Legacy - March 2016

Legacy

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Connecting The Dots Since 2011

Cover: Chinook Transforming Artist: Leanne Hodges Website: West Coast Wild Leanne Hodges is a mixed media artist and naturalist living on Quadra Island in the Salish Sea. Her passion for the BC coast translates into visual narratives of wildlife, indigenous cultures, and our ecological footprint. Leanne's art and advocacy celebrate both the creative experience and the abundant diversity of life on the inner south coast

o Contents: o Game Fishing Planet Earth o Opinion o Activism o Climate o Habitat o Harvest o Greener Salmon Feedlots oo Cleaner Electricity

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Legacy Wild Game Fish Conservation International Wild Game Fish Conservation International (WGFCI): Established in 2011 to advocate for wild game fish, their fragile ecosystems and the cultures and economies that rely on their robust populations.

LEGACY – Journal of Wild Game Fish Conservation: Complimentary, nononsense, monthly publication by conservationists for conservationists LEGACY, the WGFCI Facebook page and the WGFCI website are utilized to better equip fellow conservationists, elected officials, business owners and others regarding wild game fish, their unparalleled contributions to society and the varied and complex issues impacting them and those who rely on their sustainability.

LEGACY exposes impacts to wild game fish while featuring wild game fish conservation projects, community activism, fishing adventures and more. Your photos and articles featuring wild game fish from around planet earth are welcome for possible inclusion in an upcoming issue of LEGACY. E-mail them with captions and credits to Jim (wilcoxj@katewwdb.com).

Successful wild game fish conservation will ensure existence of these precious natural resources and their ecosystems for future generations to enjoy and appreciate. This is our LEGACY.

Wild Game Fish Conservation International Founders

Bruce Treichler

Jim Wilcox

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Contents Game Fishing Planet Earth – Now and Then _______________________________________________________________  This is what it's all about! (Scotland)____________________________________________________________________  Pierre Sempé with one that brings a smile (France) ______________________________________________________  Video: Small Stream – Big Trout (Denmark) _____________________________________________________________  Two ways to be Fooled ________________________________________________________________________________

6 6 7 8 9

Special ___________________________________________________________________________________________ 10  The Ghosts of Fishers Past ___________________________________________________________________________ 10  Livestock Genetics in two of the three wild salmon _____________________________________________________ 16  Cooke looking to buy all of Icicle ______________________________________________________________________ 18

Opinion __________________________________________________________________________________________ 20         

Response via e-mail to ISAV evidence reported in Virology Journal ______________________________________ Don’t Eat Diseased, Ocean Feedlot-raised, Atlantic Salmon _____________________________________________ It’s Time to Change the National Dialogue on Energy ___________________________________________________ Opinion: Site C: Too risky to rely on one river system for B.C.’s hydro needs _____________________________ Sockeye death toll a predictable disaster ______________________________________________________________ OP ED: WOODFIBRE LNG OWNERSHIP________________________________________________________________ Time to kick the coal habit, Canada ____________________________________________________________________ Interview with Joseph Barrett on his “Ice Boom Theory” ________________________________________________ Canada has energy export opportunities beyond pipelines ______________________________________________

20 23 24 28 31 33 36 38 42

Community Activism, Education and Outreach ______________________________________________________ 44              

Stopping Farmed Salmon at the Cash Register _________________________________________________________ Ban Ocean Fish Farms _______________________________________________________________________________ Norwegian Fish Farms Out of British Columbia _________________________________________________________ Action Norway: Divest from Dirty Salmon Farming ______________________________________________________ Keep it in the ground _________________________________________________________________________________ Video: Signing The Lelu Island Declaration_____________________________________________________________ Signed Lelu Island Declaration ________________________________________________________________________ Stop Kinder Morgan – Keep it in the Ground ___________________________________________________________ We Love This Coast – Stop Kinder Morgan _____________________________________________________________ Aboriginals, environmentalists rally outside Trans Mountain hearings in Burnaby ________________________ Northwest U.S. Tribes Fight Proposed Canada Oil Pipeline That Threatens Salish Sea _____________________ Benicia commission rejects crude oil trains ____________________________________________________________ INLAND FISHERIES MANAGEMENT FOR WASHINGTON ________________________________________________ Northwest Youth Conservation and Fly Fishing Academy: June 19 – 25, 2016_____________________________

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 55 58 60 61

Climate___________________________________________________________________________________________ 62  Marine Life Can’t Keep Up With Climate Change ________________________________________________________ 62  Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha Indians become the first official Climate Refugees _________ 64

Habitat ___________________________________________________________________________________________ 66    

Studies aim to restore habitat of imperiled Northwest fish _______________________________________________ Save Skeena Salmon _________________________________________________________________________________ Plan for Exploratory Drilling Near Mount St. Helens Revived _____________________________________________ Map: Mount St. Helens Exploratory Drilling _____________________________________________________________

66 68 69 71

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels    

A Place at the Table: Benefits of Beach Restoration ____________________________________________________ We Can Never Let This...Happen Here _________________________________________________________________ The Atlantic Ocean Is Acidifying at a Rapid Rate ________________________________________________________ Sequim scientists work to restore eelgrass in Puget Sound _____________________________________________

72 73 74 76

Harvest __________________________________________________________________________________________ 79      

Why we’ve been hugely underestimating the overfishing of the oceans __________________________________ NT Government says no to supertrawlers ______________________________________________________________ Video: The Last Salmon Feast of the Celilo Indians – April 1955 _________________________________________ Celilo Falls: An Indian Trading Center _________________________________________________________________ More action needed to save sturgeon fishery ___________________________________________________________ Two illegal salmon fishers fined, banned from inland waters ____________________________________________

79 81 83 84 86 88

Hatcheries________________________________________________________________________________________ 90  DNA evidence shows that salmon hatcheries cause substantial, rapid genetic changes ___________________ 90

Greener Salmon Feedlots__________________________________________________________________________ 92    

Gibraltar group to invest €60m in world’s largest on-land salmon farm ___________________________________ Land-based salmon farm on Vancouver Island nears economic viability __________________________________ Cleaner, greener farmed salmon_______________________________________________________________________ Avoid Farmed, Open Net Pen Atlantic Salmon __________________________________________________________

92 94 97 99

Energy Generation: Waves, Solar, Wind, Geothermal, Oil, Coal, Natural Gas, Hydropower _____________ 101      

ANALYSIS: Green tech ready to step in when oil prices rise: Don Pittis _________________________________ Forces of NO vs. The Forces of Know _________________________________________________________________ Why The Renewables Revolution Is Now Unstoppable _________________________________________________ Despite Supreme Court, Clean Energy and Climate Progress Are Full Speed Ahead ______________________ Uruguay Now Generates Almost 100 Percent Of Its Electricity From Renewable Sources _________________ Canada's First Geothermal Plant Is Being Built in the Oil Industry's Backyard ___________________________

102 106 107 112 114 116

Ocean Waves__________________________________________________________________________________________  Wave energy plants in Brazil _________________________________________________________________________  Pontoon Power Converter ___________________________________________________________________________  Wave Star working prototype proving the harvest of energy from waves ________________________________  Harnessing wave energy to light up coastal communities ______________________________________________  Carnegie completes final milestone for CETO 5 Perth wave energy project ______________________________  Coming Soon: The World’s Largest Tidal Power Plant Will Generate Electricity For 175,000 Homes _______  Microsoft sinks to new depths with underwater data centre experiment _________________________________

120 120 120 120 121 123 126 129

Solar _________________________________________________________________________________________________  City of Vancouver looks to cut red tape for green energy _______________________________________________  Morocco to switch on first phase of world's largest solar plant _________________________________________  IBM Solar Collector Magnifies Sun By 2000X – These Could Provide Power To The Entire Planet __________  This Solar Road Will Provide Power to 5 Million People ________________________________________________  World’s First See-through Solar Panels _______________________________________________________________  Japan has finally figured out what to do with its abandoned golf courses _______________________________

131 131 133 135 137 139 140

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Hydropower ___________________________________________________________________________________________  What You Need To Know About Columbia/Snake River Dams & Salmon _________________________________  Indian Tribes Seek to Restore Columbia Salmon Runs _________________________________________________  A Look at Restoring Wild Salmon Runs on the Columbia River _________________________________________  Proposed Site C Dam: Reservoir Level ________________________________________________________________

142 142 147 149 151

Wind__________________________________________________________________________________________________ 152  Wind power supplied 97% of electricity needs of Scottish households in 2015 ___________________________ 152  Whopper of a Wind Farm to Power 1 Million Homes ____________________________________________________ 153

Forward The March 2016 issue of “Legacy” (Volume 6, Issue 5) marks fifty three consecutive months of our complimentary eMagazine; the no-holds-barred, watchdog journal published and distributed by Wild Game Fish Conservation International.

Wild game fish are our passion. Publishing “Legacy” each month is our self imposed responsibility to help ensure the future of these precious gifts that have been entrusted to our generation for their conservation.

Please read then share “Legacy” with others who care deeply about the future of wild game fish and all that rely on them.

Sincerely,

Bruce Treichler James E. Wilcox Wild Game Fish Conservation International Editorial Comment You’ill notice a significant change in the articles now published in Legacy.

Our new focus is to introduce and promote compelling practices and technologies likely to minimize negative impacts to wild game fish. Among these are land-based salmon feedlots and electricity production.

We’ll continue to highlight articles associated with community education, climate change, harvest and habitat.

We’ll also feature some of our readers’ fishing photos from around planet earth.

Please drop me a line if you’d like to see other changes to Legacy.

Tight Lines...

Jim

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Game Fishing Planet Earth – Now and Then

 This is what it's all about! (Scotland) Scottish Salmon Fishing Surgery

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Pierre Sempé with one that brings a smile (France)

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Video: Small Stream – Big Trout (Denmark) with Svend Eric Albertsen

Me and Martin went out to see if we could find some nice trout streams in the neighbourhood.

We found a promising river and asked the landowner if we could give it a try.

He said "yes, but I don't think you'll catch anything.

I haven't seen any fish and nobody ever comes here to fish". Well, look what we found...

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Two ways to be Fooled

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Special

 The Ghosts of Fishers Past Lost fishing gear keeps on doing the job it was designed for long after its owners are gone.

January 22, 2016 Lacuna is like most other humpback whales in the Atlantic Ocean. He overwinters in warm Caribbean waters—where humpbacks breed and give birth—and heads north in spring, toward colder waters to feast on the abundance of krill, copepods, and other tiny marine life.

For nearly two decades, Lacuna, recognizable by the unique pattern of black and white marks on the underside of his tail fluke, has beaten the same watery path from the southern Atlantic to the Bay of Fundy in eastern Canada without incident, managing to avoid the dangers an animal his size might encounter. But last July when whale watchers spotted him in the bay, he was entangled in ropes—he had run afoul of fishing gear.

Although it was impossible to tell the origin of the gear Lacuna was hauling around, the whale’s plight highlighted a growing threat worldwide, abandoned or lost fishing gear that endangers marine life— ghost gear.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Ghost gear does the job it was designed for: to catch marine animals.

The problem is that it continues to catch fish, turtles, birds, and whales, for as long as the gear exists. Even worse, as animals die in lost traps or nets, they act as bait to attract other marine life and the cycle continues for years or even centuries.

Around 640,000 tonnes of fishing gear is lost or abandoned worldwide each year, accounting for around 10 percent of all marine litter. Ghost gear entangles and kills an estimated 136,000 whales, seals, and other marine mammals annually, and likely millions more animals with lower profiles: fish, crustaceans, turtles, and birds.

High-profile entanglements like Lacuna’s have prompted fishers in the Bay of Fundy to do something about ghost gear. “The last thing we want to see is our fishing gear entangled on a whale,” says Maria Recchia, executive director of the Fundy North Fishermen’s Association (FNFA). “That’s a real black mark on us.”

Reid Brown, a taciturn veteran fisher from New Brunswick’s Deer Island, is one of 15 fishers from FNFA who is working to clean up the area. When not catching halibut, scallops, and sardines he’s fishing for his colleagues’ lost and abandoned gear.

Reid Brown, a New Brunswick fisher, regularly fishes for lost gear.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Dragging a 450-kilogram grapple—a homemade device that resembles a trio of spiky anchors— behind his boat the Rebecca & Shelley, Brown trawls the seafloor of Passamaquoddy Bay, an offshoot of the Bay of Fundy between New Brunswick and Maine, in search of derelict lobster traps and other debris. He’s logged some impressive hauls. The largest one included more than 30 lobster traps, some as much as 12 years old, as well as a tangle of rope thousands of meters long, a net half the size of a football field designed to keep birds out of aquaculture pens, a spruce log the size of a telephone pole, a gill net, and a small boat anchor. “You can really feel it when you snag a big bundle of them,” he says.

Ask any lobsterman, and you’ll learn that losing traps is a costly fact of life and something they work hard to avoid. It’s not unusual for a fisher with about 300 traps to lose around 10 to 15 traps a season. The traps are lost when boat propellers slice through the ropes, or when strong currents and powerful tides drag the traps around. They snag together, growing into bigger and bigger snarls like underwater snowballs. Sometimes the best places for fishing can be the worst for losing traps, such as the “cod hole,” a large depression in the seafloor near Deer Island that is filled with fish and lobsters, but also traps from several boats, and swirling eddies that can tangle the gear.

Aside from being a menace to marine animals, lost traps are an economic headache for the fishers.

The traps and attached rope cost up to CAN $200, but even worse, when traps go missing, their owners miss out on the lobsters they would have brought in. Losing 10 traps could mean forgoing as much as $5,000 worth of lobsters in a season, says Brown.

The combined environmental and economic costs were behind the FNFA’s decision to clean up ghost gear. Since 2008, they have retrieved 1,000 traps, as well as more than 23 kilometers of rope, almost 700 meters of metal cable, 76 buoys, and a collection of other debris including nets, chains, and the front axle and wheels of a truck from the 1940s. About half of the traps and a lot of the rope were still usable, and in many cases could be returned to their owners, says Brown, although “it was a lot of work to untangle it.”

Reid Brown pulls up ghost gear from the ocean off Canada’s east coast. Photo courtesy of the Fundy North Fishermen’s Association Lacuna hauled around his necklace of rope most of the summer. For weeks local volunteers tried to free him. The only volunteer whale disentanglement team in the area, from New Brunswick’s Campobello Island, tried three times in mid-July, but after their first attempt Lacuna fled whenever they came near. A scientific study team from Massachusetts working in the area glimpsed Lacuna and tried to help him, but fog and rough seas kept them from getting close enough.

By September, Lacuna had not been seen for several weeks.

That same month Lacuna disappeared from view, the international organization World Animal Protection held its first Global Ghost Gear Initiative (GGGI) meeting in London, England.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Around 75 people dedicated to preserving marine life, from environmental groups, government agencies, the fishing industry, and seafood companies, gathered to share ideas about how to tackle the problem and save the hundreds of thousands of animals entangled and killed each year.

“There’s lots of good local work and excellent solutions already, but what’s missing is a coordinated framework to tackle it globally,” says Katherine George, project manager of the GGGI. Groups from around the world, including FNFA, have joined the GGGI to help develop an international plan for dealing with ghost gear. There is currently little regulation and a lack of enforcement regarding fishing gear once it’s off the boat.

