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In the labyrinthine organizational chart of the U.S. government, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sits conspicuously within the portfolio of the Department of Commerce. Ocean research and weather monitoring have clear economic stakes, of course, but the responsibilities of the science-oriented agency — targeted for dismantling by the Trump administration for allegedly instigating “climate change alarm” — often seem better suited to the Department of the Interior, or perhaps nestled within the Environmental Protection Agency.
That is, until you start talking about the fisheries.
The United States is the world’s sixth-largest producer of wild-caught seafood, with the fishing industry supporting at least 2.3 million domestic jobs and generating around $321 billion in annual sales. After the National Weather Service, NOAA’s Marine Fisheries Service is the agency’s biggest arm, employing around 4,200 of the roughly 13,000 people who worked at NOAA before Elon Musk’s efficiency layoffs. The NMFS (as it’s known in the acronym-heavy parlance of NOAA) is tasked with managing, conserving, and protecting the nation’s fishing resources and the billions of pounds of domestic seafood harvested annually, along with state departments of natural resources and the Food and Drug Administration.
But like every other line office at NOAA, NMFS now faces cuts of up to 20% of its payroll, which could reduce its services and pass on unpleasant repercussions to seafood-loving Americans. At NOAA Fisheries’ offices in Narragansett, Rhode Island, and Woods Hole, Massachusetts — the latter being the oldest marine research station in the country — at least 20 staff members have already been laid off, The New Bedford Light reports. Though Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick claimed in his confirmation hearing that it was not his intent to “dismantle” the agency, people all over the climate science and forecasting communities fear that the cuts are effectively doing exactly that. (NOAA declined to comment for this story, citing long-standing practice against discussing internal personnel and management matters.)
“These actions are not the strategic moves of a government looking out for its populace,” Rick Spinrad, the NOAA administrator under President Joe Biden, said in a recent press call hosted by Washington Senator Patty Murray. “They are the unnecessary and malicious acts of a shambolic administration.”
Not all fisherpeople necessarily welcome NOAA into their lives, however. Many fishing communities around the U.S. have long felt neglected by the government, since wild-caught seafood isn’t eligible for traditional farming grants from the Department of Agriculture and it doesn’t qualify for the economic assistance directed toward domestic aquaculture, either. The problem is particularly acute in the case of shrimp, Americans’ favorite seafood, which is eaten by nearly half of the households in the country. Wild-caught shrimp is often more sustainable than domestically farmed shrimp, the latter of which is almost nonexistent, making up less than 1% of what’s on the market in the U.S. But American shrimpers face intense market pressures from the glut of farmed and often illegal foreign imports that make up 90% of the shrimp for sale in stores and restaurants, with little obvious intervention from federal monitors at NOAA or the FDA.
“We’re like, ‘Yeah, kick them all out, burn it down, start fresh,’” Bryan Jones, the vice president of the South Carolina Shrimpers Association and a director of the United States Shrimpers Coalition, told me of he and his colleagues’ frustration with the agency’s priorities. “The entire seafood industry would like to see a mindset shift. What is the purpose of NOAA? Why do they exist?”
Though NMFS performs many functions, perhaps its most important is managing and conserving the nation’s fisheries, the geographic regions where particular stocks of fish are harvested commercially (for example, the Alaska pollock fishery is the nation’s largest commercial fishery, valued at $483.5 million). The agency hires observers to record what’s caught and discarded aboard commercial fishing boats. That data is then used to set quotas on how much of the given population can be harvested in a season, determined in collaboration with private industry partners at the nation’s eight regional fishery management councils. NOAA also prescribes mandatory precautions, such as the use of “turtle excluder devices” in cases where bycatch is a concern, like shrimping.
Though Jones spoke highly of all the individuals he collaborates with at NOAA, the behemoth agency can also move at what feels like a glacial pace. In 2018, for example, a winter freeze decimated the white shrimp stock in Charleston harbor, triggering $1 million in federal disaster relief for the affected shrimpers. But almost seven years later, much of that emergency money still hasn’t been distributed by NOAA. And even that amount was still far short of the $2 million in requests made by the Lowcountry shrimpers.
But there are also stark counterexamples of what can happen to fisheries when the data collected by NOAA falters or degrades, as is likely to happen if the layoffs continue apace. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic suspended NOAA’s annual Bering Sea bottom trawl survey, leading to gaps in the data about the snow crab population. Then, in 2021, following a marine heat wave, the snow crab fishery collapsed, meaning its population saw a decline of more than 90% and was too small to sustain a harvest. “Consequently, we don’t have a good idea of what [the snow crab] population looked like the year prior, in 2020, and we need that type of data to know how many fish and crabs we can catch each year, where the populations are going as the oceans change, and to keep track of environmental trends,” Rebecca Howard, a former research fish biologist at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle who NOAA laid off, said on the virtual press call with Spinrad and Murray.
