Friday, a federal judge said he would dismiss a lawsuit levied against the California Coastal Commission by SpaceX, which listed commissioner and Humboldt County Supervisor Mike Wilson as a defendant. The tentative order said the lawsuit failed to prove that SpaceX was materially harmed by the commission’s attempts at hampering an increase of launches at a U.S. Air Force base — despite the company’s claims of “political bias” against CEO Elon Musk at a meeting.“It is not clear how the commission’s position or demands injure SpaceX,” the order states. The judge pointed out the Air Force approved the increase over the commission’s objections.The lawsuit alleged “naked political discrimination” against SpaceX, citing comments made by four commissioners.But Friday, U.S. District Judge Stanley Blumenfeld Jr. said the lawsuit, filed in Oct. 2024, did not prove the company was actually harmed in any material way in response to a motion to dismiss the suit.“Even assuming that the commission’s vote not to concur in the Air Force’s consistency determination was procedurally improper, the Air Force overrode the commission’s objection and permitted SpaceX to increase its launch cadence,” the judge wrote.This tentative order was reported by Reuters and can be found in full there via https://tinyurl.com/4xasf8vjRead More
Something fishy is moving from the Woodley Island Marina's docks across the bay to Eureka's Madaket Plaza, where Humboldt County will have its first fisher's market, starting in May or June.Ashley Vellis, owner of Ashley's Seafood, has been brewing up the idea of a local fish market since late 2019 and is now partnering with the North Coast Grower's Association to organize it, currently working on fundraising to make the new addition to Eureka's waterfront a reality.Eureka City Manager Miles Slattery says he hopes the market will be similar to other events held in Eureka, like Art's Alive and Friday Night Markets, which have been successful in bringing more people into the city."I think it's something our community has been missing for a long time," says Slattery. "We're very supportive of our commercial fishing industry and I think it'll be a good thing."Taking inspiration from dockside markets in Santa Barbara, San Diego and San Francisco, Vellis says that she wants to make it more accessible for people to purchase seafood directly from the source. The vision is that local fishers will have stalls to sell their latest and freshest catch. Residents will then be able to take their fish to be filleted, or gutted and gilled at a processing station on site, before heading home with fish ready to cook. Currently, the plan is for the market to be open every other Saturday through October, when boats begin preparing for the crabbing season.Keep Reading
At this week’s meeting of the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District’s Board of Commissioners, the board met with staff and consultants to hear updates on the Humboldt Bay Offshore Wind Heavy Lift Marine Terminal Project — a redevelopment project that will re-envision a significant portion of the Samoa Peninsula as a 180-acre multi-use port to support California’s offshore wind development.Among those items featured on the agenda were an update on the project’s emissions goals, a technical presentation on dredging and material removal associated with the project and an overhaul of the adjacent trail infrastructure and Woodley Island’s fishing and boating facilities to be improved with funding from the project.Achieving net zeroScott Lagueux of infrastructure consulting firm Moffatt & Nichol, presented on the project’s “Green Terminal Roadmap,” a framework that is being designed to bring the project into alignment with the goal of net zero carbon emissions.“Your desire is to achieve net zero at this port, and certainly it’s a great goal and one that we look forward to helping you achieve through this analysis and through … incremental implementation of technologies and other approaches that will help you get to that point,” Lagueux said.Lagueux presented a number of options that will be finalized over the next several months and noted several possible scenarios with regard to the cost and the timing of the project. Ultimately, he said, the roadmap would provide the district with “a series of decision-making matrices” and a “menu of technologies” that can help achieve the goal of a zero-emission project.Keep Reading
Clean water soon could join a list of issues – smog, the minimum wage, gun control – as an area where California law goes further than similar laws in the rest of the country.But here’s the rub: The most likely path for that to happen is if lawmakers approve a new bill, SB 601 that calls for California to permanently enshrine into state law the rules of what has been, until recently, the federal status quo – the Clean Water Act of 1972. The bill was introduce on Feb. 21 by state Sen. Ben Allen, D-El Segundo.The bill’s basic premise is simple. All future water pollution laws in California will have to cover the same waterways – wetlands, creeks, streams rivers and lakes – that applied to the federal Clean Water Act until the Supreme Court changed the definition of Waters of the U.S in Sackett v. EPA.Because it doesn’t create new rules, SB 601 isn’t expected to add costs or red tape for the farmers and ranchers, water agencies, builders and manufacturers most often affected by clean water laws. And, because it is enshrining long-standing federal law into the state code, it’s hard to argue that the idea is particularly liberal or conservative. The Clean Water Act was signed by a Republican president, Richard Nixon, during an era when politicians across the political spectrum often favored environmental protection.But supporters argue SB 601 will be needed because federal environmental laws – and, in some cases, the broader goals of cleaning the environment – are being gutted by the U.S. Supreme Court and President Donald Trump.“We just don’t want to see (water rules) backslide,” said Garry Brown, founder of Orange County Coastkeeper, a nonprofit that’s backing SB 601.“In the 28 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never heard anybody say they want to see the water become dirtier. Clean water has never been a partisan issue,” Brown said.“But conditions have changed,” he added. “And, now, we’re afraid of what we’re seeing right now in Washington.“The rules we’re talking about are the rules we all basically agreed on for a long time,” Allen said.But supporters of SB 601 say the Supreme Court is only part of why they want the new law. The other issue, they say, is an era of lax environmental protection they view as likely during a second Trump administration.Read More
Uncertainty is bad for business, bad for research, bad for productivity, and terrible on morale. I am on NOAA’s Tsunami Science and Technology Advisory Panel (it is a volunteer position and I don’t get paid) and I know a number of people fairly high up in the organization. For the last few weeks, I’ve been asking what they know or expect, and the answer is a unanimous “we don’t know.”The U.S. tsunami program is a very small part of NOAA. It includes the two tsunami warning centers, tsunami research at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, and underpins state tsunami hazards reduction programs through the National Tsunami Hazards Mitigation Program (NTHMP). Full disclosure — grants from the NTHMP have funded much of our North Coast tsunami outreach effort, including the newest edition of Living on Shaky Ground.In the first round of cuts, the tsunami program lost its administrator, the person who coordinates the different pieces of the program, several support personnel, and a newly hired forecaster at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. Two recently approved positions at the International Tsunami Information Center were frozen.I am far more concerned about what might be happening next. Two years ago, NOAA finally recognized the need to put our two tsunami warning centers on a common operating system truly capable of backing each other up. At present, the centers in Hawaii and Alaska use different hardware and software and operate under separate administrative parts of NOAA. I am worried that budget cutting could set this project back, continuing the current inefficient system.I am even more concerned about the maintenance and support of our offshore tsunami detection system. The Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART) has been a huge step forward in our ability to assess the potential of a tsunami to cause damage.Read More
