March 17, 2021 — U.S. President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act into law on Thursday, 11 March, almost one year after the CARES Act established the country’s first federal coronavirus relief bill.
The USD 1.9 trillion (EUR 1.6 trillion) American Rescue Plan Act is the largest spending package in U.S. history and contains significantly less relief for the commercial fishing and seafood industries than the CARES Act included, though much of that funding is yet to be distributed.
March 16, 2021 — Representative Deb Haaland of New Mexico made history on Monday when the Senate confirmed her as President Biden’s secretary of the Interior, making her the first Native American to lead a cabinet agency.
Ms. Haaland in 2018 became one of the first two Native American women elected to the House. But her new position is particularly redolent of history because the department she now leads has spent much of its history abusing or neglecting America’s Indigenous people.
Beyond the Interior Department’s responsibility for the well-being of the nation’s 1.9 million Native people, it oversees about 500 million acres of public land, federal waters off the United States coastline, a huge system of dams and reservoirs across the Western United States and the protection of thousands of endangered species.
“A voice like mine has never been a Cabinet secretary or at the head of the Department of Interior,” she wrote on Twitter before the vote. “Growing up in my mother’s Pueblo household made me fierce. I’ll be fierce for all of us, our planet, and all of our protected land.”
March 11, 2021 — President Joe Biden’s arrival at the White House in January was, as customary for any new executive branch leader, met by outsized expectations on the part of supporters and detractors alike. Among the countless areas of public policy set to be affected by the new administration, perhaps no one issue is more anticipated to be in play than energy and environmental policy.
The heightened set of expectations around energy policy began with the campaign, when Team Biden consistently placed climate change issues among its leading priorities — a trend that noticeably continued with Cabinet picks, as nominees for agencies from Defense to Transportation to Treasury cited climate considerations as key factors affecting their respective portfolios. On January 27, 2021, shortly after taking office, the Biden administration released a series of executive actions that included a stated goal of reaching a “carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035.”
Perhaps no single industry would be more critical to the realization of this far-reaching carbon-free goal than offshore wind, which has emerged in the United States over the past several years as a potentially game-changing source of clean energy generation, based on its earlier-moving success in Europe and elsewhere. In fact, along the country’s populous coastal areas, where fifty three percent of US residents reside, offshore wind presents the most viable option to build up renewable energy resources in the foreseeable future.
March 11, 2021 — America’s offshore wind infrastructure is modest: the only turbines in the ocean today power a small community’s worth of homes from a wind farm off Block Island. But within two years, the number of American homes powered by the renewable energy source could grow to nearly half a million.
Vineyard Wind CEO Lars Pedersen says an environmental review released by the federal government this week brings the company closer to its goal of supplying 800 megawatts of electricity to New England’s grid by 2023.
“More than three years of federal review and public comment is nearing its conclusion and 2021 is poised to be a momentous year for our project and the broader offshore wind industry,” Pedersen said.
The much-anticipated study from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management found the only major environmental impact from the turbines would be felt in the region’s commercial fisheries.
Many fishermen fear Vineyard Wind is leaving too narrow a distance between turbines for vessels to safely navigate during bad weather. Annie Hawkins, director of the seafood industry-backed Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, said the federal government has also failed to set guidelines for compensating fishing crews that will lose access to squid and lobsters they once caught in Vineyard Wind’s 118-square-mile lease area.
March 11, 2021 — U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday, 11 March, signed the USD 1.9 trillion (EUR 1.59 trillion) American Rescue Plan Act into law, opening the door for billions in aid to go to businesses – including nearly USD 29 billion (EUR 24.2 billion) for a restaurant industry that’s been battered by closures and other restrictions over the past year due to COVID-19.
On Thursday, the National Restaurant Association lauded the bill’s Restaurant Revitalization Fund, which association president and CEO Tom Bene said will help save jobs across the country.
March 11, 2021 — The Biden Administration is betting that green energy produced by new offshore wind farms will help slow climate change, but fishers and some scientists say there are too many uncertainties about how the massive structures will affect the ocean and its marine life. The first big test of how the push for wind energy might clash with ocean conservation will likely play out in Massachusetts waters. This week, Department of the Interior officials gave initial approval to the $2.8 billion Vineyard Wind project located about 15 miles south of the island of Martha’s Vineyard.
Once the massive wind turbines begin operating in 2023, the wind farm is expected to generate 800 megawatts of clean electricity. That’s enough to power 400,000 Massachusetts homes and businesses.
Vineyard Wind will be the first big offshore wind farm on the East Coast, although smaller pilot projects are running off Block Island, Rhode Island, and Virginia Beach, Virginia. Officials at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, an office within the Department of the Interior, are reviewing another 12 commercial offshore wind projects between Maryland and Maine. If approved, those wind farms would generate 25 gigawatts of clean energy for the power-hungry Northeast, more than doubling all land-based wind power coming online in 2021.
March 10, 2021 — In a major boost for Vineyard Wind, the U.S. Department of Interior announced Monday that a long-awaited environmental analysis of the plan to build the first commercial-scale offshore wind farm 12 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard is complete.
The announcement signals a sea change in the outlook for the emerging offshore wind industry under the Biden administration, and it puts the $2 billion Vineyard Wind I project solidly back on track to be first in the race to harness hundreds of square miles of ocean for the development of renewable energy.
“The United States is poised to become a global clean energy leader,” said Laura Daniel Davis, principal deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management, in a press release Monday.
Completed by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the final environmental impact statement is due to be published in the Federal Register later this week, the announcement said.
March 10, 2021 — The U.S. House of Representatives gave final approval on 10 March to a USD 1.9 trillion (EUR 1.6 trillion) COVID-relief spending plan that includes some opportunities for the seafood industry to benefit.
A spokesperson for U.S. President Joe Biden said during the vote that he is expected to sign the bill into law on Friday, 12 March, according to C-SPAN.
March 9, 2021 — It didn’t take long for area fishermen to realize that Joe Biden is not their friend.
Biden, or whoever is calling the shots these days in Washington, rushed through a review of the Vineyard Wind offshore wind farm, moving the project, expected to be online by the end of 2023, closer to becoming a reality.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, an arm of the U.S. Department of the Interior, says it has completed the project’s final environmental impact statement. The project now moves to the final permitting phase.
President Donald Trump slowed the review process over concerns about the negative impacts an offshore wind farm could have on the commercial and recreational fishing industries. Fishermen say the wind farm, some 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard, would pose navigational hazards and negatively impact marine life resulting in higher prices for seafood and lost jobs.
March 8, 2021 — The Biden administration took a crucial step Monday toward approving the nation’s first large-scale offshore wind farm about 12 nautical miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., a project that officials say will launch a massive clean-power expansion in the fight against climate change.