The Global Tuna Conservation program has been focusing on a source of ghost gear that is deliberately tossed overboard—the fish aggregating devices (FADs) used by the tuna industry to attract and corral tuna. Since tuna and other marine animals like to hang around floating objects in the open ocean, tuna boats attach big bundles of nets and other garbage to a floating raft, equip it with a satellite tag or radio beacon, and dump it overboard. They return later to scoop up the tuna that has gathered underneath.

A gray seal caught in a fishing net off the coast of England.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels The FADs hang down hundreds of meters into the water column, where they entangle and kill animals such as sharks and turtles. The Pew Charitable Trusts estimates that since 2013 alone, the total number of drifting FADs tossed overboard is between 81,000 and 121,000—and the vast majority are never recovered, or even seen again by fishers. “There is an extraordinarily large amount of gear floating around out there, still aggregating fish, but most of them are never fished,” says Amanda Nickson, director of Global Tuna Conservation at Pew. “There are pretty much no rules, they can just leave it out there as garbage. You wouldn’t see that in any other Earth environment.”

So Pew is working to tighten the rules with a group of eight Pacific island nations in whose waters the majority of skipjack tuna fishing takes place. Starting this year, these countries will require fishing boats to share satellite tracking data with their national fisheries departments, and with conservation scientists, so that the FADs can be monitored and studied after being released. It’s a start, but what Nickson would really like to see is a limit on how many FADs can be released, and a requirement that fishers must pick them up again.

A juvenile gray whale off the coast of Mexico with rope caught in its mouth and baleen.

Other groups around the world are also developing strategies to clean up the oceans. To help whales like Lacuna, the World Cetacean Alliance (WCA) mobilizes whale watching tour companies through its Net Effect campaign. The program provides companies with education packages they can share with their customers and gets them involved in mapping and cleaning up the derelict gear they spot when out at sea. Lacuna is far from alone in having trouble with fishing gear. Whale entanglements are on the rise: in 2014, 30 whales were seen entangled in fishing gear, mostly crab pots, on the US Pacific coast, nearly double the number seen the previous year. And in the first half of 2015, 25 whales were seen entangled in California alone.

This spring, the WCA will send the education packs to 700 tour companies in 24 countries, and hopes to reach 500,000 customers.

In Australia, the conservation group GhostNets Australia supports indigenous rangers who patrol the coast cleaning up nets and rescuing entangled turtles and other wildlife. The group is also building a database of lost nets to determine where they are coming from, so that prevention activities can focus on the right areas.

Off the coast of Thailand, a fishing net entangles and smothers a coral reef.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels “We’ve seen a marked decrease in ghost gear recently,” Riki Gunn, founder and coordinator of GhostNets Australia, told the London meeting. “We think we’re starting to have an effect.”

On the other side of the Pacific, the Northwest Straits Initiative in Washington State has collected more than 5,000 derelict fishing nets and 3,000 shellfish traps over the past 13 years, built a statewide database of derelict fishing gear, and initiated a program encouraging fishers to report lost nets.

Last year they began a pilot project using remotely operated vehicles to retrieve lost nets from deep water.

Projects like these are making some progress toward tidier oceans, and the group at the London meeting was optimistic about future efforts. But cleaning up ghost gear isn’t as simple as hauling derelict nets and traps out of the sea: strict fishing regulations create complications. “It’s actually illegal [in most jurisdictions] to handle another fisherman’s gear,” says Laura Ludwig, a coordinator of marine debris projects at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

It’s also expensive. Fishers like Reid Brown can’t afford to spend time on the water hunting for ghost gear unless they’ve at least covered their fuel expenses, which can run as much as $200 a day. To fund the FNFA’s efforts, Maria Recchia scraped together money from a variety of sources, including the Canadian government’s fisheries and environment departments, and fishers themselves.

There’s also the question of what to do with the collected gear and other debris. The government and privately funded program Fishing for Energy provides large collection bins at 37 ports where anyone can dump unwanted or recovered derelict gear. The nets, traps, and other debris is sorted, with metal being recycled and the rest going to incinerators to generate electricity. But the drop-off points are often overburdened, says Ludwig, and most other recycling centers refuse fishing gear because it is too difficult to process. Gear often ends up in the dump, where fishers usually have to pay a fee.

The FNFA has the same problem: retrieving and disposing of gear is costly. “Some recovered gear can’t be reused or recycled, and there is no easy way to dispose of it,” says Recchia. “Disposal takes up a big part of our budget.”

The FNFA is shifting its focus from clean up to prevention. If they can reduce the number of traps lost in the first place, then future clean-up efforts will be much easier.

“If we do a little bit of clean up every year at a few key points, we’ll keep it clean,” says Brown. “In the last couple of years, I haven’t heard of anyone losing traps in the cod hole.”

No matter how many abandoned nets we pull out of the sea or lost traps we dredge up from the cod hole, though, eradicating ghost gear will take time. But sometimes, these stories can have a happy ending.

Despite the failure of many dedicated volunteers to help Lacuna, he somehow managed to help himself.

He was last seen in mid-October, free of any ropes, ready to begin his winter migration.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Livestock Genetics in two of the three wild salmon (translated) Dramatic in salmon rivers: Escaped farmed salmon is the main reason why four out of five wild salmon stocks are in poor condition.

February 8, 2016 It's Scientific Advisory Committee for Atlantic Salmon Management (VRL), consisting of 12 scientists from six institutions, which was commissioned by the Environment Directorate and with contributions from the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research and IMR has rated stood at 104 Norwegian salmon rivers. Estimates are for the first time based on quality standard for wild salmon that was introduced two years ago.

Two out of three breeding genes Quality Norm gauge size of spawning stocks / harvesting potential and genetic integrity of each individual salmon stocks.

The researchers conclude that only 22 percent of the 104 wild salmon stocks have a good or very good quality. Half have poor or very poor quality - and the rest moderate quality. That means 78 percent of stocks did not get passed. Among these is Norway's most famous salmon rivers like Orkla, Gaula, Namsen, Målselv and Alta.

Status for all of the 104 rivers you can see here.

The rivers in Rogaland and Nord-Trøndelag comes out best - but none of the rivers in Hordaland, Sor-Trondelag or in Troms have a good or very good quality.

46 of the surveyed populations have status as national salmon rivers and must therefore have a special protection. 37 of these reached nor the goal of good quality.

Most rivers reached the target set for spawning stock. Overfishing in rivers are thus not considered to be the major problem. But only 36 percent of stocks are no genetic traces of escaped farmed salmon. Offspring of a mixture of wild and farmed salmon can lead to decreased survival and involves dilution of the distinctive genes over many thousands of years have adapted to life in each river.

Been concerned about long - This is discouraging results, says director of the Environment Agency, Ellen Hambro.

- Are you surprised that such a large proportion of wild salmon stocks have genetic interference from escaped farmed salmon?

- For that, I can say that we have worried long. Only now is this well documented.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels - From breeding range has long been skepticism about the escape is a problem for wild salmon?

- I hope we of this report may put off the discussion of escaped farmed fish is a problem or not and agree that there is indeed a big problem. We now have a very good scientific basis for this and will pursue measures to improve conditions in the rivers, she said.

- What does it mean?

- The draft Act does not say that there is a direct legal obligation to initiate measures when quality objective will not be achieved, but that the authorities should clarify the reasons and work out a plan with measures to ensure that the quality could still be reached. So we will simultaneously work on such things as liming of waterways, gene banks and fight against the salmon parasite gyro. And I hope this report can help to improve public understanding of the status and the need to take action. This includes ensuring that aquaculture intensify its efforts to prevent escapes and reduce louse problem, she says. surprised Climate and Environment Minister Vidar Helgesen (H) says he has already given Environment Agency commissioned to create an action plan to preserve wild salmon.

- For this thing was not good. The report shows that we have some major challenges.

- Are you surprised that nearly two out of three wild populations have genetic mixing of farmed salmon?

- Yes, I must admit that I am, because we have already initiated many measures. However, it is a fact that we now have new knowledge about the stocks that have big challenges. It is a very good starting point to create a accurate action, says Helgesen.

Aquaculture sites in Norway’s Fjords

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Cooke looking to buy all of Icicle February 16, 2016 Acquisitive Canadian seafood entrepreneur Glenn Cooke is said to be closing in on a deal for US farming, fishing and processing firm Icicle Seafoods, which New York-based private equity Paine and Partners is desperately trying to offload.

Cooke, who owns fish farming operations in Canada, the US, Chile, Scotland and Spain, has been linked to a move for the Icicle Washington State salmon farm ever since the start of the sale process, which got underway at the start of 2015.

Now, Cooke is negotiating a deal for the salmon farm, as well as its Alaska-based wild salmon processing in Alaska and whitefish operations, sources told Undercurrent News.

Undercurrent understands Cooke is the main player left in the process, at this point in time. Pacific Seafood Group, which was back in the mix in December, after the collapse of the sale to the Indonesian Soetantyo family, is said to be on the sidelines, however.

Although the Soetantyos were also reportedly in the running in December, despite the fiasco with the deal collapse, they are no longer said to be a factor.

Icicle’s salmon farm, which produces around 16 million pounds of salmon a year, would give Cooke a foothold on the west coast of North America, where the company does not have operations, sources said.

Getting into wild salmon also makes sense in terms of Cooke’s diversification strategy and the fact the company controls the sale channel to the final customer in North America, via its sales and marketing arm True North Salmon, one source, who did not wish to be quoted by name, told Undercurrent.

The whitefish part of the Icicle business, which is involved in catching and processing pollock and cod, is less of a direct fit, he said. “However, Cooke is looking to get access to resource, so it makes sense from that point of view.”

In keeping with this strategy, Cooke is also making a play to expand in wild whitefish with a deal for Fripur, the bankrupt Uruguayan hake catching and processing company.

Cooke did not personally respond to request for comment to Undercurrent.

Nell Halse, vice president of communications for Cooke, declined to comment.

Pacific Seafood CEO Frank Dulcich also did not respond to request for comment to Undercurrent.

Cooke goes wild Cooke, which began with salmon farming then expanded into bass and bream in Spain, has been building up its exposure in wild seafood.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Through Cooke Seafood USA, Cooke has expanded into fishing in the US, with a deal for Wanchese Fish Company, first reported by Undercurrent.

This deal provides a template as to how the Canadian family-owned business can deal with rules that mean fishing vessels in the US have to be 75% owned by an American, under the rules of the American Fisheries Act. Icicle operates three processing vessels and 11 catcher vessels. The company has Northern Victor, which anchors near Dutch Harbor and produces individually quick frozen pollock and blocks.

The ship is attended by a number of catcher vessels that bring in pollock and cod from the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska. Icicle’s Gordon Jensen and R.M. Thorstenson vessels then process salmon, crab, herring, cod and other species throughout Alaska.

Icicle’s fleet of catcher vessels operates predominantly in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska, and range from 103 feet to 133ft in length. Nine of the vessels primarily trawl for pollock and cod. One fishes for crab and the final boat is used exclusively as a tender for salmon, pollock and cod.

For wild salmon, Icicle has shore plants in Petersburg in southeast Alaska; Seward, near Anchorage, giving the company the ability to deliver fresh seafood by air and road; Egegik in Bristol Bay; Larsen Bay, on Kodiak Island; and Wood River, located just outside Dillingham at the mouth of the Wood River.

Editorial Comment: A very bad idea given Cooke’s horrid track record in Atlantic Canada – Lice, disease, escapes, ecosystem, lifestyle...

We can only imagine how this purchase will negatively impact Salish Sea and Elwha restoration efforts among others.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Opinion

ď ś Response via e-mail to ISAV evidence reported in Virology Journal (Author’s name withheld as requested) First, let me be clear that what follows is my personal opinion and does not represent any organization. This is a pretty broad email list and I'm not entirely comfortable delving into this, but here are a couple of points I think need to be considered. For those who don't know me my background is in disease ecology, specifically concerning salmonids. My response is lengthy, but you asked...

First, I think the paper is sound, though in due scientific process it should be independently confirmed (as with all of science, particularly that which will have major impacts). The problem with this "normal" process is that the salmon farming industry- and aquaculture in general- will bring the full force of their political might to try to discredit this, and they have considerable clout. So it's time for folks at Universities to step up. One of the points of the paper is that these newly detected strains are of European origin, based on sequence analysis - that is important because people are going to claim that this virus has "been here all along" (and indeed, there are a few viruses that made a big splash and did turn out to have been here all along, particularly those that infect lots of fish species, aka "reservoirs"). But that can be determined by DNA (or in this case, RNA) sequence analysis. If they are of European origin, then they were recently introduced.

The second point that will be made is that "the government/industries have been testing for this forever and have never detected it", with the variation "it may have been detected, but was never confirmed".

First, the mutations reported in the recent paper occurred in the region where the most common (published and vetted) protocol's primers and probes used to detect ISAV normally attach to the target (i.e. viral) gene. This plausibly explains why government/state efforts to detect ISAV in western North America have so far been negative. The claim of lack of confirmation stems from the a longheld "Koch's postulates", which require the isolation and culture of a microorganism, and subsequent secondary infection, to confirm that a suspect disease is caused by said microorganism.

However, this is no longer a strictly applied tenet in the case of molecular biology, for a number of reasons, the most applicable here being that it is nearly impossible (at present) to culture nonpathogenic strains of ISAV (e.g. HPR0) in living cells. Many well respected scientists have tried (for one thing, it would make research on ISAV much easier), and all have failed.

The third point that will be made is that "the virus has been here (for some amount of time) and no harm has come of it- what's the big deal?!"

It is a very big deal b/c, for salmonids, this is a very dangerous virus.

The virus, as with all negative RNA viruses, has been shown to mutate at very high rates- they are famous for this. In addition, the HPR0 strain reported has been shown (Christiansen et al, 2011) to have previously mutated directly from the non-pathogenic HPR0 variant into a highly pathogenic variant, presumably in one mutation event.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels So- this has already happened, probably more than once, and may even be a common mutation- I don't think we know. The probability of its recurrence is high enough that some suggest that we treat detection of HPR0 as the same as detection of more virulent forms of ISAV (think Scotland), and may even go on to kill off salmon at farms to make sure the virus doesn't get the chance to mutate. Remember that viruses can replicate in a matter of minutes, so every replication represents a chance for mutation, and any susceptible host (one that permits viral replication, even if the host does not get sick) allows for ongoing viral replication...

What would happen if the ISA virus mutated in BC? It is most likely that an avirulent strain of ISAV would first mutate into a form infectious for Atlantic salmon (its "normal" host), which would be very bad news for the salmon farming industry on the West coast. However, that is not a sure thing, given that all salmonids (Oncorhynchids and Salmo) are genetically very closely related (by some estimates, 97% similar). If it got into the fish in the net pens, suddenly there would be HUGE opportunity for replication and thus mutation. This would then provide the virus the opportunity to adapt, and infect, other hosts, most likely Pacific salmon. This is what we must prevent. There is also a chance that the virus could mutate into a form directly infectious for Pacific salmon, but that is less likely in the short term. If that route occurred, what is most likely is that the virus would mutate into an as yet unseen form, infect but not cause disease in that new species (this may have already happened for Cultus Lake trout), and then, over time, slowly acquire enough mutations to cause disease on a large scale. There is also the possibility that it could directly mutate into a form that would be pathogenic for Pacific salmon- that has occurred before when a novel (“new” to that area) pathogen arrives and infects a new, previously unexposed (and thus with no genetic immunity) host. I do not want to be alarmist, but that is a possibility.

What is the proper course of action?

