By Coral Davenport
...The approval (click here) is a major victory for Shell and the rest of the petroleum industry, which has sought for years to drill in the remote waters of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, which are believed to hold vast reserves of oil and gas....
They will endanger the entire region from Seattle to the Chukci Sea with oil and contaminated ballast water.
The companies need to move their mess to Barrow.
This was Obama's answer to the Keystone Pipeline. Alaska already has a pipeline. The companies should also prepare for sinking icebreakers and oil platforms. There is more sea ice with a hot planet. It is like having an Arctic Ocean full of boats colliding into each other. They loose a lot of monies in equipment damage and loss. Let's hope they don't lose lives along the way. The drilling is never going to show a profit.
Get them out of Seattle, they are doing too much damage to the northern Pacific. Fisheries are already having trouble sustaining themselves and now there is going to be oil pollution.
Pacific sardines (click here) are found from southeastern Alaska to the Gulf of California, Mexico. Sardines live in the water column in nearshore and offshore areas along the coast. They’re also sometimes found in estuaries. Sardines prefer warmer water – during the 1950s to 1970s, they abandoned the northern portion of their range because sea surface temperatures cooled and the sardine population decreased. Now that sea surface temperatures are warm again, the stock has increased and they’ve reoccupied areas off northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, as well as habitat far offshore from California....
The commercial fisheries have been closed because of the sardine crash. These ecosystems cannot afford anymore problems. Get the blasted oil companies out of the north Pacific.
March 6, 2015
By Paul Shively
The population of Pacific sardines, (click here) a crucial forage fish for marine life along the U.S. West Coast, has dwindled to the point that it can no longer sustain a commercial fishery, according to a preliminary assessment by scientists advising West Coast fishery managers.
The ongoing collapse is bad news for ocean wildlife, as well as fishermen and others who rely on a healthy ocean.
This is a major cause for concern, but it shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. In 2012, two government scientists predicted we would end up in exactly this position, finding a parallel with the last major collapse in the middle of the 20th century. Three years ago, the scientists wrote that “all indicators show that the northern sardine stock off the west coast of North America is declining steeply again and that imminent collapse is likely.”
That prediction turned out to be right....
No one listens to the scientists and this is still ongoing negligence of the US federal authorities to ignore the warnings. These fisheries are a mess. Besides the pollution from the oil industry, there is the continued migration of Japanese radiation. No one ever listens.
April 13, 2015
By Jeff Barnard
SALEM, Ore. -- Federal fisheries managers (click here) have followed through on expectations they would shut down the West Coast's upcoming sardine commercial fishing season because of rapidly declining numbers.
Meeting outside Santa Rosa, California, the Pacific Fishery Management Council voted Sunday to close the season starting July 1.
Geoff Shester of the conservation group Oceana says the next step is deciding whether overfishing is a factor. That could lead to shutting down the rest of the current season, which runs through June 30.
Sardines regularly go through huge population swings. A major collapse in the 1940s took down the sardine industry in Monterey, California, made famous by the John Steinbeck novel Cannery Row. It did not rebound until the 1990s. Most of the West Coast catch is now exported to Asia....
Those responsible for monitoring the fish stocks in US fisheries come out with data and outcomes. They recommend cutting back on the harvest to insure a quick rebound to the stocks. Does the government listen? No. What happens? The fisheries collapse and the fishermen face hardship because of it. It is all government corruption.
There is no real management so much as feast and famine.
