US President Donald Trump says that wind farms harm birds and whales. Scientists weigh wind power's impacts on wildlife against those of oil and gas.Aspen Ellis, a seabird biologist at University of California, Santa Cruz, spent a decade doing field work on remote islands off the coast of the United States. She often lived for months amongst thousands of birds, becoming so immersed in their ways that she even learned to tell which predators were nearby from the birds' calls. But as she added her observations to 40 or 50 years of previous research on these colonies, she noticed a worrying pattern."Again and again, I just found myself logging the impact of climate change over time," she recalls, from rising sea levels that threatened breeding colonies, to fish moving to cooler areas and leaving seabird chicks starving. "Without addressing this larger issue of climate change, the seabird conversation work we were doing wasn't sufficient to save those populations," she adds. She decided to change focus – and today, studies ways to make clean-energy offshore wind farms safer for birds.The impact of energy production on wildlife has come into the spotlight again amid US President Donald Trump's plan to pivot the country's supply from renewables such as wind, to oil and gas. In his first days in office, Trump revoked former-president Joe Biden's ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling. "We will drill, baby, drill," Trump promised when he was inaugurated, while putting the brakes on the expansion of wind farms. One of his arguments is that wind farms harm birds and whales. His executive order halting offshore wind farm development cited the importance of marine life as one of the reasons for the decision.Keep Reading
The rain is misting over Woodley Island Marina's Dock B, where the Jenna Lee is moored. Kristen Pinto, in a bright yellow slicker, pulls three Dungeness crabs from the trickling bin on the deck of the adjacent home-built pontoon boat from which the Pinto family sells to the public as Jenna Lee's Seafood."It's been a little slower," she says, lifting a half shrug and noting the strained economy and higher price of crab — $8 per pound — have kept some away. "They're a nice size and all, but it adds up. A nice size crab can be $20."The jump in price from last year has been a boon for crab fishers who've been stuck selling their hard-won catches for less and less over shortened seasons in recent years.Keep reading
At 11:59 p.m. on Jan. 4, commercial fisherman Barry Day is 10 miles off the coast of Half Moon Bay, watching the clock. One minute to go until the start of Dungeness crab season.In the pitch black sea, Day’s radiant orange buoys bob with the promise of a payday. In total, he has set out 250 crab traps. Every buoy is attached to a thin rope that stretches 200 feet down to a cylindrical, metal-and-wire pot on the ocean floor. Day spent the previous month readying the pots: inspecting every piece of wire, splicing and joining ropes, repairing rubber wrappings, painting buoys.Each trap costs around $300 all accounted for — $75,000 of gear now at the bottom of the ocean. Insurance for his boat and two deckhands is another $30,000. Then there’s the cost of slip space at the harbor. Thirty percent of sales goes to his crew. These are the numbers crawling in the back of his mind as the seconds tick by.The clock strikes midnight, and the mad dash begins. Day’s crew pulls up a pot, empties it out, throws it back overboard. Repeat. A maritime metronome. Last year, his pots came up full after 10-hour soaks, with maybe 30 crabs in each. This year, Day is lucky if there are six in each pot.“Just one of those seasons,” Day said.One bad crab season didn’t used to worry the fleet, not in an existential way. The Dungeness crab industry — or fishery — brings in more than $50 million in a good year and naturally cycles through good and bad seasons. But this year, the lack of crabs is tacked on to a much bigger problem. Those long, thin ropes that stretch from seafloor to surface have come under scrutiny for entangling endangered and threatened humpback whales. It’s an issue so contentious that in 2017, an environmental nonprofit sued the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, claiming it had failed to adequately protect the whales.For the last six years, the lawsuit and subsequent settlement have squeezed crab season into shorter periods. In 2024, the traditional eight-month season opened on Jan. 15 and closed less than three months later. And it’s not just the length of the season — a 50% reduction in the number of traps allowed out at sea is becoming the new normal.Keep reading
This Sunday, one Humboldt County business will be marking an auspicious occasion. Hog Island Oyster Company, a company that operates approximately 90 acres of oyster nursery, hatchery and farm facilities out of Fairhaven on the Samoa Peninsula, will be featured in Google’s latest campaign — with a commercial to be aired during Super Bowl LIX.“When Google approached us we were like ‘wow, really, Google?’” said John Finger, Hog Island Oyster Co. founder and CEO. “It’s been fun to see how many people have picked up on it … It makes us proud. You think about this ad campaign, it’s 50 States, 50 Stories, and for California they chose us.”Hog Island Oyster Company began roughly 40 years ago after Finger, an East Coast native and recent graduate with a degree in marine biology and a background in restaurant work, attempted to marry his love of the ocean and his love of food.So, how did Google get involved?“Part of it is, I think especially in the Bay Area, we’ve been around long enough,” Finger said. “We’ve had one customer call us an institution, and I’m not sure I like that, but he also talked about us being part of the fabric of our community, which is better.”Keep reading
President Joe Biden has banned new offshore oil and gas drilling across a vast swath of federal waters, including the entire coast of California, Oregon and Washington, in a move seen as a last-minute effort to thwart actions by the incoming Trump administration to expand offshore drilling.North Bay politicians and environmental activists expressed gratitude, relief and — in the case of one veteran anti-drilling activist — confidence that it will be extremely difficult for Donald Trump to undo the sweeping new strictures once he takes over the White House in two weeks.The ban, announced Monday, protects nearly 630 million acres in offshore areas along the East and West coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and portions of Alaska's Northern Bering Sea.To withdraw those areas from future oil and gas leasing, Biden used his authority under a provision of a 1953 law, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act — the same law that previous presidents have used to protect areas of the coast, including President Trump, who sought to safeguard a stretch of the Atlantic coast during his first term.“So we do not believe this can be reversed or undone. I feel entirely comfortable that today’s action is Trump proof,” said Bodega Bay activist Richard Charter, a senior fellow at the Ocean Foundation.In a statement Monday, Biden said his decision “reflects what coastal communities, businesses and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs.”The new orders would not affect large swathes of the Gulf of Mexico, where most U.S. offshore drilling occurs, but it would protect a vast, unbroken stretches of the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines from future drilling.Rep. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, the highest ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, celebrated Biden’s decision to “permanently protect much of our oceans, coastal communities, and local economies from Big Oil’s long record of exploitation.“Importantly, today’s action is Trump-proof; the courts have already defended the 12(a) authority against previous attacks,” Huffman said in a statement, referring to the legal provision used by Biden in the new ban.Read More