I don’t claim to know the proper course of action (my opinion will be clear shortly), but I think the following points need to weigh heavily in the discussion. First, this is not a question of “salmon farms or no salmon farms?” We can have salmon farms- if they are placed on land, and the effluent is carefully sterilized (and monitored by government or state agencies, b/c it’s not as easy as it sounds) so that no pathogens from the farms can infect wild fish (or other animals) of any type. And the industry should pay for this monitoring, in my opinion, b/c they are a private entity seeking profit by placing wild ecosystems at risk en route to that profit (is my opinion clear yet?). And this doesn’t just apply to salmon, in case that isn’t clear. The role of government here is to make this transition financially feasible so that these companies continue to exist, and farmed salmon remain available to the public who choose to buy it. Will the price go up? Of course. I would argue the current price of farmed salmon (~$6/lb near me) is artificially low, b/c it does not factor in the cost of pollution or the impact to wild salmon and ecosystems. And wild salmon, as caught by commercial fisherman, becomes a more price- competitive product, which is good for everyone- fisherman work harder than just about anyone to make a living.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Also, we need to acknowledge the role that wild or “naturally produced” or even hatchery salmon play in our environment and our economy. No, this is NOT the paragraph where you get to drift off and lose interest. This is the crux of the matter. Pacific salmon (catch and processing) account for, by various accounts, some 40,000+ jobs in the (US) Pacific Northwest, and billions of dollars annually to the economy. And they have contributed to our economy for over 100 years. And we, at least if we manage the resource correctly, have to spend very little for this resource to replenish itself…. it is a gift to us. Farmed salmon risk that resource, for a relative pittance of jobs and money, much of which goes overseas to the foreign companies that reap the profits (almost all salmon farming operations are ultimately owned by foreign, esp. Norwegian, companies. Really. Check it out). So it seems apparent that we have been taking wild salmon, as a resource, for granted for a very long time, and it would be foolish to continue to do so. For economic reasons, as well as ecological ones.

Ecologically, salmon are a keystone species- that is, one crucial to the functioning of the entire ecosystem. The reason for this is that we live in a very rainy climate, and that near constant rainfall has the effect of draining our many rivers of much of their nutrients. In some parts of the world, rivers are seen as nutrient conduits, but in the Pacific Northwest we get so much rain that the rivers are nutrient poor (this is particularly true as you move north into AK). Most of the nutrients here come from the sea- in the summer, from coastal (wind driven) upwelling and subsequent phytoplankton and zooplankton “blooms” which drive the entire food web through forage fish and then all the larger organisms.

Wild salmon “serve” the ecosystem by carrying these nutrients ashore during their spawning migrations, “feeding” all other riparian organisms along the way (not just bears and orcas and birds, but trees, lichens, aquatic insects that are the food supply for the next generation of salmon, and pretty much everything else you can think of. The literature on this is fascinating).

As an aside, one of the limitations to salmon recovery is that we don’t allow enough salmon to make it back to the rivers, cutting the source of the energy supply for that next generation. We try to make up for this with hatcheries, which have not worked very well since they were first introduced in the late 1800’s, in part because we don’t allow hatchery fish to fulfill this need either. There are many other issues with hatchery fish that are important.

Back to the point. If we allow ISAV the opportunity to mutate into a form infectious, and pathogenic, for Pacific salmon, we risk losing many of the endangered or even declined stocks along the West coast. Will all the salmon die? No. There is genetic variation in their immune systems, and as with any (even novel) pathogens, some will survive. But our depleted stocks might lose so many fish that what is left will not be a large enough genetic pool(s) to recover, jeopardizing the billions of public dollars spent over the last many decades towards the effort of salmon recovery.

If we move the salmon farms on land, we avoid this risk. In my opinion, that makes the choice obvious.

I apologize if this is info is redundant to many of you- I don’t know most of you, so I included much in an effort to make a cogent argument. Again, these are my opinions.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Don’t Eat Diseased, Ocean Feedlot-raised, Atlantic Salmon

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 It’s Time to Change the National Dialogue on Energy What Canadians need is a new national dialogue, not about the future of oil but rather about the promise of clean energy February 18, 2016

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Are politicians in Canada suffering from “collective amnesia”? Have they forgotten Canada’s pledge in Paris, you know the one about reducing our emissions by 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030?

Have they not seen the shocking numbers — what Canada has to do by 2030 to meet its own targets?

National Dialogue on Emissions is Unrealistic Well, you can’t get there from here. The numbers are astounding. In 2005, Canada produced of 749 megatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions according to Environment Canada. The Trudeau government must now cut 225 megatonnes, down to 524 megatonnes per year in the next 15 years — a formidable if not impossible challenge — to achieve its Paris commitment.

But Canada’s 2015 Emissions Trend Report shows that emissions are actually on the rise — from 726 MT in 2013 to 766 MT by 2020. The sobering reality is that it would require cuts equivalent to all the emissions from cars, trucks, electricity and buildings in the country. — clearly a non-starter.

Chart of three scenarios for the output of GHGs. Credit: Environment and Climate Change Canada The oilsands’ share of national greenhouse emissions is projected to increase by 124 percent to 115 megatonnes between 2010 and 2030. (Environment Canada data). So why are we still talking pipelines and increasing oilsands production?

In a recent Climate Action Network Canada poll, 60.7 percent of people in the Maritimes oppose Energy East while 27.7 percent support it. At the national level, 47 percent oppose and 40 percent support the pipeline. In spite of a growing wall of opposition to Energy East, Premier Gallant of New Brunswick and most of his provincial premier colleagues continue to support the construction of pipelines to get Alberta’s Tar Sands oil to market.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels National Dialogue on Oil is Yesterday’s Mindset So as Canada continues to drift away from its own targets, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the provincial and territorial leaders, as well as Catherine McKenna and her provincial counterparts continue to talk about building more pipelines and allowing the expansion of the Tar Sands. Oil-rich Alberta needs greater access to world markets they all agree.

The double speak on climate by Justin Trudeau and provincial premiers is confusing, misleading and hypocritical. In a recent article I’ve attempted to show that our Prime Minister has been more of an “empathizer-in-chief” than the visionary leader Canada needs. During his latest meeting with Alberta’s Premier Rachel Notley, Trudeau talked about how “Ottawa can work with Alberta on a plan to combat climate change and how to expand access to markets for Alberta’s oil and gas.” But it’s not remotely possible to do both simultaneously.

Mike Hudema (Greenpeace Canada climate and energy campaigner) is very clear on this issue: We support Prime Minister Trudeau’s and Premier Notley’s pledges to act on climate and to live up to Canada’s global climate commitments but building more pipelines will make those goals impossible……We simply can’t add tens of millions of tonnes of additional greenhouse gases to the atmosphere for decades and call it climate leadership.

Other examples of oil doublespeak involve the addition of a climate test to the National Energy Board environmental assessment process. Both the Kinder Morgan and Energy East pipeline projects will be subject to an upstream emissions test prior to the final decision by the Liberal cabinet. But soon after the announcement, government officials were quick to clarify that upstream emissions will be only one of several factors in arriving at a final decision on a pipeline project. Climate and the environment will not trump other factors such as the economy, jobs, societal needs, etc.

Cameron Fenton, 350.org’s tarsands organizer stated in a media release: “A climate test on pipelines is only meaningful if it respects the commitment to 1.5ºC that Prime Minister Trudeau made in Paris, and that would mean taking pipelines and tar sands expansion off the table. There’s no such thing as a climate friendly pipeline.

The science is crystal clear: in order to prevent catastrophic climate change, fossil fuels, and especially tar sands, need to stay in the ground. Any ‘review’ that concludes you can build more tar sands infrastructure is nothing more than a greenwashing exercise.”

I do not believe that it’s even possible for a pipeline carrying oilsands bitumen to pass a climate test even if its main purpose will be to export oil and therefore emissions to foreign destinations? The exporting of emissions is not climate leadership; it’s blatantly hypocritical and immoral in view of the “Canada is back” announcement made by Justin Trudeau in Paris.

Once unstoppable, the Alberta oil industry is now on its death bed. Energy experts and environmentalists take a very dim view of the future of the Tar Sands. The skyrocketing growth of renewable energy combined with the post Paris Agreement action to slow global warming are the beginning of the end of the Tar Sands.

“Within the realm of sanity, I think the oil sands are finished,” says David Schindler (limnologist and ecologist at the University of Alberta). Schindler predicts a major consolidation of oil operators until only a few remain, but then predicts that “Eventually they too will fall. New investment? Not unless investors are total idiots.”

My Observations Canada cannot meet its Paris emissions-reduction targets if we continue to focus on oil.

The Tar Sands have peeked and will rapidly becoming a sunset industry.

More pipelines “does not equal less emissions”.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels The “climate test” added to the pipeline evaluation process is merely greenwashing.

Future jobs in the energy sector will be in clean technology.

My Questions Why are we still talking about pipelines and the Alberta Tar Sands?

When will we “freeze the tar sands” at current production levels?

Why are political leaders being so misleading by using climate-energy doublespeak?

Why are we not talking about the phasing out of fossil fuel subsidies?

How long will it take to implement a national carbon pricing strategy?

Will the Prime Minister introduce a framework for a national clean energy strategy at the First Ministers Meeting scheduled for March 3?

The New National Dialogue Must Be On Clean Energy A 2015 report by Analytica Advisors (Canadian Clean Technology Industry Report) reveals the tremendous potential of clean energy for the Canadian economy and the future of jobs in the energy sector: Canada’s global share of Environmental Goods is steadily declining and we are the world’s third greatest loser of market share since 2008. Our market share of manufactured Environmental Goods declined by 41 percent from 2.2 percent to 1.3 percent. Worse still, our global ranking fell from 14th to 19th. After the UK and Japan, Canada’s is the steepest decline in global market share.

Admittedly this extract from the report shows a trend going in the wrong direction but therein lies the opportunity to shift the dialogue away from oil and towards the clean energy potential. Clean Energy Canada is urging Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who campaigned on the promise of a clean energy future as a key climate solution, to transform Canada into a green energy superpower, Merran Smith (executive director of Clean Energy Canada) talks about Canada’s potential: When you look around the world, Canada has a clean energy advantage: we have renewable energy resources from coast to coast to coast, the cost of renewable energy technologies are falling, and the market opportunities in Canada and internationally are growing every year.

With a firm majority and a clear mandate, the Liberal government faces an historic opportunity to restore Canada’s credibility as a climate leader, and grow our share of the global clean energy and technology market.

The First Ministers Meeting on climate is scheduled for March 3. The Prime Minister and the Premiers must focus on two issues: a clean energy framework for Canada and a pan-Canadian carbon pricing strategy. This kind of political direction will mark the beginning of a new national dialogue on energy.

Rolly Montpellier is the Founder and Managing Editor of BoomerWarrior.Org. He’s a Climate Reality leader, a Blogger and a Climate Activist. He’s a member of Climate Reality Canada, Citizens’ Climate Lobby (Ottawa) and 350.Org (Ottawa), the Ethical Team (as an influencer) and Global Population Speakout.

Rolly has been published widely in both print and online publications. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Pinterest.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Opinion: Site C: Too risky to rely on one river system for B.C.’s hydro needs January 28, 2016

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels In the face of a prolonged drought, water levels at Lake Mead, the giant reservoir that straddles the Nevada and Arizona border, are lower than at any point since the Hoover Dam was built in the 1930s.

For residents in California, Nevada, Arizona and northern Mexico, a crisis looms. What alternative drinking water sources are there for millions of people? How many farms may fail? What will replace the “reliable” hydroelectric power that the Hoover and other dams once produced?

You might not expect it, but even here in rainy B.C., we may soon face similar questions.

As BC Hydro continues preparations for Site C — a third major dam on the Peace River and the single-most-expensive megaproject in the province’s history — there are cautionary lessons for us in events south of the border.

The idea that we would put all our eggs in one renewable energy basket at a time when climate change is upon us is, to put it mildly, troubling.

Recently, in the journal Nature Climate Change, scientists warned that up to three-quarters of the world’s hydroelectric plants could be vulnerable to reduced water supplies and therefore less power output. That’s what droughts do.

In June, the Hoover Dam’s power generators were, in industry parlance, “derated.” There simply wasn’t the water to spin the dam’s turbines full out, so their rated output dropped by nearly onequarter. It could fall further still.

To suggest that couldn’t happen here is hubris.

Should we bet the farm not once but three times on one river system to supply us with the bulk of our projected electricity needs, when at least some of the power supply from those dams could be threatened by future climatic events?

Recently, B.C.’s Minister of Energy and Mines Bill Bennett said Site C “is the best way to acquire new electricity at the lowest price,” that construction delays will cost ratepayers, and that civil disobedience or not, the project must proceed.

These are curious claims, considering that all Hydro customers are on the hook for construction costs, costs that could easily go well beyond the currently estimated and astronomical pricetag, given overruns at other major hydroelectric projects around the world.

Not only that, but by BC Hydro’s own admission, we don’t currently need Site C’s power, and won’t for decades. Only in the increasingly unlikely event that a liquefied natural gas industry emerges does the scenario change.

Even more troubling than all of the above, Site C’s cheerleaders may be seriously overstating the economic rationale for the project.

In May, highly respected U.S. energy economist Robert McCullough released a report commissioned by the Peace Valley Landowners Association that raised numerous questions about the economic case for Site C.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels “Using industry standard assumptions, Site C is more than three times as costly as the least expensive option,” McCullough said. “Site C fares poorly when compared to cogeneration, wind, landfill and coal gasification.”

The Peace River region has great wind power and geothermal potential. Across North America in recent years, wind power projects backed up with firm power supplies have come in at an average of half the cost of the power that would be provided by Site C, McCullough said.

Another disquieting conclusion gleaned from McCullough’s work is that because power from a completed Site C dam wouldn’t be needed for some time, BC Hydro would likely have to sell significant power at a loss. Simply delaying dam construction by two years could save hydro ratepayers $200 million.

Such analysis strongly suggests that at the very least we ought to subject the Site C project to a proper independent review.

Bill Bennett and the B.C. government, however, refuse to do so. They have declined to refer it to the province’s independent watchdog, the B.C. Utilities Commission, as recommended by a federalprovincial panel that reviewed the Site C project. They also plan to exclude two transmission line extensions close to Site C from BCUC review, even though those projects will add hundreds of millions of dollars to the debt that all hydro users must repay.

In the face of clear evidence that hydroelectric dams are vulnerable to climate change and with all the economic risks that such vulnerabilities imply, why are we triple betting our renewable energy future on a third dam on the Peace River?

It’s time for a reputable, independent body to address the question; if not an inquiry by the BCUC in a quasi-judicial capacity, then B.C.’s Auditor General. The public deserves answers — well before dam construction begins.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

ď ś Sockeye death toll a predictable disaster August 4, 2015

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels The Columbia River Basin is experiencing a predictable disaster this summer.

Nearly a quarter million sockeye salmon, including Idaho’s endangered sockeye, have been dying as they confront water super-heated by warm weather, low snowpack and a system of dams that cooks the water in its reservoirs to levels that are flat-out lethal for salmon.

It’s not only sockeye that are suffering. Sturgeon that have been plying the Columbia River’s waters for nearly a century have also turned belly up. So, too, did more than 100 spring chinook that died in early July in the Middle Fork of the John Day River.

Salmon are a cold-water species that start to die when water temperatures rise above 72.

Temperatures in parts of the Snake and Columbia rivers approached 80 degrees this summer and have consistently been above 70 degrees — a full 10 degrees warmer than normal.

