Alaska senators hope to toss overbroad fishing-discharge regs overboard

Chris Klint, Senior Digital Producer, cklint@ktuu.com

ANCHORAGE –

Three U.S. senators, including both of Alaska’s, are pushing to gut the application of an Environmental Protection Agency discharge regulation to small fishing boats they say could punish cleaning up fish guts.

Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, both Alaska Republicans, joined Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) Thursday in sponsoring legislation which would remove the expiration date on a three-year moratorium for commercial fishing vessels, as well as commercial vessels under 79 feet long. The incidental discharge regulation was part of the Coast Guard Reauthorization Bill, which was passed by Congress and signed into law in December.

“The flawed regulation is written so broadly that it would penalize Alaska’s fisherman and more than 8,000 boats statewide simply for rinsing fish guts off their deck, or rainwater washing other materials off their decks,” Murkowski’s office wrote in a statement on the 2014 bill Thursday.

In a December Senate speech on the proposed moratorium, Murkowski offered her colleagues a fisherman’s perspective on what the regulations meant.

“For those who need a little more graphic detail as to what we’re talking about, when you take a commercial fishing vessel out, your 45-foot commercial fishing vessel, and you have a good day fishing, you’ve got some salmon guts on the deck,” Murkowski said. “You’ve got a little bit of slime. You hose it off.  That would be an incidental discharge that would be reportable to the EPA, and if you fail to report, you could be subject to civil penalties. That’s what we’re talking about here.”

Murkowski Speaks on Senate Floor on Vessel Discharge Agreement — video

Murkowski spokesman Matthew Felling said Thursday that the sweep of the EPA regulations seemed to be a product of being overbroad, rather than an intentional effect.

“I think this was designed for big, huge fishing boats, and they just forgot to make the reasonable exception,” Felling said.

The Peninsula Clarion reported last year that leaders of Alaska commercial fishing groups had questioned the sensibility of applying the regulations to small fishing boats, noting that they would bar pumping rainwater overboard or returning parts of halibut removed from the sea to the sea.

With bipartisan support from Boxer, Felling said Murkowski is optimistic that a permanent version of the moratorium “is going to happen.”

“Sen. Boxer had announced that she’s not running again, and this has been a real priority for her,” Felling said. “We want to make sure this gets done this Congress, to give certainty and security and right a wrong that may not have been intended in the first place.”

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President Obama signs discharge permit exemption for commercial fisheries

Yesterday, President Obama signed into law the “Howard Coble Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Act of 2014,” exempting small fishing vessels from the EPA’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) discharge permit requirements. The law extended the exemption provision for three years on the very day that the EPA’s NPDES permit requirements would have taken effect.

The regulation was intended to prevent fuels, toxic chemicals, or hazardous waste from entering the water. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told the Alaska Journal of Commernce that requiring a permits for fishermen to hose down a boat is overkill – especially when recreational boats, including mega-yachts – are exempt from the rule.

“We want to abide by environmental regulations that make sense,” Murkowski told the Journal, “But I don’t think any of us believe it should be a requirement for a fishermen who has had a good day out on the water, and they are cleaning up the boat, and hosing slime and maybe some fish guts off the deck and that then becomes a reportable discharge to the EPA…. Let’s use some common sense here.”

Read more about the extension from the Alaska Journal of Commerce here

View the full Act signed by the President here

FDA and EPA Issue Updated Draft Advice for Fish Consumption

Advice encourages pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers to eat more fish that are lower in mercury

• Draft advice on fish consumption, and supplemental questions and answers about the draft advice:  Fish: What Pregnant Women and Parents Should Know

• Federal Register Notice of Availability: Advice About Eating Fish; Draft Update

• 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans

• FDA Consumer Update: New Advice: Some Women and Children Should Eat More Fish

• EPA information on wild-caught fish

• FDA Audio Clips

• EPA Audio Clips

• Read the draft advice.

• Starting Wednesday, June 11, 2014, submit comments through the Federal Register docket at FederalRegister.gov.

9 Reasons To Eat Fish Right Now

All things considered, 2013 was not the best year for fish news. We learned all about the dangers of contaminated fish sources and, just in December, a large-scale study published in The Journal of Nutrition found some evidence to contradict the commonly held belief that a fish-rich diet improved cognitive function in old age.

But, looking forward, the news gets better: In its first issue of 2014, the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics released a new position on fat intake, promoting fatty fish as the go-to source for polyunsaturated fatty acids:

   It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that dietary fat for the healthy adult population should provide 20 percent to 35 percent of energy, with an increased consumption of n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids and limited intake of saturated and trans fats.

Two “long-chain” omega-3 fatty acids found in fish, EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) and DHA (docosahexaenoic acid), are not made by the human body, meaning we need to eat them from a dietary source. Many people get omega-3 fatty acids from plant sources like flax seeds and walnuts, though this type of “good” fat — alpha-linolenic acid — only partially converts to EPA and DHA in the body and doesn’t have the same amount of research behind it that omega-3s derived from fish do. Here are nine reasons to eat fish for your health:

Read the full article here.

Clean Water Act failing in new climate

BY RYAN P. KELLY & MARGARET R. CALDWELL

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently gave California some tough love in the form of a ghastly report card on water quality along our coasts and in our rivers and streams: The state’s water pollution seems to have gotten much worse, with the number of polluted water bodies skyrocketing between 2006 and 2010.

Some of this change is due to more aggressive testing; the blame for the rest is solely our own. And while this news is bad enough on its own, what’s often not discussed is that all of that polluted water ends up downstream in the coastal ocean, already hard hit by decades of abuse.

This is killing the goose that lays the golden state’s egg. Californians depend upon our coastal oceans more than you might realize. As of 2000, over three-quarters of Californians lived in coastal counties, and the state’s coastal economy accounted for $42.9 billion and 700,000 jobs. These numbers have surely risen since 2000, but we’ve failed to be the stewards of these waters that their value – economic, aesthetic and otherwise – deserve.

And the threats to ocean resources keep coming, from climate change to the collapse of so many fisheries stocks worldwide. One challenge we are just beginning to understand is ocean acidification, a consequence of the fact that the oceans absorb a large fraction of the carbon dioxide we continue to pump into the atmosphere. This has changed the chemistry of the entire world’s ocean, making it more acidic. Because this increased acidity dissolves the hard shells of many of the world’s marine creatures (e.g., oysters, mussels, and many forms of plankton), these creatures and the food webs of which they are a part face a difficult future.

The horrible air quality of the 1970s is an obvious analogy to the state of California’s waters today. While the state still has severe air quality problems in places – Bakersfield, the Central Valley, and the Los Angeles region stand out – three decades of concerted effort to clean up our air has led to significantly improved air quality for most of our state. And the benefits of such action are enormous: An EPA report earlier this year showed the direct benefits of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments dwarfed the costs of implementation by a 30-to-1 ratio. This month’s final EPA report on water quality only confirms what we already know, that California must do better when it comes to our coastal ocean.

Read the rest of the opinion from the San Diego Union-Tribune.