Saving Seafood

White House outlines priorities on oil and gas, offshore carbon storage

September 8, 2025 — The White House’s regulatory agenda landed Thursday, solidifying plans for rules that could boost the oil and gas industry and laying out a timeline for offshore carbon storage regulations.

The spring Unified Agenda offers the latest look at the Trump administration’s efforts to expand domestic energy production — while not providing a deadline for standards for carbon dioxide pipelines.

During the first seven-plus months of the Trump administration, officials have focused on jettisoning initiatives advanced under former President Joe Biden that sought to impose more requirements on fossil fuel businesses.

Read the full article at E&E News

White House Orders Agencies to Escalate Fight Against Offshore Wind

September 4, 2025 — The White House has taken the extraordinary step of instructing a half-dozen agencies to draft plans to thwart the country’s offshore wind industry as it intensifies its governmentwide attack on a source of renewable energy that President Trump has criticized as ugly, expensive and inefficient.

Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, and Stephen Miller, a senior White House adviser, are leading the effort, according to two people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.

Agencies that typically have little to do with offshore wind power have been drawn into the effort, the two people said. At the Health and Human Services Department, for instance, officials are studying whether wind turbines are emitting electromagnetic fields that could harm human health. And the Defense Department is probing whether the projects could pose risks to national security.

Last week Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, said he was working with Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, Chris Wright, the energy secretary, and Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, as part of a “departmental coalition team” to investigate the risks from offshore wind farms.

Read the full article at The New York Times

Trump halts work on New England offshore wind project that’s nearly complete

August 25, 2025 — The Trump administration halted construction on a nearly complete offshore wind project near Rhode Island as the White House continues to attack the battered U.S. offshore wind industry that scientists say is crucial to the urgent fight against climate change.

Danish wind farm developer Orsted says the Revolution Wind project is about 80% complete, with 45 out of its 65 turbines already installed.

Despite that progress — and the fact that the project had cleared years of federal and state reviews — the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management issued the order Friday, saying the federal government needs to review the project and “address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States.”

It did not specify what the national security concerns are.

President Donald Trump has made sweeping strides to prioritize fossil fuels and hinder renewable energy projects. Trump recently called wind and solar power “THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY!” in a social media post and vowed not to approve wind or “farmer destroying Solar” projects. “The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!” he wrote on his Truth Social site this week.

Read the full article at the Associated Press

Trump administration officially proposes drastic cuts to NOAA, targeting climate-related research

May 5, 2025 — The White House has released its official “skinny budget” for fiscal year 2026, which outlines drastic cuts to NOAA and targets climate-related programs.

“For decades, the biggest complaint about the federal budget was wasteful spending and bloated bureaucracy,” U.S. Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought said in a statement. “But, over the last four years, government spending aggressively turned against the American people and trillions of our dollars were used to fund cultural Marxism, radical Green New Scams, and even our own invasion. No agency was spared in the Left’s taxpayer-funded cultural revolution.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

MAINE: Lobster industry hails executive order easing fishery regulations

April 22, 2025 — Lobster trade associations in Maine are hailing an executive order from the White House that would ease or eliminate regulations on seafood fisheries.

The Maine Lobstermen’s Association “has been fighting government overregulation for years and won a historic court case that challenged draconian whale rules taking a big step forward in ending this abuse of power,” said Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association. The executive order “recognizes the challenges our fishing families and communities face and we appreciate the commitment to reduce burdensome regulations and strengthen the competitiveness of American seafood.”

“Maine fishermen have been supporting Maine’s economy for generations,” said Virginia Olsen, a lobster fisherman and director of the Maine Lobstering Union.

Read the full story at Mainebiz

White House memo rescinds freeze on federal funding that could have hit programs benefitting seafood

January 30, 2025 — The White House has rescinded a two-page memo issued by the Trump administration that called for a broad pause in federal funding – a move which would have halted potentially USD 3 trillion (EUR 2.8 trillion) in funding.

A memo released by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) called for a “temporary pause of agency grant, loan, and other financial assistance programs” which would have taken effect at 5 p.m. EST 28 January. The memo said it was meant to impact programs that may have been implicated by Trump’s earlier executive orders, “including but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

White House announces US strategies for sustainable ocean management

June 8,2024 — The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has issued a trio of new federal strategies for sustainable ocean development.

“President Biden has been leading the most ambitious climate and conservation agenda in history while accelerating locally led conservation efforts, creating good-paying jobs, and enhancing coastal community resilience to the effects of climate change,” White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Brenda Mallory said. “The reports announced help us better understand how to achieve our shared conservation and ecosystem restoration goals and integrate climate action and environmental justice into a sustainable ocean economy.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Conservation groups ask White House to take over SIMP review

February 20, 2024 — A dozen conservation groups penned a letter to the White House asking for the Executive Office of the President to take over a review of the Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) that was initiated by NOAA Fisheries late last year.

NOAA Fisheries terminated its plans for a limited expansion of SIMP – a government program designed to crack down on illegal, unreported, or unregulated (IUU) fishing – late last year in response to public input. NOAA’s expansion would have added new species to the program, which currently covers 13 species groups, but conservation groups heavily criticized the action for not being more ambitious and expanding the program to all imported seafood species.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Offshore wind industry boosted as New England governors team up with Biden

June 23, 2022 — The White House is launching a formal partnership with 11 East Coast governors to boost the growing offshore wind industry, a key element of President Joe Biden’s plan for climate change.

At a White House meeting on Thursday, Biden administration officials will meet with governors and labor leaders to announce commitments to expand important parts of the offshore industry, including manufacturing facilities, ports and workforce training and development.

The partnership comprises governors of both parties from Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

In working with states and the private sector, the White House said it will “provide Americans with cleaner and cheaper energy, create good-paying jobs and invest billions in new American energy supply chains,” including construction of wind turbines, shipbuilding and servicing.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

Offshore wind grid woes may be worse than previously thought

December 7, 2021 — Experts are warning that the challenge of connecting large amounts of offshore wind to an aging onshore grid may be much larger than initially realized.

That’s because offshore wind will need to grow very big, very fast to decarbonize the grid, they say.

The White House has given a big boost to the burgeoning sector with its pledge to facilitate putting 30 gigawatts of offshore wind in the water by 2030 as part of a broader plan to decarbonize the economy by midcentury.

To reach the 2050 target, however, offshore wind would need to swell to 300 GW on the East Coast alone, said Eric Hines, a civil and environmental engineering expert at Tufts University, during an offshore wind panel hosted by Resources for the Future last week.

Hines is not alone in his assessment. While the Biden administration was lauded by industry and activists for the ambitious 30-GW target — which would be a 7,000 percent increase in offshore wind power from today — many academics crunching numbers conclude that the level of emissions cuts called for by Biden would require a lot more power.

A Princeton University study last year estimated that the United States may need to triple its transmission to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, for example.

Read the full story at E&E News