Unfortunately, this is not just a bad summer, but the result of a long-term failure by federal hydrosystem managers to fix a broken status quo. The conditions that led to this summer’s losses were predictable and inevitable — and will happen again. The only way to deal with this problem effectively is to remove the lower Snake River dams.

Idaho’s salmon were listed under the Endangered Species Act in the 1990s, and since then federal agencies have produced four illegal salmon plans. All four of those studies were overturned by federal judges for failure to consider lower Snake River dam removal.

Between Idaho and the Pacific Ocean there are eight dams and eight reservoirs, and each slack water reservoir is another tank where hot summer weather can super-heat the water. (The dams also slow migration of salmon smolts, increase the chance for predation and cause delayed mortality because of the trauma of being flushed through or over a dam.)

Make no mistake. This year’s low snowpack and hot summer temperatures would have been difficult for salmon in a day and age without dams or human influence at all, but we haven’t done the species any favors by heating the water further and slowing transport times for out-migrating smolts.

Federal fisheries managers estimate that we’ll lose 80 percent to 90 percent of sockeye salmon returning to Idaho this year and about half of the unlisted sockeye headed for tributaries of the Columbia in the Cascades. These are the same managers who, only 11 months ago, held a press conference to pat each other on the back and tout the difference they were making for salmon.

NOAA Fisheries, the Army Corps of Engineers, Bonneville Power Administration and special interest groups gathered at Bonneville Dam last September to celebrate “the collaboration that is bringing more fish home,” according to a Sept. 30, 2014, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers press release.

“These efforts to protect Columbia Basin salmon and steelhead represent one of the largest fish and wildlife programs in the nation,” said Bonneville Power Administration Administrator Elliot Mainzer.

“With our federal, state and tribal partners, we are continually improving conditions for salmon in the streams and tributaries, in hatcheries, in fish passage and on the river.”

The problem is, they’ve done just about everything except fix the problem, and this year’s huge death toll is clear evidence of that. Four dams on the lower Snake River are four dams too many for Idaho’s iconic fish, and four dams too many for water temperatures in the Snake and Columbia river system even under the best of conditions, much less during a hot and dry 2015.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

ď ś OP ED: WOODFIBRE LNG OWNERSHIP Is this the kind of corporate neighbor we want to have?

January 30, 2016 Would you attend a discount jewelry party in your neighborhood? Everything at 25% original value or less?

There are such parties and I would advise you to stay as far away as possible - you don't have to be a brain surgeon to understand why. Your hosts will no doubt tell you that it's all "legit" but you know that everything is sure to be hot as hell and that sometimes these parties are set ups and many good citizens of the neighborhood wind up being charged with receiving stolen property. That would be the practical reason you would stay away.

Might you also stay away because you don't want to reward criminals? You might muse "I wonder what supports the famous Thieves Market in Mexico City?" Or I wonder if that expensive broach that Aunt Tilly had pinched might just show up at one of these parties? You might also ponder to whether you become an integral, albeit small, part of a worldwide criminal activity just by going to one small party and buying one watch?

Now, what do you now think about your neighbors holding this party, being such nice, pleasant folks while subjecting their neighbors to risk of jail and presumably making a little something for their trouble??

When anyone comes into our communities to do business we expect them to be honest. Now, we know that is not always going to be the case. There is no way we can check their honesty up front but we use our instincts, our eyes and our ears, and if the store gains a bad reputation we take our trade elsewhere. Moreover we go to the local police and the Better Business Bureau, not just for our own benefit but our neighbors as well. While we know we can't stamp out corporate crime we do know that we don't condone it.

In short there's a moral issue involved. But there's also a very practical one for while you may not know what's the precise consequence of a bad company in your community, you do know that it will cost you money even though you can't actually see it happen.

One more thing before we get down to cases. You also expect vigilance from the authorities.

Let's say that your City Council licenced a company that did unlawful things, cheated on taxes, and made environmental messes but you're satisfied they did their best to check them out. Fair enough.

But what if you find that they did no "due diligence" and perhaps even took campaign money for their Council seats and Mayor's chair from this company? Or maybe the company put on a big fundraiser for the mayor at a swank golf club?

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Wanting badly to come to our community is a company called Woodfibre LNG, which is owned and controlled by an Indonesian billionaire named SukantoTanoto. Not to put too fine a point on it, this man is a crock and lest you worry that I libel the man, that's one of the kinder things he's been called in print around the world.

Tanoto is a big-time tax cheat having been fined $200 million for tax evasion. Considering that if he did that in Indonesia there's every likelihood he would do it in British Columbia if he could get away with it. Research shows that not only has the provincial government taken no particular steps to protect the treasury from Mr. Tanoto cheating but that with the corporate structure he has, it would be mere child's play.

I don't say he will steal; I only say that he has stolen, big league, and we've invited him into our community having taken no special steps to ensure that he doesn't whiz his profits into tax free Singapore.

Mr. Tanoto overall has also a reputation as a serial environment destroyer. Burning down jungles is one of his specialties and he has shown no inclination whatsoever to care what he does to land or the people living thereon or how he leaves it at once he's taking his profits.

Are you satisfied that our environmental safeguards covering this magnificent fjord where we live are sufficient to guarantee that this kind of person is going to obey even the letter of the law - much less go out of his way to protect our environment?

Degrading of the environment is the industrialists cash cow and even the best regarded of them will cut corners wherever they can. It's money in the bank. I could go on but I invite you to do your own due diligence - you'll not find it difficult I assure you.

We already have strong signals from Mr. Tanoto that he doesn't give a fiddler's fart for the environment in our great inlet. Woodfibre LNG proposes using huge LNG tankers to transport their product from Squamish to market even though, by international standards and even the standards set by the industry itself, Howe Sound is far too narrow for this traffic and almost every part is exposed to danger ranging from relatively minor to catastrophic.

Woodfibre LNG's spokesperson, Vice-President Byng Giraud, who learned the dissembling trade while an executive with Mount Polley, is somewhat disingenuous on the safety issue of LNG tankers saying it's 100% safe, that there's not been an accident for 75 years!

But that statement is a tad tricky. You see he's just talking about accidents "on the high seas", not coasts, inlets, harbors, rivers and fjords! This is how industries like Woodfibre LNG "tell the truth".

I subscribe to highly regarded gCaptain, which reported something in the order of 30 or 40 major accidents last year involving large freighters in inlets, harbours, rivers and fjords just like Howe Sound. Some were grounded or even capsized by high winds, hit other ships, smacked the shore, ran into the tugs guiding them or just ran aground. Listening to Woodfibre's Giraud and reading gCaptain reminds me of the man caught by his wife in bed with another woman, and the man says "do you believe me, or your eyes?"

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Here is the meat of the matter. Not only has premier Christy Clark and her poodle, Rich Coleman, accepted Woodfibre LNG without any questions about their fiscal or environmental integrity, they've chased them all over the world getting them to come into our community! This is the "due diligence" done by our business oriented government!

We've all been lied to by a disreputable international corporation; we have been lied to by our government. A hell of a lot of Howe Sounders and British Columbians, but not enough, know what's happening and are fighting back.

Woodfibre LNG, their duplicitous shills, Resource Works (with their formal partners, The Vancouver Province), and Christy Clark are relying on those who "don't want to get involved" who are cheerfully trotting off to the neighborhood jewelry party. My question to them - Is it worse to be a crook or a fool?

WC Fields was right when he said "you can't cheat an honest man".

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Time to kick the coal habit, Canada February 11, 2016 In many provinces, our electricity is being generated from an energy source that is quietly poisoning our people and the planet: coal.

But there are signs abroad that citizens want change. Concerns are growing about the effects of coal-related air pollution on people with asthma and other diseases, as well as the disproportionate contribution made by coal to climate change — “the greatest threat to global health of the 21st Century,” according to the World Health Organization.

At the climate change negotiations in Paris, the Canadian government promised to produce a new climate plan within 90 days of the signing of the Paris Agreement. A major focus of that plan should be to improve federal regulations for coal-fired power plants.

Some provinces have made great strides already. In November, the Alberta government announced an accelerated coal phase-out, pledging to eliminate emissions from coal-fired electricity by 2030.

Alberta is joining Ontario, which set a world-leading pace when it shuttered its last coal-fired plant in April of 2014, only ten years after setting the goal. More recently, Denmark and the U.K. have made similar bold pledges.

There is much to learn from the experiences of Alberta and Ontario. In both provinces, there were worrying signs of worsening air pollution — with substantial evidence that coal combustion was a significant contributor.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels In 2005, Ontario had 58 smog alert days. Recently, communities in central Alberta failed to meet air quality standards set by the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment. Canadians were worried. They had every right to be.

The scientific evidence for the health effects of coal pollution is clear. Coal emits a toxic blend of chemicals — sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter 2.5 (very small chemical particles which can be absorbed into the bloodstream), mercury, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, benzenes and a host of others.

Coal pollution has been associated with myriad health issues, such as cancer, autism, miscarriages and poor lung and brain development in children.

The most direct effects are on the lungs, worsening chronic diseases like asthma and emphysema.

But the evidence shows that the greatest damage is to the cardiovascular system; heart attacks, abnormal heart rhythms, strokes and substantial mortality are associated with both short-term spikes in pollution and long-term exposure.

Coal pollution has been associated with myriad other health issues, such as cancer, autism (through pregnant mothers’ exposure), miscarriages and poor lung and brain development in children.

Now that coal has been phased out in Ontario, air pollution in the province has decreased precipitously over the last decade. From a peak in 2005, smog alert days have steadily declined — to zero in 2014 and 2015. Toronto Public Health reported in 2015 that Ontario’s improved air quality prevents 400 deaths and 2,450 hospitalizations in Toronto annually.

In addition to air pollution, coal contributes significantly to climate change. Coal is easily the dirtiest of the fossil fuels, emitting about 40 per cent more GHGs per kWh than natural gas. Eliminating coal (and replacing it with energy efficiency and renewables) must be an integral part of any serious climate policy.

We know that all provincial governments want the best health for their citizens — but Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia currently intend to have plants burning coal well into the 2040s. We can do better.

With federal and provincial leaders promising to meet in the near future to discuss options for climate mitigation strategies, the elimination of coal-fired power needs to be back on the table.

Recently, the Canadian Medical Association affirmed the need for immediate action on climate and a commitment to meaningful and urgent action to combat the adverse health impacts of climate change. To that end, the CMA would like to see a coal-power-free Canada in ten years’ time.

The Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, the Canadian Public Health Association, the Canadian Lung Association and the Asthma Society of Canada would like to lend their voices to the call for a coal phase-out by 2026.

Canada can’t afford to miss such a win/win opportunity. With a single policy shift, the Trudeau government can improve our air and our health, and make our climate safer — launching us into a new age of healthy energy. Our children — all citizens — deserve nothing less.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Interview with Joseph Barrett on his “Ice Boom Theory” The use of an “Ice Boom” to stop ice movement on the Lower Great Lakes has done, continues to do, colossal damage to the Ecosystem. Ice flow is an essential force counteracts the process of erosion and decay. Ice Movement also prepares environment for reproduction of most of the native species of fish, plants, birds animals. – Joseph Barrett (BanTheBoom.com)

and that the and

Normally the ice boom is removed from the mouth of the Niagara River at the beginning of April. Only now are crews beginning the process, which led to the following interview with Joseph Barrett, a community activist who feels that the boom was never actually needed to begin with.

April 23, 2015

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels How much of an impact the Ice Boom is having on the weather?

The weather effect is measurable but really minimal. It is a red herring. the least of our concerns for the real price of stopping the ice. Not really to warmer weather.

What is the main reason the ice boom is still in the water?

The main reason the ice boom is still in the water is one of money. New York Power Authority (NYPA) makes more money when the intakes are not slowed with ice. It is also one of arrogance. Nobody except me ever questions what they do. They fear no one, they answer to no one.

How much of the lake is still frozen?

The Last quote I heard on ice coverage was 850 square miles. It’s probably down to 600 ish now.

Is it even possible to remove the boom with the frozen conditions?

They don’t remove it until there is 250 sq. miles left. This is meaningless to nature. Sure it’s possible but the contractors probably get more for severe conditions. Again with money.

Are you in favor of removing the ice boom completely?

I am totally in favor of the ice boom being outlawed. It is the single biggest threat to the entire Lower Great Lakes that we face. It does more damage than every other problem combined. This is counter intuitive thinking. People say, “What’s the harm of letting the ice melt in place?” What they should ask is “What happens when the ice is not allowed to move as nature intended?” This was the question I asked way back when and led to Ice Boom Theory.

When was the ice boom initially used? What year?

The present form of ice boom was first used in 1964.

Why was it initially used?

An earlier attempt at one used in front of the intakes alone was not strong enough for full ice runs.

What organization is responsible for the boom?

NYPA and the Canadian side are responsible but supposedly have to get re authorized to use it every 2 years by the International Joint Commission (IJC). This is a farce because it gets rubber stamped without a second thought.

Have there been appropriate studies conducted in regards to the need for the ice boom?

I have urged, hounded, written to, spoke at the meetings and warned IJC. countless times of the damage in an attempt to get a real study done. They completely ignore this or send an antique statement by email saying everything is just fine. The only studies done about the environmental impact of the ice boom were done in the early 60s. They claimed there were no adverse effects.

These studies, (which I have a copy) are a joke. Just fluff, smoke and mirrors.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels My studies are real and when I sent my allegations to the relicensing people at Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), they misfiled them. Lost them for months. These are numbered documents with clear titles also.

They were put with a Missouri gas pipeline project. When I question them and demanded a posting, the license was issued without public viewing or required comment period, in the middle of the night and 5 months ahead of schedule. Hmmm?

It is said that the boom protects Grand Island from flooding. Is that true?

Grand Island is not protected from flooding by the ice boom. Grand Island is in fact washing away at an alarming rate. Any unprotected shoreline is stripped of the sand, gravel, rip rap, protective vegetation by the current because there is no ice flow to replenish them. Now, the base of the island which is an alluvial clay, is exposed and the top soil which took thousands of years to form, is pouring into the water continuously. Huge old trees that were well inland when they sprouted, are now at the water’s edge with the roots washed bare.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels It is said that the boom protects water intakes from clogging.

Yes the ice boom protects the intakes. They are 2 pipes 63 feet in diameter. NYPA disrupts the entire Lower Great Lakes ecosystem normal function to do this. Lake Erie is almost 10,000 square miles, The Niagara River is fairly long and Lake Ontario, while smaller, has way more volume than Erie. It also is starving the 1,000 Islands area of vital nutrients. So, the ice boom is the single biggest act of selfish overkill that the world has seen since burying a Pharaoh in a pyramid.

What needs to be done to address this ice boom issue, if anything?

What needs to be done to stop the use of the ice boom? I have been trying to figure that out for longer than it took to solve the problems the ice boom created. I suppose it will take shining a light on the ridiculous scope of damage one corporation is allowed to get away with for the sake of profit. It will require a public outrage. It will most likely involve Ohio and Pennsylvania suing to protect their interests in Lake Erie. It will take the charter captains of both Lakes organizing to ensure the return of a healthy balance in nature. It will take some public shaming of the officials that were supposed to protect the citizens and the environment from exactly this sort of thing. It will involve NYPA spending some of their obscene profits on redesigning and improving the intakes. It mostly will take awareness. It’s Western New York’s chance to return to a properly functioning ecosystem that brings health back to the Lower Great lakes in just 3 to 5 years. It would create jobs galore and mostly the return of the ice flow would become OUR spectacle. The single biggest spring time Eco-tourism event in the world. People would come from all over to see this event and we have 35 miles of shoreline to view it from so everybody can share in those dollars coming in. Better than Mardi Gras, Longer than the Super Bowl, way more exciting than Old Faithful that’s for sure.