For much of the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. fisheries were not in a good state; overfishing caused the populations of many of the country’s most iconic fish stocks, including flounder and cod, to collapse. Stricter limits on overfished stocks have allowed populations to recover in recent years. Today, the U.S. can boast of having “the best-managed fisheries in the world,” Sally Yozell, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Oceans at NOAA, told me. “And there was a lot of pain that went into getting to that point,” she said. “It took a lot of science and a lot of pain by the fishermen,” who weren’t allowed to harvest certain species during the recovery efforts. Today, the agency is involved in managing more than 400 fish stocks.
But Yozell also pointed out that it is the balance between commerce and science that is crucial. “It’s not fair to say to a fisherman, ‘Okay, you go and guard your own hen house,’” she added. “I mean, they’ll fish as much as they can — and why not? It’s in their nature. That’s why we have openings and closings [of fisheries] that are science-based,” intended to prevent overfishing or population collapse.
If the quality of NOAA’s fishery management data suffers as it hemorrhages staff, the regional fishery management councils will likely err on the side of caution rather than risk a fishery collapse, which, if severe enough, could result in localized extinctions. “That could mean scaling back the amount of fish that could be harvested to take a more precautionary approach,” Sarah Poon, the associate vice president of Resilient Fishery Solutions at the Environmental Defense Fund, told me. Sure enough, fishermen have already overfished Atlantic bluefin tuna off North Carolina this year because NOAA failed to close the fishery after the quota was reached — an uncharacteristic oversight that was apparently due to the agency’s layoffs, Reuters reports, and that will likely result in more conservative management of fisheries down the line.
The New England Fishery Management Council is already warning that the continued freeze at NOAA could delay the traditional May 1 opening of its groundfish fishery, and the valuable New England scallop fishery might also see delays as NOAA struggles to issue its standard regulations. Spinrad, the former NOAA administrator, has warned that the layoffs could potentially disrupt the $320 billion annual salmon hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest if commercial fishing closures or delays continue to occur.
Despite his frustrations with the bureaucracy of NOAA, the South Carolina shrimper, Jones, said that fishing communities would be the first to acknowledge the importance of good data, science, common-sense regulations, and stock management. “We’re all environmentalists at the end of the day,” he said, pointing out that fishermen wouldn’t have jobs if pollution or overfishing endangered the shrimp population.
But while many at NOAA now fear for their livelihoods, the stakes for small fishing communities have long felt existential. “It’s not hyperbole to say we’re at a precipice,” Jones went on. “There’s a chance that we may not be around in a couple of years — it’s that bad.” Sales of South Carolina seafood have nearly halved since the early 2010s, and the number of shrimp boats on the water in Georgetown County, the “seafood capital” of the state, has done the same.
But if wild-caught shrimp vanish from the markets, it could mean an even heavier reliance on farmed imports. Foreign aquaculture, however, is rife with forced labor and human rights violations, rampant environmental pollution and habitat destruction, and serious contamination concerns. Other seafood sectors, like white fish, are contending with adversaries such as Russia mixing in foreign-caught fish with domestic fish during processing and labeling it American wild-caught, or with outright mislabeling — though it again falls on NOAA’s potentially compromised enforcement capabilities to verify that U.S. seafood is actually wild-caught in the U.S.
EDF’s Poon told me it’s the most volatile fisheries that are ultimately most reliant on NOAA’s data, a category she believes shrimp falls into given warming-related environmental pressures and harmful algal blooms. While she agreed that NOAA Fisheries could use some “fine-tuning and refinement,” Poon added that turmoil at the agency is “already upending some of these decision-making processes that we have,” for the worse.
And while the NOAA layoffs might be cathartic for some in the fishing industry, there is also no clear indication that a regime change in Washington will mean the reversal of fortunes for fishermen. “It’s like we’re viewed as something to be managed out of existence; that’s the perception we’ve had and the way we felt,” Jones said. “I see a lot of great scientists and folks that work on the ground with us and are very helpful, but from an agency standpoint — yes, that’s how we felt.”
But “I mean, we’ve never gotten a call from Howard Lutnick, either,” he said.
