From"Summits," symptoms and what's wrong at NOAA

We have to ask just exactly whose side Ms. Lubchenco and her ex-ENGO bully boys and girls at NOAA and NMFS are on.

Obviously, it’s not the fishermen’s. In her year and a half at the helm of NOAA, she’s done less to help and more to harm fishermen than it was conceivable any head of the federal agency in charge of marine fisheries could do before she was annoin… er, appointed to that position. She is hell-bent on a management strategy that is going to get rid of as many boats and fishermen as possible. As an illustration of this, the management program she is committed to in New England will end up concentrating New England’s entire groundfish fishery in two ports, Gloucester and New Bedford. In spite of President Obama’s oft-voiced emphasis on jobs, this concentration is going to cost thousands of jobs in New England’s fishing communities, including New Bedford and Gloucester.

Just as obviously, she doesn’t appear to be on the public’s side. How much has her foot-dragging and continuing “it’s not as bad as all that” reaction to the BP catastrophe, and the attendant impacts it has had and continues to have on the ability to put together an effective response, cost the residents of the affected Gulf coast states? How much is her commitment to minimizing the amount of oil spilled and the consequences going to cost those residents in terms of settlements and future litigation?

As so many fishermen have been made aware in recent years, the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act are powerful tools that NOAA/NMFS, in company with the Fish and Wildlife Service, uses to significantly restrict or even stop fishing when interference with subject species are involved (or often even suspected). Could these federal laws have been used to restrict or regulate drilling in the Gulf? Of course they could have. But obviously, they weren’t. Since Ms. Lubchenco has headed NOAA, hundreds of new wells, including the Deepwater Horizon, have been drilled.

“Kendra Barkoff, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, said her agency had full consultations with NOAA about endangered species in the gulf. But she declined to respond to additional questions about whether her agency had obtained the relevant permits. Federal records indicate that these consultations ended with NOAA instructing the minerals agency that continued drilling in the gulf was harming endangered marine mammals and that the agency needed to get permits to be in compliance with federal law.” (from the NY Times here.

And it’s sure not Congress’s. She has been figuratively thumbing her nose at some of the most powerful Members from both parties over fisheries management and enforcement issues for just about as long as she’s been running the NOAA show.

What about the fish and other denizens of the deep and not so deep? The 300 plus Gulf wells that were drilled on her watch with insufficient oversight - in the case of the Deepwater Horizon, with hugely insufficient oversight - attest to her regard to the biota that NOAA is supposed to be nurturing.

You can read the whole FishNet piece here.