Lead image: Image from the NYPA ice boom webcam, which can be found here.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

An employee from the Electrical Manufacturing Company Ltd. (EMC) walks through the installed solar modules at the Naini solar power plant in the northern Indian city of Allahabad March 21, 2012.

 Canada has energy export opportunities beyond pipelines February 3, 2016 The big energy story in Canada continues to be pipelines. Still.

Why? There’s controversy, for starters, but it’s also the fact that energy exports – especially oil – make up a big chunk of Canada’s exports, and we’re an export-driven economy.

Fair enough. But it’s time we started focusing more attention on the opportunity to export energy technologies and services, not just raw energy. As United Nations Environment Program chief Achim Steiner said the other day on CBC’s Power & Politics, “Whether you build the next pipeline or not … the economy of Canada will not be centered around a fossil-fuel-based extractive economy.”

That’s in no small part why Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne has been in India in recent days. There are always domestic politics tied to these trade missions, but there is both need and value for Canadian leaders – from government and clean-energy companies – to travel abroad, seeking out new business opportunities. If Canada is going to play in the increasingly competitive global cleanenergy marketplace, we need to sell our industry and the climate solutions they offer.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Let’s unpack this.

Not two months ago, the world raised the bar on climate action by signing an agreement to replace fossil fuels and build a clean global economy. An unlikely leader at the forefront of that charge is India, with a commitment to install 175 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2022. India is a top-three player, according to Ernst & Young’s Renewable Energy Country Attractiveness Index, so it’s not surprising that clean-energy businesses are flocking there, including those based in Canada.

Why? The size of the prize.

The reality is, for Canadian companies, prospects at home are looking lean, especially in the short term. While we’ve seen sizable renewable electricity targets from both Alberta and Saskatchewan, policy details have yet to be unveiled and even then it will take time for projects to get started. And, while Ontario has held the top spot in renewable electricity for the past few years, topping out at $12.7-billion in investment by the end of 2014, there are many unanswered questions as to what’s next for clean energy as the province considers its supply strategy.

For companies looking to grow, there is little choice but to look beyond our borders. Enter India – with the right mix of commitment, investment and policy – the next clean-energy frontier.

With a formal target of 100 GW of solar capacity (and 60 GW of wind) by 2022, India is a giant market for clean-energy companies. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance data, the dollars are matching those commitments. In 2015, India saw $10.9-billion (U.S.) in clean-energy investment, a 22-per-cent increase over 2014, with nearly half ($5.2-billion) in solar. This is not to say that the clean-energy revolution in India is easy; finding land and the state of power transmission infrastructure have posed challenges for the country. But with policy approaches evolving to meet the country’s power needs, there’s no sign India is slowing down on its commitment any time soon.

In fact, many Canadian companies have already seized business opportunities in India. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Canada last April, solar-power deals – one with AMP Solar Group and the other with Canadian Solar Inc., a big player on the Indian market – accounted for more than $1billion (Canadian), 63 per cent of the value of the total agreements signed.

Another success story for Canadian solar in India is Sarus Solar, a joint venture comprising three Canadian firms that is planning a series of 500-megawatt solar parks, the first of which will be built in Maharashtra. According to Sarus Solar’s head of operations for India, Arun Agarwal, “The Canadian firm saw huge potential in the solar sector in India, especially after the government announced its target.”

Finally, let’s point to Canada’s SkyPower Global, which, last summer, made the lowest bid of 5.17 Indian rupees a kilowatt hour (10.6 cents) as part of the 2 GW solar tender in the Indian state of Telangana. Subsequent actions have secured even lower bids, yet Canadian companies are clearly in the game in India.

Exporting clean-energy solutions reaps benefits for Canadians and Canadian companies.

While pipeline controversies make headlines, an important Canadian success story is being written outside our borders. It’s a story worth telling here at home.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Community Activism, Education and Outreach

ď ś Stopping Farmed Salmon at the Cash Register

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Ban Ocean Fish Farms Rally: Canadian Superstore – Mission, British Columbia, Canada January 24, 2016

The power of educated consumers Eddie Gardner Sixteen Wild Salmon Defenders attended this event and we are motivated to continue until fish farms are out of the ocean and we no longer have net-pen farmed salmon sold in any of the grocery stores, including Superstore, Wal-Mart, Costco and Save-On-Foods! It is unethical to sell open-net cage farmed salmon and we must get them out of the migration routes of our wild salmon.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

ď ś Norwegian Fish Farms Out of British Columbia Bergen, Norway

On the ground at Marine Harvest offices in Bergen, with the Green Warriors of Norway. Marine Harvest owns 55% of the BC open net-pen salmon farming industry.

Last spring a Canadian federal court nullified rules that allowed fish farms to transfer diseased fish to open pens in the ocean. Marine Harvest is appealing that decision.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

ď ś Action Norway: Divest from Dirty Salmon Farming Wild Salmon Conference - Alta, Norway News Broadcast February 9, 2016

Today people from Sami Nation, Nuu-Chah-Nulth First Nations, Norway and Canada stood together for wild salmon and indigenous rights at an action held at the Alta Wild Salmon Conference. Alex Morton's petition asking Norway to divest from dirty salmon farming, signed by over 10,000 people, was rolled out across the lobby. Beaska Niillas leader of the NSR in the Sami Parliament sang a traditional Sami wolf yoik before speeches were made. Tore Bongo, honoured leader of the Alta Controversy (a non-violent direct action to stop a dam) took part in today's action.

Special thanks to Kurt Oddekalv and the Green Warriors of Norway! Lots of media was in attendance.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Keep it in the ground

A protester steps in front of the signing ceremony at the North American Energy Ministers Meeting.

Jim Carr, Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources (centre) with Mexico’s Secretary of Energy Pedro Joaquín Coldwell (right) and the United States Secretary of Energy Dr. Ernest Moniz.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

ď ś Video: Signing The Lelu Island Declaration

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

ď ś Signed Lelu Island Declaration January 23, 2016 The undersigned First Nation leaders and citizens of the Nine Allied Tribes of Lax Kw’alaams hereby declare that Lelu Island, and Flora and Agnew Banks are hereby protected for all time, as a refuge for wild salmon and marine resources, and are to be held in trust for all future generations.

Our ancestral knowledge, supported by modern science, confirms this area is critical to the future abundance of the wild salmon our communities rely on. It is our right and our responsibility as First Nations to protect and defend this place. It is our right to use this area without interference to harvest salmon and marine resources for our sustenance, and commercially in support of our livelihoods.

We hereby extend an invitation to all First Nations, the governments of Canada and British Columbia, and all communities that depend on the health of Lelu Island, Flora and Agnew Banks and the Skeena River estuary, to join us in defending this unique and precious place, and to protect it for all time.

Signed, on this day January 23, 2016, in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, Canada.

The "Protection" of Lelu Island, Flora and Agnew Banks is specific to industrial development and is not designed to curtail traditional or historic indigenous and non indigenous food gathering and harvesting in the area. Commercial and recreational fishing, berry picking and other food gathering activities will continue.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Stop Kinder Morgan – Keep it in the Ground Rally – Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada January 18, 2016

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 We Love This Coast – Stop Kinder Morgan Rally – Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada January 19, 2016

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

ď ś Aboriginals,

environmentalists rally outside Trans Mountain hearings in

Burnaby January 19, 2016 BURNABY - Protesters rallied outside the Delta Hotel in Burnaby today as the city of Surrey presented its case against Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

About a dozen people, mostly from the Dogwood Initiative and the Squamish First Nation, waved signs and offered their support to the intervenors who headed inside the the National Energy Board hearings. Nearby, six police officers gathered in front of the hotel or spread out to the corners of Dominion and Sumner.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Jamie Antone, who wrote a letter to Parliament asking the federal government to vote not to Kinder Morgan, LNG and the pipeline, marched with his mother Clarissa, who was dubbed the "Mama bear" during protests on Burnaby Mountain where several people were arrested while protesting.

"We're just standing on the sidelines cheering on the intervenors here today," said Tracey Maynard, provincial organizer for the Dogwood Initiative. "And to call on (Prime Minister Justin) Trudeau to follow his election promise to redo the Kinder Morgan process."

Kinder Morgan Canada is seeking National Energy Board approval to increase the capacity of its Trans Mountain Pipeline, which stretches about 1,000 kilometres from Edmonton to Burnaby, to 890,000 barrels a day from 300,000. The federal cabinet will make the final decision. If the project goes ahead, the number of oil tankers loading in Burrard Inlet would increase to 34 a month, up from five now.

The protesters are expecting larger crowds this afternoon, with a rally slated for 1 pm., ahead of afternoon presentations from other cities including New Westminster.

A half dozen police officers are patrolling the streets around the Delta Hotel in Burnaby, where the National Energy Board is hearing the first intervenors lobbying against Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. Kinder Morgan would like to triple the capacity of its Westridge Marine Terminal in Burnaby

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Members of the Tulalip Tribe sing along the banks of the Fraser River in Chilliwack, British Columbia, as part of a ceremony to honor the waters and marine life so integral to the Coast Salish way of life.

ď ś Northwest Salish Sea

U.S. Tribes Fight Proposed Canada Oil Pipeline That Threatens

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Burnaby, British Columbia — An alliance of Northwest U.S. Treaty tribes, represented by Earthjustice, presented final arguments today against a proposed new tar sands pipeline in Canada.

The TransMountain Pipeline Project, proposed by Texas oil giant Kinder Morgan, calls for tripling the amount of oil shipped from tar sands fields in Alberta from its present level of approximately 300,000 barrels per day to 890,000 barrels per day to the British Columbia coast.

The Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, Tulalip Tribes, Suquamish Tribe and Lummi Nation joined Canadian First Nations, conservationists, the cities of Vancouver and Burnaby, and the Province of British Columbia in a historic effort to reject the pipeline proposal and protect the Salish Sea. The Northwest tribes are opposing the project as intervenors before Canada’s National Energy Board, the government body responsible for making a recommendation to the Canadian federal government on the future of the pipeline proposal.

Today’s arguments before Canada’s National Energy Board represent a critical and final call to safeguard the Salish Sea from increased oil tanker traffic and a greater risk of oil spills. Experts have acknowledged that a serious oil spill would devastate an already-stressed marine environment and likely lead to collapses in the remaining salmon stocks, further contamination of shellfish beds, and extinction of southern resident killer whales. If approved, the TransMountain Pipeline would instigate an almost seven-fold increase in oil tankers moving through the shared waters of the Salish Sea, paving way for a possible increase in groundings, accidents, and oil spills.

“The U.S. sovereign nations have treaty-reserved fishing rights and cultural heritage that are put at grave risk by the TransMountain project,” said Earthjustice attorney Kristen Boyles, who delivered the final arguments to the NEB on behalf of the U.S. tribes today. “Yet, TransMountain failed to consider or even talk with the U.S. tribes about their interests, in violation of both Canadian and international law. The tribes decided that they had to go to Canada and speak for themselves in opposing this pipeline.”

“The Salish Sea has faced the increase of vessel traffic and the potential threat to treaty fishing areas and resources, thus facing a threat of irreparable damage to salmon and shellfish on both sides of the border from a spill or accumulative oil spills,” said Swinomish Chairman Brian Cladoosby. “We are speaking directly to the Canadian regulators to highlight the risks of this pipeline to our lives, our culture, and the priceless waters of the Salish Sea.” “The TransMountain Pipeline expansion threatens the ancient fishing grounds of the Suquamish Tribe. Increased traffic disrupts fishing and the real threat of oil spills puts the Salish Sea at an unreasonable risk. It is our duty as stewards to the Salish Sea to oppose this project,” said Suquamish Tribal Chairman Leonard Forsman.

“Our People have always depended upon the Salish Sea for their life and culture. We live in a time where corporations are making major errors in the way they extract natural resources, at all costs and risks,” said Chairman Tim Ballew II of the Lummi Nation. “We have to unite, with all others that believe they have no voice. We have to rally together and demand to be heard. There is too much to lose. We praise the (encyclical) statement of Pope Francis and his call for responsible government.

As natives, as aboriginals, as indigenous peoples, we have argued that the Earth is Sacred and we should treat it with respect. We are gambling with the inherited rights of all our children.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels What type of Earth will we hand over to them, if we fail to speak out! It is amazing that this type of decision can be made without consideration of the impacts to the Treaty Nations immediately south of the border, and in disregard to the interests of the United States itself? It is this disregard that our allies are concerned about. In addition, both the USA and Canada have committed to the duties and obligations of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In light of that duty, we are demanding that consultations be held with all parties impacted.”

“We have a sacred duty to leave our future generations, our children, our children’s children, a healthy world,” said Mel Sheldon, Chairman of the Tulalip Tribes. “We will continue to oppose this project because it further threatens the Salish Sea with reckless increases in oil tanker traffic and increased risk of catastrophic oil spill.”

The proposed tar sands pipeline expansion is one of several projects that would dramatically increase the passage of tankers and bulk carriers through the Salish Sea on both sides of the U.S.Canada border. In addition to oil, regulators in both countries are reviewing controversial proposals to export huge quantities of U.S. coal. Taken together, these projects would greatly increase the risk of oil spills and other accidents that threaten the Coast Salish economies and cultures.

Take a look into our fight to protect the Salish Sea, here.

Read our FAQ on the proposed Kinder Morgan TransMountain pipeline expansion, here.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

A tanker truck is filled from railway cars containing crude oil at McClellan Park in 2014.

ď ś Benicia commission rejects crude oil trains February 11, 2016

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels The Benicia city planning commission, voting unanimously, dealt a dramatic setback Thursday to an oil company's plans to ship crude oil via train through Northern California, including downtown Sacramento, to its local refinery.

After four successive nights of hearings, commissioners rejected Valero Refining Co.'s request to build a rail loading station so it could import oil on two 50-car trains daily, despite a city staff recommendation for approval.

Several commissioners said they were highly uncomfortable with the plan, based on an analysis that says the trains pose a significant unavoidable health hazard to humans and other environmental risks along the route to the Benicia refinery.

City officials said they expect Valero, the largest employer in town, to appeal the commission's decision to the Benicia City Council. A Valero spokesman said his company is disappointed and will sit down to discuss next steps.

"Most disappointing was the commissioners disregard for the opinions of a multitude of environmental and legal experts who spent over three years to evaluate this project," said Valero spokesman Chris Howe.

Valero officials have been pushing for the project for years, saying train shipments will allow them to stay competitive by accessing crude from North American crude oil fields. The refinery currently gets most of its oil via marine shipments, and some by pipeline.

The decision, if upheld by the City Council, would represent a major victory for up-rail cities, and represents a national challenge to the burgeoning but controversial practice of shipping large amounts of crude oil, sometimes on mile-long trains.

Hundreds of individuals, organizations and local government leaders weighed in on the project over the past two years, many opposed to the project. Others argued the fears of environmental damage and human injury from potential mishaps are overblown.

Benicia city staff officials, in their environmental analysis, argued that federal laws on interstate commerce pre-empt any locally imposed safety regulations that would affect the train shipments, essentially prohibiting Benicia from responding in any way to concerns of cities along the rail lines.