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On the environmental reviews, Microsoft’s emissions, and solar on farmland
Current conditions: Enormous wildfires in Manitoba, Canada, will send smoke into the Midwestern U.S. and Great Plains this weekend • Northwest England is officially experiencing a drought after receiving its third lowest rainfall since 1871 • Thunderstorms are brewing in Washington, D.C., where the Federal Court of Appeals paused an earlier ruling throwing out much of Trump’s tariff agenda.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that courts should show more deference to agencies when hearing lawsuits over environmental reviews.
The case concerned a proposed 88-mile train line in Utah that would connect its Uinta Basin (and its oil resources) with the national rail network. Environmental groups and local governments claimed that the environmental impact statement submitted by the federal Surface Transportation Board did not pay enough attention to the effects of increased oil drilling and refining that the rail line could induce. The D.C. Circuit agreed, vacating the EIS; the Supreme Court did not, overturning the D.C. Circuit in an 8-0 decision.
The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requires the federal government to study the environmental impact of its actions. The D.C. Circuit “failed to afford the Board the substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases and incorrectly interpreted NEPA to require the Board to consider the environmental effects of upstream and downstream projects that are separate in time or place,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court.
The court’s decision could sharply limit the ability of the judicial branch to question environmental reviews by agencies under NEPA, and could pave the way for more certain and faster approvals for infrastructure projects.
At least, that’s what Kavanaugh hopes. The current NEPA process, he writes, foists “delay upon delay” on developers and agencies, so “fewer projects make it to the finish line. Indeed, fewer projects make it to the starting line.”
Map of the approved railway route.Source: Uinta Basin Railway Final Environmental Impact Statement
The Department of Agriculture is planning to retool a popular financing program, Rural Energy for America, to discourage solar development on agricultural land, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman exclusively reported.
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” a USDA spokesperson told Heatmap. The comments echoed a USDA report released last week criticizing the use of solar on agricultural land. The report said that the USDA will “disincentivize the use of federal funding at USDA for solar panels to be installed on productive farmland through prioritization points and regulatory action.” The USDA will also “call on state and local governments to work alongside USDA on local solutions.”
The daughter of a woman who died during the Pacific Northwest “Heat Dome” in 2021 sued seven oil and companies for wrongful death in Washington state court, The New York Times reported Thursday.
“The suit alleges that they failed to warn the public of the dangers of the planet-warming emissions produced by their products and that they funded decades-long campaigns to obscure the scientific consensus on global warming,” according to Times reporter David Gelles.
Several cities and states have brought suits making similar claims that oil and gas companies misled the public about the threat of climate change. Earlier this week, a German court threw out a suit from a Peruvian farmer against a German utility, which claimed that the utility’s commissions helped put his town at risk from glacial flooding.
The seven companies named in the lawsuit are Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and Olympic Pipeline Company, a subsidiary managed by BP. None of them commented on the suit.
Tech giant Microsoft disclosed in its annual sustainability report that its carbon emissions have grown by 23.4% since 2020, even as the company has a goal to become “carbon negative” by 2030. The upside to the figures is that the growth in emissions was due to a much larger increase in energy use and business activity, not from using dirtier energy. In that same time period, Microsoft’s revenue has grown 71%, and its energy use has grown 168%.
“It has become clear that our journey towards being carbon negative is a marathon,” the report read. The company said it had contracted 34 gigawatts of non-emitting power generation and had agreements to procure 30 million metric tons of carbon removal.
The company has set out to reduce its indirect Scope 3 emissions “by more than half” by 2030 from the 11.5 million metric tons it reported in 2020, as its Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions fall to close to zero. It will become “carbon negative,” it hopes, by purchasing carbon removal.
Microsoft attempts to reduce emissions in its supply chain by procuring low- or no-carbon fuels and construction materials. Last week the tech giant signed a purchasing agreement with Sublime Systems for 600,000 tons of low-carbon cement.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced it had approved a 77-megawatt small modular reactor design. This is the second SMR design approved by the NRC, following approval of a smaller design in 2020. Both are products of the SMR company NuScale, and neither has yet been deployed. A project to build the earlier design in Idaho was abandoned in 2023.
The NRC review was set to be completed in July of this year. Coming in ahead of scheduled demonstrates “the agency’s commitment to safely and efficiently enable new, advanced reactor technology,” the Commission said in a press release.
Congress and the Biden and Trump administrations have pushed the NRC to move faster and to encourage the development of small modular reactors. No SMR has been built in the United States, nor is there any current plan to do so that has been publicly disclosed. NuScale’s chief executive told Bloomberg that he hopes to have a deal signed by the end of the year and an operational plant by the end of the decade.
