has set aggressive targets to reduce greenhouse gases, by, for example, rejoining the Paris climate accord, which Trump abandoned, and pushing the electric-power sector to be carbon-free by 2035. Those goals will be tough to pull off without offshore wind.

“You’re poised for a big explosion of offshore wind growth,” said Theodore Paradise, a senior vice president at the power line developer Anbaric, in Wakefield.

Industry executives hope a Biden-controlled Department of the Interior will ease the permitting bottleneck. Equally important: restarting auctions for offshore zones that have apparently been on hold under the current Interior secretary, David Bernhardt.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

RI’s wind-farm plan poised to advance in ’21

November 19, 2020 — Much was made of the Raimondo administration’s selection in 2018 of a proposal for a massive offshore wind farm off the Rhode Island coast that would power as much as a quarter of the state’s electric load.

The project, known as Revolution Wind, cleared a key hurdle a year later when state regulators approved a contract for the wind farm to sell power to National Grid, Rhode Island’s dominant electric utility. And developers Orsted and Eversource Energy would get another boost when Connecticut also agreed to buy power from the wind farm, a move that nearly doubled the size of the project to 704 megawatts.

But since those very big and very public milestones, things have been relatively quiet for a project that could cost more than $2 billion to build.

The paucity of action is largely due to a hold-up in the federal permitting process for offshore wind projects amid concerns raised by commercial fishermen that arrays of towering turbines off the southern New England coast would interfere with fishing activities.

But a Biden presidency is expected to boost renewables overall, and a decision could come in a matter of weeks for the benchmark Vineyard Wind project, the first offshore wind farm to go before the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. A favorable ruling on the proposal could break the logjam for Revolution Wind and other projects.

Read the full story at the Providence Journal

BOEM pushes back final findings on Vineyard Wind

November 16, 2020 — A sweeping environmental review of the Vineyard Wind offshore wind project is now tracking to be finalized Jan. 15, as the federal Bureau of Offshore Energy Management completes its review of public comments.

BOEM received more than 13,000 comments on its Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for Vineyard Wind, a planned 800-megawatt turbine array off southern New England, according to an agency spokesperson.

The final EIS is to be published Dec. 11, with the agency issuing its final record of decision Jan. 15 – a month’s delay for the report long-waited by the offshore wind supporters and its critics alike.

The second BOEM study was ordered up by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt in August 2019, after the National Marine Fisheries Service Greater Atlantic regional office refused to sign off on the first one. The supplemental study also looked at potential cumulative impacts of Vineyard Wind and 14 other potential wind projects now at various stages off the East Coast.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

World’s Biggest Offshore-Wind Company Sees U.S. Projects Lagging

October 29, 2020 — Orsted A/S, the world’s biggest offshore wind developer, expects four of its projects constituting about 2.8 gigawatts to be delayed beyond the expected 2023 and 2024 construction years, according to its interim financial report. Orsted’s explanation: it’s still waiting for clarity on the projects’ federal permitting process.

“We had expected to have received the notices of intent for the most progressed projects, but we can now see that will not happen before the election,” said Marianne Wiinholt, Orsted’s chief financial officer, on a call with reporters Wednesday. “We have to stand still for a period.”

The delay comes as offshore-wind proponents warn that limited resources at the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management are constraining development. But funding decisions — including whether to hire more staff to work through a backlog of wind project applications — fall to Congress, not the U.S. Interior Department agency.

Read the full story at MSN

Democrats push expansion of offshore wind, block offshore drilling with ocean energy bill

October 21, 2020 — A new bill from House Democrats turns to the oceans as a way to fight climate change, proposing to expand offshore wind while barring drilling along America’s coasts.

The more than 300-page legislation is broadly billed as a “blue carbon” bill — a way to harvest clean energy while protecting fisheries and resources like marshes and wetlands that can store carbon and protect eroding shorelines.

The Ocean Based Climate Solutions Act, introduced Tuesday, comes as the ocean is rapidly warming and acidifying, a result of climate change and absorbing carbon from the atmosphere.

The bill directs the Department of the Interior to up the number of permits for offshore wind projects, where higher wind speeds allow windmills to generate more electricity than they do on land.

The bill also repackages some measures already before the House, such as a pledge to conserve 30 percent of oceans by 2030 and an approved measure to bar offshore drilling along both coasts that has failed to advance in the Senate.

Read the full story at The Hill