Planning commissioners rejected that notion. "That doesn't make sense from a human point of view," commission chair Donald Dean said.

After listening to more than 70 member of the public testify on the issue over four nights, the six voting members of the commission unanimously declined to approve the city's formal environmental impact report on the project, calling it inadequate on numerous points. They also declined to give their OK for a project permit.

Several said they feel they need to look out for up-rail cities, such as Sacramento and Davis. "I don't want to be the planning commissioner in the one city that said screw you to up-rail cities," said Susan Cohen Grossman.

"I don't want to be complicit with what has become a social nightmare across the country," George Oakes said, referring to oil trains, several of which have crashed and exploded. "What we are talking about here is some additional profit for a couple of companies."

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

OLYMPIA CHAPTER OF TROUT UNLIMITED FEBRUARY 24, 2016, 7:00PM NORTH OLYMPIA FIRE STATION 5046 BOSTON HARBOR ROAD NE

 INLAND FISHERIES MANAGEMENT FOR WASHINGTON

Stocking Rapjohn Lake. WDFW Gallery Administrator

Chloe's First Trout, Round Lake. WDFW Gallery

Program: The public is invited to the February 24, 2016 meeting of the Olympia Chapter of Trout Unlimited for a presentation on the Inland Fisheries Management for Washington”. The speaker is Larry Phillips, Inland Fish Program Manager, with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW).

His presentation will focus on the management of trout in lakes, rivers, and streams in Washington State. He will support and illustrate his presentation with the use of a power point presentation. Be sure and bring a note pad and pen or pencil to write down notes that you will find productive towards your next trout fishing trip.

We will have refreshments and a fishing equipment raffle following the presentation.

Bio: Larry Phillips has been the Inland Fish Program Manager for Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) since Oct. 2015. Prior to becoming the head of the Inland Fish Program, he spent 18 years as the District Fish Biologist for WDFW in south Puget Sound.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental science from Lewis Clark State College and a master’s degree in fisheries from Eastern Washington University.

Larry and his wife Marci have three children. He is an avid hunter and fisherman.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Northwest Youth Conservation and Fly Fishing Academy: June 19 – 25, 2016 Apply by April 15, 2016

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Climate

 Marine Life Can’t Keep Up With Climate Change Researchers say conditions in the northeastern Pacific Ocean foretell what’s to come worldwide.

January 15, 2016 If you want an idea of what oceans around the world may be like in the not-too-distant future, look to the Pacific Ocean off the West Coast of the United States.

That’s the message from a team of scientists who analyzed dozens of recent research papers on climate change’s impact on ocean conditions. Their work was published in the journal BioScience.

From British Columbia to Mexico, increasing acidity, rising temperatures, and lower oxygen levels are putting multiple stresses on marine life at the same time, said George Somero, a marine biologist at the Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University in Pacific Grove, California, and the lead author of the analysis.

Scientists are just starting to understand how these threats combine to affect animals throughout the food web, Somero said. “You can go from the level of a proton, a single unit of acidity, all the way up to the level of marine mammals. If you acidify the water, the food chain starts to crumble literally and figuratively, all the way up to killer whales.”

The effects extend to our dinner plates because the ecosystem shifts have affected Pacific salmon, shellfish, and other commercially valuable species. Along with ocean acidification, “we see small rises in temperature,” said marine biologist Jody Beers of the Hopkins Marine Station. “We also see more pronounced levels in hypoxia, with shoaling—spreading of the oxygen minimum zone—into coastal areas.”

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels These conditions have contributed to mass die-offs of fish, crabs, and seabirds in recent years, including last summer’s starvation of seabirds from Northern California to British Columbia.

Only 81 of These Killer Whales Are Left, but Their Chances of Survival Just Got a Big Boost Some species are moving northward in search of cooler waters, said Beers, as well as moving deeper into the ocean, where oxygen levels remain livable.

“When you look at the ocean, the changes are happening in one direction,” said Somero. “Oxygen is going down, temperatures are going up, pH is going down, [and it’s] the fastest rate at which these variables have changed in the earth’s history. When people say glibly, ‘Things always change. Life goes on,’ well, things have never changed this quickly.”

“When you’re talking about fishes, whales, seals—big animals—they have very long generation times,” he added. “And the rate at which things are changing is so quick that these organisms just won’t be able to keep up.”

There are steps people can take to help build resilience among marine species, Somero and Beers said, such as cutting runoff of fertilizers from farmland into the ocean, which can create oxygen-depleted dead zones near coastlines.

“But the continuous addition of CO2 to the atmosphere, that’s the big challenge, and it’s not clear what we do about that,” Somero said. “Even if we were to stop them, the planet is going to continue warming, and the CO2 will continue to go into the oceans.”

Getting a better grasp on the combined impacts is vital, said Beers. “By continuing to understand how these multiple stressors work together and the effect they have on marine animals, we can start to identify some of the more sensitive species,” she said. “There may be one species that is more tolerant than another, and that may influence decisions that policy makers make in terms of managing our fisheries.”

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

ď ś Isle

de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha Indians become the first official Climate Refugees Watch documentary HERE February 15, 2016

The Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw just received $48 million to move off of their disappearing south Louisiana island. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced in January that it had awarded the tribe $48 million to pay for a move, most likely farther north and inland, making them the first community of official climate refugees in the continental (lower 48) United States.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels The tribe wants to move as a group as they are rightfully concerned that a dispersal of their people would be the end of their tribe.

The money awarded is part of $92 million provided to Louisiana as part of a National Disaster Resilience Competition the state had won. Note that the American taxpayer will foot the bill for the relocation. For some strange reason, the fossil fuel industry, who shares the bulk of the blame for climate induced catastrophes such as sea level rise, are never asked to contribute a dime.

The Isle de Jean Charles has been reduced from 11 miles long and five miles wide in the 1950s, to around a quarter-mile wide and two miles long today. The tribe’s disintegrating homelands have already displaced and scattered many families, and some of the funding will pay for homes to reestablish community.

“Now we’re getting a chance to reunite the family,” Naquin said. “They’re excited as well. Our culture is going to stay intact, [but] we’ve got to get the interest back in our youth.”

Chief Naquin expressed dismay that other communities are caught up in situations similar to theirs.

“Maybe we can be the model community to teach others,” he said.

The Chitimacha Indians (Sitimaxa-"people of the many waters") were the original inhabitants of Southern Louisiana. Circa 500 A.D, the Chitimacha began settling the bayous, where they lived in permanent villages in homes constructed of cane, wood and palmetto leaves.

The Chitimacha in this area lived along the Bayou Teche (a Chitimacha word meaning "snake").

Their legend has it that the bayou was formed when Chitimacha warriors battled a huge venomous serpent that terrorized the region. The snake was miles in length and as it twisted and writhed in death, it deepened the mud where it lay, forming the sinuous course of the bayou.

Like most Indian tribes, contact with Europeans put the tribe on the verge of extinction. In the mid1800’s the Chitimacha obtained a governmental decree establishing title to 1,062 acres of land, but by the early 1900s there were only 260 acres remaining in tribal hands. If not for the help of Sarah McIlhenny (of the Tabasco family) in the early 1900’s, all of their land would have been stolen. The reservation today stands at 283 acres with a tribal population of 360 souls.

Beset by rising sea levels, communities on the Louisiana coast and offshore islands are constantly flooding, leaving the United Houma Nation and the Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha Choctaw struggling for dry land. These communities in southern Louisiana’s bayou region “are fighting a daily battle against the rising seawaters and disappearing land—a natural process which has been expedited over the last century by the dredging of tens of thousands of miles of wetlands for pipelines and navigation canals by oil and gas companies dating back to the 1930s,” the newswire Climate Progress reported in a January 22 story.

“Honestly, I think there’s maybe one or two generations more,” said Regee Dupree, executive director of the Terrebonne Parish Levee District, to Climate Progress. “It’s heartbreaking with the culture aspects but sooner or later, as a government official, you have to be realistic about how much you can spend per capita. All you can do is rearrange the chairs on the deck of the Titanic right now.”

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Habitat

In this undated photo provided by NOAA Fisheries, underwater antennas are visible stretching across the Little River, a tributary of the Elwha River in Washington state, where they track fish as part of intensively monitored watershed studies to determine how the fish respond to habitat restoration

ď ś Studies aim to restore habitat of imperiled Northwest fish February 8, 2016 BOISE, IDAHO: Scientists in the Pacific Northwest are studying more than a dozen watersheds to develop templates on habitat restoration that could be used in similar streams to bolster struggling fish populations.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels The federal government lists 28 populations of salmon and steelhead on the West Coast that need protections due to low numbers despite spending millions of dollars every year on restoration efforts.

The studies aim to make those efforts more successful. They focus on 17 watersheds in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Northern California and British Columbia and examine the benefit of everything from dam removal to building artificial beaver dams in tributaries.

Creating templates for habitat restoration could save time and money by using strategies known to produce good results in similar habitats in the region, said George Pess, a research fisheries biologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"The overall goal is to learn enough to be smart about our restoration," he said, noting that the studies will offer recommendations to private, tribal and government entities but won't produce any legally binding regulations.

Most of the studies began in the 2000s. Pess said scientists are still discovering what works and the program will require years of monitoring. They are examining how fish use waterways and the challenges salmon and steelhead face throughout their lives in the different watersheds.

In previous restoration efforts, officials have taken out barriers, such as dams, to open up spawning habitat. The studies go further by trying to determine whether removing the barriers leads fish to change when they go to the ocean and return as adults, Pess said. That would mean restoration efforts need to ensure enough water flows through streams at critical times.

"It's a terrific and much-needed project — getting a scientific basis for really teasing out the factors preventing the recovery of wild steelhead and salmon," said Guido Rahr, president of the Wild Salmon Center, which works to protect rivers and wild salmon populations. "They've chosen watersheds with diverse and different geographies. It's really going to be helpful."

In northern Idaho's Potlatch River, a tributary of the Clearwater River, monitoring started in 2005 and restoration work began in 2009. About 1,000 wild steelhead use the Potlatch.

Last year, state workers for the first time counted steelhead spawning beds above an area where a dam had been removed, said Brian Knoth, a fisheries biologist with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game.

Whether opening new habitat increases fish numbers or simply causes the existing population to spread out is a frequent question in the 17 study areas.

To get an answer, scientists place small tags in fish that give off a signal when passing through an electronic field. That allows young fish leaving and then returning as adults to be counted.

On central Oregon's Bridge Creek, workers have built artificial beaver dams as part of the study, discovering that the real animals moved in to expand on human efforts.

"It's OK if natural beavers join in on the fun," said Stephen Bennett, a research associate of watershed sciences at Utah State University who is involved with that and other studies.

Of the 17 studies, nine are in Washington state. Perhaps the most ambitious involves the Elwha River and the 2012 removal of a 100-foot dam that increased habitat by 300 percent. It more than a doubled spawning beds for chinook salmon and steelhead above the dam site.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

ď ś Save Skeena Salmon

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Plan for Exploratory Drilling Near Mount St. Helens Revived Agencies Release Modified Assessment; Environmental Groups Remain Opposed January 27, 2016 To the chagrin of environmental groups, a Canadian mining company has renewed its efforts to perform exploratory drilling in the Green River valley north of Mount St. Helens.

The U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management on Jan. 6 released a modified environmental assessment for the Ascot Resources Goat Mountain exploratory drilling permit application. The move attracted attention from environmental and conservation groups and U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.

The Gifford Pinchot Task Force, the group that previously sued to block the drilling, claims the new document is identical to the one struck down in court in July 2014, in which Ascot detailed plans to search for copper, silver, gold and other minerals by drilling 63 holes at 23 different sites just north of the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument boundary near the headwaters of the Green River. That proposal had been approved by both the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management in 2012.

Gifford Pinchot Task Force Executive Director Matt Little said the group wasn’t surprised to see the permit surface again.

“This is that next round where they are attempting to respond to the judges’ orders, I’m guessing to make a more complete application,” Little said.

He acknowledged that the permits are only for exploratory drilling, not the mine itself, but said the agencies were not seeing the entire picture.

“It seems like the agencies have blinders on when they’re reviewing only one portion with the drilling permit, and not the project overall,” he said.

The task force tried unsuccessfully to stop the drilling with an administrative appeal, then was victorious in U.S. District Court in Oregon when Judge Marco A. Hernandez found a 2012 analysis and approval of the plan to be inadequate and in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act. The exploratory drilling never happened.

In the fall of 2014, Ascot, the bureau and the Forest Service filed notice to appeal but dropped the motion that December.

Robert Evans, chief financial officer and director of Ascot Resources, said that the bureau and the Forest Service worked methodically for more than a year to address the issues identified by the court, but he still expects pushback from the task force.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels “We anticipate that the Gifford Pinchot Task Force will do whatever it can to delay this project, however we continue to be heartened by the strong support we receive from the people of Lewis and Skamania counties,” Evans wrote in an e-mail.

Indeed, Little said the group will rally public opposition to the project, but they won’t stop there.

“If they approve this, then we’ll consider our legal options at that point,” he said.

Public comment The final day for public comment on the environmental assessment is Feb. 4. However, the task force, 20 other conservation and environmental groups and Murray sent letters to the Oregon and Washington state offices of the Bureau of Land Management asking for an extension to the public comment period.

“An extension of the comment period to the full 90 days allowed by federal regulations would ensure interested stakeholders have ample opportunity to examine potential impacts and generate comprehensive comments regarding the proposal,” Murray wrote in a letter dated Jan. 22.

The Forest Service purchased the land for the proposed project with money from the Land and Water Conservation Fund. The Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife designated the Green River a wild steelhead gene bank in March 2014.

Editorial Comment: Really... Mineral exploration in this ultra sensitive ecosystem on land purchased for land and water conservation and then subsequent designation of the Green River as a wild steelhead gene bank.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

ď ś Map: Mount St. Helens Exploratory Drilling

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 A Place at the Table: Benefits of Beach Restoration This is a video about a project Friends of the San Juans managed that restored a local beach and will “set the table” for the entire food chain and the…

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

ď ś We Can Never Let This...Happen Here

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

A fishing boat heads out of Gloucester Harbor in Massachusetts.

 The Atlantic Ocean Is Acidifying at a Rapid Rate A new study finds it’s absorbing 50 percent more carbon than it was a decade ago, and that could have dire consequences for dolphins, whales, and other marine life.

February 3, 2016

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Over the past 10 years, the Atlantic Ocean has soaked up 50 percent more carbon dioxide than it did the decade before, measurably speeding up the acidification of the ocean, according to a new study.

The paper, published Saturday in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles, “shows the large impact all of us are having on the environment,” Ryan Woosley of the University of Miami said in a statement.

“Our use of fossil fuels isn’t only causing the climate to change but also affects the oceans by decreasing the pH.” The burning of oil, coal, and natural gas for energy and the destruction of forests are the leading causes of the carbon dioxide emissions driving climate change. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 355 parts per million in 1989 to just over 400 ppm in 2015.

Decreasing pH in seawater can harm the ability of shelled organisms, from microscopic coccolithophores to the oysters and clams that show up on our dinner plates, to build and maintain their bony exteriors.

Researchers reported last year that acidification is also threatening to wipe out large populations of phytoplankton, the tiny ocean plants at the base of food webs that support fish, dolphins, whales, and other marine life.

Climate change is altering ocean chemistry in other ways as well. Scientists announced on Tuesday that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is not only releasing huge amounts of freshwater into the Atlantic Ocean—slowing down an important heat-carrying ocean current—but may also be carrying about 441,000 tons of phosphorous into coastal waters.