Tesla veteran Drew Baglino’s Heron Power raised a $38 million round of Series A funding for a new product designed to replace “legacy transformers and power converters by directly connecting rapidly growing megawatt-scale solar, batteries, and AI data centers to medium voltage transmission,” Baglino wrote on X.
A conversation with Mike Hall of Anza.
This week’s conversation is with Mike Hall, CEO of the solar and battery storage data company Anza. I rang him because, in my book, the more insights into the ways renewables companies are responding to the war on the Inflation Reduction Act, the better.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s jump in!
How much do we know about developers’ reactions to the anti-IRA bill that was passed out of the House last week?
So it’s only been a few days. What I can tell you is there’s a lot of surprise about what came out of the House. Industries mobilized in trying to improve the bill from here and I think a lot of the industry is hopeful because, for many reasons, the bill doesn’t seem to make sense for the country. Not just the renewable energy industry. There’s hope that the voices in Congress — House members and senators — who already understand the impact of this on the economy will in the coming weeks understand how bad this is.
I spoke to a tax attorney last week that her clients had been preparing for a worst case scenario like this and preparing contingency plans of some kind. Have you seen anything so far to indicate people have been preparing for a worst case scenario?
Yeah. There’s a subset of the market that has prepared and already executed plans.
In Q4 [of 2024] and Q1 [of this year] with a number of companies to procure material from projects in order to safe harbor those projects. What that means is, typically if you commence construction by a certain date, the date on which you commence construction is the date you lock in tax credit eligibility, and we worked with companies to help them meet that criteria. It hedged them on a number of fronts. I don’t think most of them thought we’d get what came out of the House but there were a lot of concerns about stepdowns for the credit.
After Trump was elected, there were also companies who wanted to hedge against tariffs so they bought equipment ahead of that, too. We were helping companies do deals the night before Liberation Day. There was a lot of activity.
We saw less after April 2nd because the trade landscape has been changing so quickly that it’s been hard for people to act but now we’re seeing people act again to try and hit that commencement milestone.
It’s not lost on me that there’s an irony here – the attempts to erode these credits might lead to a rush of projects moving faster, actually. Is that your sense?
There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects. But there’s limits to what you can do there. The bill also has a placed-in-service criteria and really problematic language with regard to the “foreign entity of concern” provisions.
Are you seeing any increase in opposition against solar projects? And is that the biggest hurdle you see to meeting that “placed-in-service” requirement?
What I have here is qualitative, not quantitative, but I was in the development business for 20 years, and what I have seen qualitatively is that it is increasingly harder to develop projects. Local opposition is one of the headwinds. Interconnection is another really big one and that’s the biggest concern I have with regards to the “placed-in-service” requirement. Most of these large projects, even if you overcome the NIMBY issues, and you get your permitting, and you do everything else you need to do, you get your permits and construction… In the end if you’re talking about projects at scale, there is a requirement that utilities do work. And there’s no requirement that utilities do that work on time [to meet that deadline]. This is a risk they need to manage.
And more of the week’s top news in renewable energy conflicts.
1. Columbia County, New York – A Hecate Energy solar project in upstate New York blessed by Governor Kathy Hochul is now getting local blowback.
2. Sussex County, Delaware – The battle between a Bethany Beach landowner and a major offshore wind project came to a head earlier this week after Delaware regulators decided to comply with a massive government records request.
3. Fayette County, Pennsylvania – A Bollinger Solar project in rural Pennsylvania that was approved last year now faces fresh local opposition.
4. Cleveland County, North Carolina – Brookcliff Solar has settled with a county that was legally challenging the developer over the validity of its permits, reaching what by all appearances is an amicable resolution.
5. Adams County, Illinois – The solar project in Quincy, Illinois, we told you about last week has been rejected by the city’s planning commission.
6. Pierce County, Wisconsin – AES’ Isabelle Creek solar project is facing new issues as the developer seeks to actually talk more to residents on the ground.
7. Austin County, Texas – We have a couple of fresh battery storage wars to report this week, including a danger alert in this rural Texas county west of Houston.
8. Esmeralda County, Nevada – The Trump administration this week approved the final proposed plan for NV Energy’s Greenlink North, a massive transmission line that will help the state expand its renewable energy capacity.
9. Merced County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire is having aftershocks in Merced County as residents seek to undo progress made on Longroad’s Zeta battery project south of Los Banos.