Sharing the Catch
Cross-posted by permission from Legal Planet.
According to Science Insider (subscription required), NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco has endorsed broader use of a “catch shares” approach to allocating the available catch in commercial fisheries. The shares strategy (also referred to as “individual transferable quotas” or “limited access privileges”) gives individual participants in the fishery a permanent and transferable right to a set proportion of the total allowable catch.
In theory, assigning shares should contribute in several ways to a more sustainable fishery. By limiting entry, a shares strategy should help address the chronic problem of over-capitalization — too many boats chasing too few fish — which tends to ratchet up pressure for high catch levels. By giving the fishers a long-term stake in the health of the fishery, it should give them incentives to support sustainable (reduced) catch levels. In some fisheries, shares can also make fishing safer by removing the pressure to catch as many fish as possible in as short a time as possible.
There is some evidence that reality matches the theory. Last fall, a group led by Chris Costello of UC Santa Barbara published a study in Science (subscription required) showing that catch shares fisheries worldwide are only half …
This item is cross-posted by permission from Legal Planet.
In March, I wrote here about EPA’s newfound boldness on mountaintop removal mining. Under current regulations, the Corps of Engineers issues permits for that practice under Clean Water Act section 404, but EPA has the authority to veto those permits. EPA, which was entirely passive on the matter under the Bush administration, had sent objections to the Corps on a couple of permits, and announced that “it would take a close loook” at others.
It is now clear that a close look doesn’t mean blanket opposition. Nick Rahall, Chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, has released a letter from EPA indicating that, of 48 permit applications the agency has reviewed, it has approved 42 and objected to only 6. Coal Tattoo (the Charleston Gazette’s blog on all things coal mining) has the story here …
This item is cross-posted by permission from Legal Planet.
The National Environmental Policy Act, which became law on January 1, 1970, is the oldest of the major federal environmental laws. It has been a model for environmental assessment laws in numerous states and other nations, but it still comes in for a lot of criticism at home.
Some criticisms are surely justified. As Dan pointed out here, NEPA has yet to fulfill the promise of its lofty goals. NEPA has never quite managed to make environmental impacts central to federal decisions at the conceptual level, the point where key choices are made about what initiatives to pursue and what priorities to assign. Predictions about environmental impacts or the effectiveness of mitigation are hardly ever later reviewed. And in too many cases, environmental analysis is simply used to paper over decisions that have effectively already been made; in …
This item is cross-posted by permission from Legal Planet.
Quite a bit, and most of the news is bad.
American Rivers has declared the Sacramento-San Joaquin the most endangered river in the United States.
The longfin smelt has been listed as threatened by the state, but it is not going to be federally listed, at least not yet.
Commercial salmon fishing off the California coast is one step closer to being formally closed for 2009.
And while late rains have increased water supplies, some farmers are still slated to get little or no water this summer.
* The American Rivers report listing the Sacramento-San Joaquin as the nation’s “most endangered” river has garnered substantial media attention. The report cites the need to overhaul both water and flood management systems. As Matt Weiser pointed out in the Sacramento Bee, that’s no surprise to locals, but there is …
This item is cross-posted by permission from Legal Planet.
EPA is finally flexing its muscle on mountaintop removal mining, taking on the Corps of Engineers and stepping in for states that have been reluctant to attack the practice.
Mountaintop removal mining involves blasting the tops off of mountains, typically in Appalachia, to get at coal. The ecological problems are less about removal of the mountaintops than about the filling of valley streams with the excess spoils. The practice has been going on for more than 20 years with very little regulatory oversight and in apparent disregard of the Clean Water Act.
In 2002, the Bush administration gave the valley fills associated with mountaintop removal mining a semblance of legality by revising the regulations governing the issuance of permits for filling waters of the U.S. under section 404 of the Act to allow filling with overburden from …
This item is cross-posted by permission from Legal Planet.
Demonstrating once again the importance of presidential elections and appointments, the 9th Circuit has upheld the National Marine Fisheries Service’s policy on considering hatchery fish in listing Pacific salmonids. (Hat tip: ESA blawg.)
Hatchery fish can be a boon or a bane to salmon conservation. Because hatchery programs have emphasized production of fish for harvest, on the whole they have been far more harmful than helpful to wild fish over the last century.
Understanding the hatchery policy requires some background on salmon listings under the ESA. The law calls for the identification and protection of “species” which are “endangered” or “threatened.” It defines “species” to include subspecies and, for vertebrate species like salmon, “distinct population segments” which interbreed when mature. In 1991, NMFS developed a policy for recognizing distinct population segments of Pacific salmon, which it calls …
This item is cross-posted by permission from Legal Planet.
It’s easy for environmentalists to get depressed, given the amount of bad news about climate change, species losses, and the like. But sometimes there is unexpectedly good news. This morning’s New York Times has one of those stories. The Atlantic right whale, which not long ago was thought by many to be a lost cause, appears to be rebounding. Last year brought a record number of calves, and “probably for the first time since the 1600s, not one North Atlantic right whale died at human hands.”
Scientists working on whale recovery credit recent changes in shipping lanes and speed restrictions in coastal waters, which have reduced whale strikes. An expensive but effective monitoring program has made those shipping changes possible by providing new information about key locations for whales. Scientists are optimistic that new restrictions on …
The following is cross-posted by permission from Legal Planet.
The Bush administration’s last-minute ESA (non)consultation rule is getting almost as much attention now as it did during the comment period. Then, the administration reportedly received more than 300,000 comments, the vast majority of them negative. Those objections were, of course, quickly swept under the proverbial rug so the administration could finalize its rule significantly cutting back on the application and scope of the consultation process. Now, Congress and the administration are rushing to figure out how to return the consultation process to its prior state.
On Wednesday, the Washington Post ran a “mission accomplished” headline: Obama Reverses Bush Rule on Protection of Endangered Species. Not so fast. Although President Obama took a significant step toward that end, the job is not yet complete. It would be a mistake for environmental advocates to stop pushing …
Almost two years after the Supreme Court declared, in Massachusetts v. EPA, that CO2 is an “air pollutant” for purposes of the Clean Air Act, this announcement, paired with the decision to reconsider California’s request for permission to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars (see Rick’s post and the Federal Register notice), shows that the Obama administration is serious about applying the Clean Air Act to greenhouse gases.
That’s a good thing. Although it would be awkward to develop and implement a National Ambient Air Quality Standard for CO2, as Michael Hanemann and I have explained, the technology-based and planning provisions of the Clean Air …
Tarlock and Doremus are co-authors of Water War in the Klamath Basin: Macho Law, Combat Biology, and Dirty Politics, published by Island Press in 2008.
Last week, the Oregon Supreme Court agreed to decide whether irrigators in the Klamath Basin "own" water delivered by the federal Klamath Reclamation Project. This latest development is one more twist in an ongoing property rights case that illustrates both how difficult it can be to determine who holds precisely what rights in western water and how property rights claims, even spurious ones, can frustrate ecosystem restoration efforts.
Usually, claims of ownership are made to recover a resource from someone else. But that's not the issue here. The United States agrees that when the Project has water available it must deliver that water to these irrigators rather than to anyone else. But the irrigators want more than that. They want the United …