The meltwater picks up the mineral as it flows along the bedrock at the base of the ice sheet, which is continually pulverized by the weight and movement of the ice.

“We find annual phosphorus input (for all of Greenland’s outlet glaciers) are at least equal to some of the world’s largest rivers, such as the Mississippi and the Amazon,” Jon Hawkings, a researcher at the University of Bristol, said in a statement.

This phosphorous flow could increase as the great melt of the Greenland ice sheet continues, Hawkings and his colleagues believe—and that matters because the mineral is a crucial nutrient in food webs.

They speculate that a richer supply of phosphorous in the Arctic Ocean could lead to increased plankton populations, which could help support more fish, birds, whales, and other marine mammals in both the Arctic and the subarctic.

Those regions, however, are acidifying along with the rest of the world’s oceans.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Sequim scientists work to restore eelgrass in Puget Sound February 1, 2016 SEQUIM — Local scientists are lending their expertise to offset the global decline of seagrass by studying and restoring eelgrass throughout Puget Sound.

To help address this decline, scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Marine Sciences Lab in Sequim are working with the state on restoring eelgrass throughout the Puget Sound.

“The amount of eelgrass that is being lost is huge,” said John Vavrinec, senior research scientist and dive officer at the Marine Sciences Laboratory.

“In 2009, it was estimated about 30 percent the eelgrass meadows in the world had been lost since the 1940s.”

Eelgrass is recognized by the Puget Sound Partnership as both critical habitat and a vital sign of Puget Sound because changes in its abundance or distribution reflect changes in environmental conditions.

As the amount of seagrass, including eelgrass, disappears on a local and global scale, so does an important piece of the overall marine habitat that supports many ecosystem processes, researchers said.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels The flowering and rooted eelgrass is the most widespread species of seagrass and provides a variety of ecosystem functions, said Ron Thom, lead for the Coastal Ecosystem Research technical group at the Marine Sciences Laboratory.

Examples include its ability to act as feeding ground and food source, provide habitats for invertebrates and microbes, be a nursery and spawning area for some fish and shellfish, protect shorelines from erosion and improve water transparency.

It can also provide oxygen to the water, trap nutrients and cycle it and sequester carbon.

Hold carbon Seagrass meadows occupy less than 0.2 percent of the area of the world ocean, but it’s estimated that they bury roughly 10 percent of the ocean’s carbon, Thom said.

“This is important for climate change and really important for sequestering carbon in sediments,” he said.

Reasons for the overall decline in eelgrass beds “are not yet fully understood,” according to Puget Sound Partnership, but such stressors as shoreline alteration, pollution and direct physical damage have impacts on the amount and health of eelgrass.

State goal The state goal is to increase the area of eelgrass in Puget Sound by 20 percent by 2020.

“In places I think it [restoration] has gone well, but to make that goal by 2020 is going to be pretty difficult,” Vavrinec said.

For the past five years, scientists at the Marine Sciences Laboratory have worked with state agencies to try to achieve this goal, Vavrinec said, but both his and his colleagues’ work with eelgrass prior to their collaboration with the state account for many more years.

If met, the goal would total 64,000 acres of eelgrass throughout Puget Sound, relative to the 2000-08 baseline of about 53,300 acres of eelgrass estimated to be within the Sound.

According to the 2015 State of the Sound, an annual report of analysis and findings, the 2011-13 estimate is approximately 7 percent higher than the 2000-08 baseline but has a wide range of uncertainty.

“We looked all around Puget Sound for good [restoration] spots, and the areas we’ve pursued are just the ones that floated to the top of our list,” Vavrinec said.

“We’ve been targeting the larger areas first, but we need to continue to improve our methods because most of the easy sites have been addressed.”

Projects in progress The eelgrass beds near Sequim are fairly healthy and seemingly self-sufficient, but the work and research done at the lab supports restoration projects throughout the sound, including two projects underway in Port Gamble and Quilcene bays.

Eelgrass near the Marine Sciences Laboratory has allowed scientists at the lab to study established eelgrass beds and create long-term data sets, Vavrinec said.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels The lab also is equipped with large outdoor tanks fed with water from Sequim Bay to temporarily hold eelgrass intended for a restoration project, sometimes propagate plants and occasionally conduct experiments to better understand the physiological response of eelgrass to temperature, light, flow or amount of carbon dioxide given climate change.

Because of the space limitation of the tanks and the scale of most of the restoration projects, the eelgrass used to plant and restore an area is taken from natural donor sites, Vavrinec said.

Although scientists err on the side of caution when taking plants from donor sites, there’s a study underway to establish the threshold for the amount of plants that can be removed from a healthy eelgrass population before it’s negatively impacted.

Improve data Modeling is used when selecting areas to restore eelgrass, Vavrinec said.

After modeling the shorelines, potential areas are identified, a field survey is conducted, test plots are placed and evaluated — and, if successful, Vavrinec will pursue a full-scale restoration.

“Science is a process,” he said. “We’re always trying to improve our chances for success, and one of the biggest problems we run into with the model is the data.”

Although modeling can target areas ideal for eelgrass, the data used isn’t always reflective of the actual nearshore environment where eelgrass is able to grow, given its sensitivity to both light and temperature.

To improve the data used by the models, Vavrinec hopes to install light sensors throughout Puget Sound.

Funding for the supplies and installation still is needed, but Vavrinec hopes to pilot the project this year with five sensors.

To regularly maintain and collect the information gathered by the light sensors, Vavrinec plans to network with such existing organizations as the Port Townsend Marine Science Center, Feiro Marine Life Center in Port Angeles, Seattle Aquarium, universities and citizen scientists.

“The idea is to get continuous data,” he said. “This would provide two things.”

First, Vavrinec said, it would provide much better estimates of where eelgrass would most likely thrive.

Second, it would provide long-term data sets.

“That same data also could help us monitor changes in water quality,” he said.

Beyond the hands-on efforts and research being done to restore eelgrass beds, Vavrinec said, the biggest thing that would help eelgrass is to increase both nearshore habitat restoration and water quality.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Harvest

In this April 27, 2011 photo, Atlantic bluefin tuna are corralled by fishing nets during the opening of the season for tuna fishing off the coast of Barbate, Cadiz province, southern Spain.

 Why we’ve been hugely underestimating the overfishing of the oceans January 19, 2016 The state of the world’s fish stocks may be in worse shape than official reports indicate, according to new data — a possibility with worrying consequences for both international food security and marine ecosystems.

A study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications suggests that the national data many countries have submitted to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has not always accurately reflected the amount of fish actually caught over the past six decades. And the paper indicates that global fishing practices may have been even less sustainable over the past few decades than scientists previously thought.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels The FAO’s official data report that global marine fisheries catches peaked in 1996 at 86 million metric tons and have since slightly declined. But a collaborative effort from more than 50 institutions around the world has produced data that tell a different story altogether. The new data suggest that global catches actually peaked at 130 metric tons in 1996 and have declined sharply — on average, by about 1.2 million metric tons every year — ever since.

The effort was led by researchers Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller of the University of British Columbia’s Sea Around Us project. The two were interested investigating the extent to which data submitted to the FAO was misrepresented or underreported.

Scientists had previously noticed, for instance, that when nations recorded “no data” for a given region or fishing sector, that value would be translated into a zero in FAO records — not always an accurate reflection of the actual catches that were made.

Additionally, recreational fishing, discarded bycatch (that is, fish that are caught and then thrown away for various reasons) and illegal fishing have often gone unreported by various nations, said Pauly during a Monday teleconference. “The result of this is that the catch is underestimated,” he said.

So the researchers teamed up with partners all over the world to help them examine the official FAO data, identify areas where data might be missing or misrepresented and consult both existing literature and local experts and agencies to compile more accurate data. This is a method known as “catch reconstruction,” and the researchers used it to examine all catches between 1950 and 2010.

Ultimately, they estimated that global catches during this time period were 50 percent higher than the FAO reported, peaking in the mid-1990s at 130 million metric tons, rather than the officially reported 86 million. As of 2010, the reconstructed data suggest that global catches amount to nearly 109 million metric tons, while the official data only report 77 million metric tons.

This news can be interpreted as both good and bad news. On the one hand, “it means that fisheries are more important than we think,” Pauly said — in other words, when catches were at their highest, they were producing more food for the world than scientists previously thought. This is a plus for global food security in the authors’ eyes. Overfishing and the subsequent decline of the world’s fish stocks can be a threat to the food security of cultures that rely heavily on fish — but Pauly suggests that if we implement better management techniques in the future that allow these stocks to replenish themselves, we may be able to feed more people than we thought, as the new data suggest.

On the other hand, the higher catch numbers also suggest that fishing has been even more unsustainable in the past than scientists thought. And the world is now suffering the consequences, as the authors point out.

Their second major finding was that fish catches have been sharply declining from the 1990s up through 2010 — much more severely than the FAO has reported. At first, the authors thought that these declines might be due to increased restrictions by certain countries on fishing quotas in recent years. But when the researchers removed those countries from their calculations, they found that the catch data was still caught up in a downward trend.

READ ENTIRE WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE HERE

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 NT Government says no to supertrawlers January 25, 2016 CHIEF Minister Adam Giles has written to the Federal Government to make it clear that a “supertrawler” operation in waters off the Northern Territory would not be welcome.

“I’ve expressed to the Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources, Barnaby Joyce, that the Northern Territory Government has serious concerns around the possibility of a supertrawler pillaging our waters,” Mr Giles said.

“Fishing is an iconic recreational pursuit for Territorians and visitors alike and customary fishing is practiced across the Territory. Our waters are also home to a number of valuable commercial fisheries with scope for appropriately scaled sustainable growth.

“We don’t want to see a situation where our local operators are pushed out of the market because of large supertrawlers taking large quantities of fish stocks.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels “It is important the Australian Government recognises our northern fisheries are smaller in scale than any that would sustainably accommodate extremely large vessels or supertrawlers.

The statement comes after a submission to the Senate Inquiry into supertrawlers from the Northern Territory Seafood Council (NTSC) was taken out of context in some media outlets and on social media last week.

A statement released by the NTSC said the following...

“Our submission was taken out of context as the Seafood Council does not welcome large scale or foreign fishing vessels, often referred to as “supertrawlers”, in NT waters. The fact is that there is no fishery in the Northern Territory that would be suitable for a large capacity fishing vessel. The fisheries in which these vessels operate are in waters off our southern states and not relevant to any fisheries in NT waters. The Seafood Council made a submission regarding the use of freezers on boats, which was included in the inquiry, as we represent the interests of professional fishing interests in the NT, who depend on freezing capacity, due to large distances travelled from our single port in Darwin.”

The Department of Primary Industry and Fisheries will outline the Northern Territory Government’s position in a submission to the Senate Inquiry into the potential economic, social and environmental impacts of such supertrawlers.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Video: The Last Salmon Feast of the Celilo Indians – April 1955

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

The amount of salmon harvested at Celilo supported a huge trading center, attracting tribes from as far as the Great Lakes, the Southwest, and Northwest Coast.

ď ś Celilo Falls:

An Indian Trading Center

For centuries Indians caught the giant chinook and other food salmon that struggled to make their way upstream through the rocky barrier of tumbling waters and swift, narrow channels of the Columbia River known as Celilo Falls, or Wy-am. During the spring flooding, ten times more water passed over this spectacular waterfall than passes over Niagara Falls today. The ancient ones left a record of their lives in the ashes of campfires and buried sanctuaries of their dead. They left tools and weapons, items of adornment, and samples of their art. Their record of habitation proves Wy-am to be one of the longest occupied sites on the continent.

For thousands of years, Wy-am was one of history’s great market places. A half-dozen tribes had permanent villages between the falls and where the city of The Dalles now stands. As many as 5,000 people would gather to trade, feast, and participate in games and religious ceremonies.

Elders and chiefs regulated the fishing, permitting none until after the First Salmon ceremony. Each day, fishing started and ended at the sound of a whistle.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels There was no night fishing. And when a fisher was pulled into the water – most who fell perished in the roiling water – all fishing ceased for the day. In later years, each fisher was required to tie a rope around his waist, with the other end fastened to the shore. Elders and others without family members able to fish could take what they needed from the catches. Visiting tribes were given what they could transport to their homes. The rest belonged to the fishers and their families.

A newsreel featuring Celilo Falls that was produced in 1933. The film is titled “Rebuilding Indian Country.” It is unclear whether the background sound during this segment was recorded at Celilo Falls, but if it was, it is the only audio recording of the mighty roar of the falls that CRITFC researchers have been able to discover.

All this changed on the morning of March 10, 1957, when the massive steel and concrete gates of The Dalles Dam closed and choked back the downstream surge of the Columbia River. Six hours later and eight miles upstream, Celilo Falls, the spectacular natural wonder and the age-old Indian salmon fishery associated with it was under water.

That was more than 50 years ago. But the spirit of Wy-am – which some say means “echo of falling water” – still lives in the traditions and religions, indeed in the very soul of Columbia River Indian people.

When the United States government submerged Celilo Falls in 1957, it compensated the tribes for flooding their fishing sites. It did not, however, purchase their fishing rights. Those rights, as set forth in the 1855 treaties, were not in principle affected when the government paid for inundating tribal fishing sites, but the tribes’ economic base was shattered. Francis Seufert in Wheels of Progress, his book about his family’s many years as cannery owners and operators in the Celilo area, explained, “The government, in paying the Indians for destroying their fishing sites at Celilo, was doing no more for the Indians than the United States government did for Seufert’s when they bought Seufert’s shore lands that were flooded out by The Dalles Dam pool.”

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Enormous sturgeon like the one represented here in bronze on Long Beach’s Discovery Trail were common in the Columbia River in the time of Lewis and Clark, but have struggled in recent years, facing a high level of predation by sea lions.

 More action needed to save sturgeon fishery February 9, 2016

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels The states of Washington and Oregon are likely to phase out the catch-and-release fishery for white sturgeon in the Lower Columbia River, the latest blow for a recreational activity that has spiraled sharply downward this decade.

Though fishermen largely regard catch-and-release with tepid enthusiasm, it provided at least a tenuous connection to the mourned glory days for the sturgeon fishery. Sturgeon seasons that allowed retention gained many ardent fans in the 1990s as salmon seasons languished. Delicious and tenacious, the medium-sized sturgeon fishermen were allowed to keep generated a lot of economic activity for Columbia estuary ports, merchants and charter operations.

Apparent spawning problems and a surge in numbers of predatory sea lions led to a steep population decline. Sea lions took a particularly severe toll on breeding-age sturgeon near Bonneville Dam, and are undoubtedly a negative factor throughout the estuary.

Editorial Comment: Curtailing catch and release fishing for white sturgeon in the lower Columbia River is long overdue as these oversize spawners cannot withstand the stress of multiple fights.

A policy advisor to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife told the state’s fish commissioners last month that sturgeon behavior is being disrupted by intense predation. Sturgeon are having to move often and are migrating into tributaries in search of safety. Even so, the legal-size sturgeon population has increased to an estimated 147,000 this year, up from 72,700 in 2012.

Despite a plea from Butch Smith of the Ilwaco Charter Association for a conservative retention season this year, the Washington commission voted 9-0 not only to bar retention but to end catchand-release. Oregon commissioners will consider the issue later this week.

Sturgeon are in trouble worldwide and caution is obviously warranted when it comes to harvest and stress.

However, sturgeon are well suited to hatchery propagation. The states should begin such a program.

Beyond this, more proactive management of sea lion populations is clearly justified. Although the idea is repellent to avid animal-right activists, sea lion numbers are out of proportion to available prey in the Columbia River as it exists today. It is irresponsible to allow such free reign to marine mammals while fish populations struggle.

Fishery managers are being careful about sturgeon. This is understandable, even if disappointing.

But they must begin being more bold in enacting long-term plans for viability of these ancient and treasured fish.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Both men were fined and have been banned from going on or near inland waters for years.

ď ś Two illegal salmon fishers fined, banned from inland waters February 6, 2016 Two men have been fined in provincial court for illegal salmon fishing, according to a statement released by the Department of Justice and Public Safety on Friday.

An Appleton man was sentenced and fined $3,000 in Gander on January 19th for netting Atlantic salmon in inland waters. The man was also fined $1,000 for illegal possession of salmon, and an additional $500 for breaching probation.

According to the statement, the man forfeited 11 salmon, a canoe, an 85-foot net as well as a black ski mask. The man is prohibited from being on or near inland waters for four years, with the exception of travelling directly to his cabin.

Meanwhile, a man from Lumsden was fined $2,500 for illegal possession of Atlantic salmon and $500 for obstructing a peace officer.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels 13 salmon were forfeited by the Lumsden man, who is now prohibited from being on or near inland waters for two years.

Editorial Comment:

The charges are the result of an investigation by wildlife officers dating back to early July.

Not sure if these Atlantic salmon were protected, wild Atlantic salmon or escapees from Atlantic salmon feedlots.

Officers are asking the public to report suspicious activity by calling Crime Stoppers or reporting the activity anonymously online.

Either way, the resulting punishments are not nearly harsh enough for these and other poachers to change their greedy ways.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Hatcheries

These are steelhead trout drift in an Oregon stream

ď ś DNA evidence shows that salmon hatcheries cause substantial, rapid genetic changes February 17, 2016 CORVALLIS, Ore. - A new study on steelhead trout in Oregon offers genetic evidence that wild and hatchery fish are different at the DNA level, and that they can become different with surprising speed.

The research, published today in Nature Communications, found that after one generation of hatchery culture, the offspring of wild fish and first-generation hatchery fish differed in the activity of more than 700 genes.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels A single generation of adaptation to the hatchery resulted in observable changes at the DNA level that were passed on to offspring, scientists reported.

This research was conducted at Oregon State University in collaboration with the Oregon Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. Scientists say the findings essentially close the case on whether or not wild and hatchery fish can be genetically different.

Editorial Comments: This study provides further evidence regarding the need to: Use river of origin broodstock when populating hatcheries, Harvest hatchery-reared fishing gear.

fish

via

selective

Differences in survival and reproductive success between hatchery and wild fish have long offered evidence of rapid adaptation to the hatchery environment. This new DNA evidence directly measured the activity of all genes in the offspring of hatchery and wild fish. It conclusively demonstrates that the genetic differences between hatchery and wild fish are large in scale and fully heritable.

"A fish hatchery is a very artificial environment that causes strong natural selection pressures," said Michael Blouin, a professor of integrative biology in the OSU College of Science. "A concrete box with 50,000 other fish all crowded together and fed pellet food is clearly a lot different than an open stream."

It's not clear exactly what traits are being selected for, but the study was able to identify some genetic changes that may explain how the fish are responding to the novel environment in the hatchery.

"We observed that a large number of genes were involved in pathways related to wound healing, immunity, and metabolism, and this is consistent with the idea that the earliest stages of domestication may involve adapting to highly crowded conditions," said Mark Christie, lead author of the study.

Aside from crowding, which is common in the hatchery, injuries also happen more often and disease can be more prevalent.

The genetic changes are substantial and rapid, the study found. It's literally a process of evolution at work, but in this case it does not take multiple generations or long periods of time.

"We expected hatcheries to have a genetic impact," Blouin said. "However, the large amount of change we observed at the DNA level was really amazing. This was a surprising result."

With the question put to rest of whether hatchery fish are different, Blouin said, it may now be possible to determine exactly how they are different, and work to address that problem. When the genetic changes that occur in a hatchery environment are better understood, it could be possible to change the way fish are raised in order to produce hatchery fish that are more like wild fish. This research is a first step in that direction. ### This work was performed using steelhead trout from the Hood River in Oregon. It was supported by the Bonneville Power Administration and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Greener Salmon Feedlots

 Gibraltar group to invest €60m in world’s largest on-land salmon farm January 20, 2016 Gibraltar-based Rodsel Group is planning an investment of €60 million from its “own resources” to build an on-land salmon farm in Zamora, Spain, an executive with the company told Undercurrent News.

The town hall of Fariza, in Zamora, has already granted the company land of 65 hectares, of which 25ha will be used for the salmon farming project, expected to produce 3,000 metric tons of salmon per year using a recirculation system with Israeli technology.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels “We have hired a company from Israel, which with take charge of the technological development to farm salmon on-land,” said Santiago Rodriguez, director of Rodsel Group.

The venture has “huge business potential” since “there’s no other on-land salmon farm in the world able to produce 3,000t,” Rodriguez said.

“Until now salmon farming on the sea was cheaper, this is why the project has not been made before, but we have now the technology,” he said.

Also, on-land salmon farming is more sustainable than traditional salmon farming on the sea, he said.

The company intends to invest €30m in the first phase to build the salmon site, which is expected to set up the tanks for salmon breeding from the third quarter of 2016, through the following seven months.

Through successive stages, Rodsel plans to build a processing plant for salmon’s cutting and smoking by 2019, as well as a feed mill, to create a vertically-integrated operation which is projected to generate between 150 to 175 jobs once it is up and running.

By 2020, the company plans to sell the first batches of on-land raised salmon, as the company said it has contracts to sell 99% of the product in Russia and Japan.

“By the time we commercialize salmon products in Russia, the trade situation will be normalized,” Fernandez said.

RAS technology to challenge salmon farming rising costs Last year, at the tenth North Atlantic Seafood Forum (NASF) in Bergen, Norway, consultant Kjell Bjordal said on-land recirculation aquaculture systems (RAS) are the only technology that can be a "serious threat" to traditional salmon farming.

From 2005 to 2014, production costs in Norway's salmon industry increased by 55%, driven by sanitary challenges and stricter regulations, said Bjordal, former Ewos executive who now owns the consultancy firm NLK. According to the consultant, on-land salmon farming will be competitive if it successes in supplying fish to the market at a similar cost as ocean-based farming today.

This will happen "sooner or later", Bjordal said.

Today, however, the average cost of the few RAS pilot facilities around the world is high on average, as RAS producers are at a very early learning stage, Bjordal said.

But the classic arguments against land-based salmon farming -- higher capital expenditure costs and energy consumption, as well as lack of land -- are not necessarily valid, Bjordal said.

Up to three quarters of investment for on-land farming operations in the EU can be subsidized, Bjordal said.

The energy consumption gap between ocean-based and on-land farming is "significantly" lower than is typically argued; while RAS facilities would need approximately 4 square meters to produce a metric ton salmon per year, he said.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Land-based salmon farm on Vancouver Island nears economic viability Kuterra has dealt with technical and biological issues and demand is growing January 28, 2016 North America’s only land-based Atlantic salmon farm battled through technical and equipment issues in 2015, but the operators are edging close to covering production and overhead costs.

The Kuterra land-raised Atlantic salmon farm — a commercial pilot project located near Port McNeill on Vancouver Island — has been forced to replace several substandard pumps, install additional oxygenation and carbon dioxide stripping capacity and repair a malfunctioning feeding system that over-fed the fish by up to 75 kilograms a day.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Equipment problems forced the operators to impose feed restrictions and lower temperatures to slow growth of some fish while repairs were made, leading to poor growth.

As a condition of its philanthropic funding from Tides Canada, Kuterra releases regular detailed reports on its technical operations and financial results in order to demonstrate the viability of landbased Atlantic salmon aquaculture.

“One of our goals is to lower the risk to new entrants to this industry by providing them with data and information that will help inform their decision-making,” said Garry Ullstrom, CEO of Kuterra.

The facility was designed based on trials run by the Freshwater Institute in West Virginia that failed to accurately portray some biological issues.

“The fish produce far more CO2 and consume far more oxygen than we expected,” said Ullstrom.

The first three cohorts of Kuterra salmon consisted of 23,000, 33,000 and 40,000 fish as the facility ramped up, but fungal infection on the smolts entering the facility led to unexpected mortality.

Fungus is killed when smolts go directly into the ocean, but Kuterra raises fish in freshwater necessitating the application of salt when young fish enter the facility.

Mortality from all causes ranged from 13 to 29 per cent in the first three cohorts, but projected mortality has since dropped to less than 10 per cent, Ullstrom said.

The next cohort of about 45,000 salmon — the facility’s sixth — is now being harvested for sale, with most of the unanticipated costs of commission well behind.

Kuterra will break even in the next fiscal year, Ullstrom said.

The facility was built with $9.5 million of government and charitable investment, including $1 million from the Namgis First Nation, which owns the plant.

The first groups of fish to pass through the facility have been prone to a number of quality issues, including “paling out,” discoloured flesh due to early sexual maturation, under-sized fish and off flavour.

“We don’t grade the fish at each harvest to avoid handling, which leads to slower growth because it stresses the fish, so we harvest at all sizes,” Ullstrom explained.

Kuterra earns about $9 per kilogram of salmon (sold head on, gutted) from its distributor Albion Fisheries.

Fish that meet all of Albion’s quality requirements typically sell for 15 to 35 per cent more than conventional net-pen Atlantic salmon, according to Albion vice-president Guy Dean.

Demand for the product — certified sustainable by SeaChoice, Seafood Watch and Ocean Wise — has expanded considerably since Kuterra was introduced in April, 2014.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels “We are getting more interest from U.S.-based retailers than before,” said Dean. “As Kuterra gets more exposure, more and more people are asking about it.”

Kuterra has some high profile local fans, including Ned Bell, chef at Yew Seafood in the Four Seasons Hotel Vancouver, who said its “consistency, flavour and quality are second to none.”

Safeway is the only grocer in B.C. that stocks Kuterra.

Closed-containment aquaculture answers many of the pressing environmental issues that the oceanbased industry is wrestling with, including Atlantic salmon escapes, chemical controls for sea lice and the spectre of disease transfer to wild fish.

When conditions in the tanks are carefully controlled, fish grow faster with less feed and draw a higher price in the market. Atlantic salmon in closed-containment systems grow to market weight in 12 to 15 months, compared with 21 to 24 months in ocean-based net pens.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

The stakeholders involved hope the model created for farmed salmon feed can expand to other species

ď ś Cleaner, greener farmed salmon February 2, 2016

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels A group of companies have teamed up to create ‘In the Blue’ - an innovative farmed fish feed that conserves marine resources and reduces environmental contaminants in farmed salmon.

The companies involved are Norwegian fish farmers Kvarøy and Selsøyvik, importer Blue Circle Foods, feed company BioMar and Whole Foods Market.

The new feed has led to the first farmed salmon with a fish-in, fish-out ratio below 1-to-1, earning it a ‘Good Alternative’ rating from Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch® program, a rare mark for farmed salmon.

Unlike conventional feeds, which are produced with fish caught solely for feed, In the Blue is made with trimmings from wild-caught fish that are already bound for human consumption. The trimmings are pressed into oil that is cleaned to reduce environmental contaminants like heavy metals and PCBs (Polychlorinated biphenyls). Because environmental contaminants found in farmed fish are predominantly passed through feed ingredients, removing those substances from the oil keeps them out of salmon that end up on dinner plates.

The production method for this salmon feed was developed by connecting existing capabilities. The trimmings are sourced from established wild-caught seafood processors, and the oil-cleaning technology is already common in producing fish oil supplements.

This salmon is sold at Whole Foods Market, which launched its rigorous farmed salmon standards in 2007 and has continued to strengthen the requirements every year since. Whole Foods Market’s aquaculture standards have target ratios of 1-to-1.

“This new process for fish feed is so exciting because it’s exactly the kind of industry-leading solution that we hoped would result from Whole Foods Market’s Responsibly Farmed standards,” said Carrie Brownstein, seafood quality standards coordinator for Whole Foods Market. “We developed ambitious yet achievable standards to create a model of more sustainable aquaculture, and we are thrilled to see In the Blue bring that to life with better farmed salmon for our shoppers, and a better example for the industry at large.”

Going forward, all stakeholders involved – BioMar, Blue Circle Foods and Whole Foods Market – hope the model created for farmed salmon feed can become common practice, and eventually expand to other species.

Dr. Claudette Bethune: It will be important to see what the final product actually contains, but it’s a good start to acknowledge the feeds are contaminated to an extent that they must be refined to protect human health.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

ď ś Avoid Farmed, Open Net Pen Atlantic Salmon

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Energy Generation: Waves, Solar, Wind, Geothermal, Oil, Coal, Natural Gas, Hydropower

No Free Lunch

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Michael Schneider, Pino Mastroianni and Paul Allsop of the Windsor Essex EV Association charge their cars at a solar charger built by Green Sun Rising.

ď ś ANALYSIS: Green tech ready to step in when oil prices rise: Don Pittis Falling costs, rising efficiency boost alternative energy even as fossil fuel prices fall February 2, 2016 As hard-hit investors in the energy sector hang on the latest price for crude and await news of this week's oil company results, they aren't the only ones. People in the green energy business also want to see an oil and gas price recovery.

"Obviously, higher cost of fossil energy is beneficial to renewable energy because we typically replace fossil energy," says Klaus Dohring, president of Green Sun Rising, based in Windsor, Ont. Dohring's solar energy company has not only survived but prospered despite the plunge in the price of fossil fuels.

According to a U.S. report out later this week, Green Sun is an example of a trend. And green advocates expect business will only improve as prices rise and governments get more serious about their climate change commitments.

Stock markets off to a rocky start partly due to lower oil prices Environment ministers face rising carbon emissions numbers

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels The report, expected on Thursday, will show that not only have green alternatives to fossil fuels survived the plunge in fuel prices, they've hit new records, says Ethan Zindler, one of a worldwide group of analysts who monitor investment in alternative and renewable energy.

Solar power record "There was a record amount of gas burned for power generation last year," said Zindler, a contributor to the forthcoming report. "But there was also a record amount of photovoltaics and the second highest amount of renewables that we have seen added in a year."

An engineer in Russia inspects equipment in the Siberian town of Abakan. Despite the plunging cost of oil and gas, alternative energy continues to make economic sense.

Thursday's report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, part of the highly credible Bloomberg financial research company, will be called the Sustainable Energy in America Fact Book.

The research shows that both gas and renewable energy are expanding at the expense of coal, says Zindler. The falling price of technology plus greater efficiency mean that solar panels and wind often remain cheaper than gas.

One area where that is especially true is solar panels on the roofs of houses and small businesses.

Cheapest alternative "Those projects are very rapidly expanding the territory where they compete and win," says Zindler.

To be profitable, the rates of return only have to be lower than the retail price paid by the home or business owner. But even at commercial prices, wind remains the cheapest alternative in many parts of the continental United States including West Texas, Oklahoma, and Iowa.

"The winds are so strong and they have developed the equipment so that they can basically collect a great deal more of the wind to generate power," says Zindler.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels He says that for the most part oil and renewable energy are not in direct competition, but Dohring says that's not strictly true.

He and his company have built a number of solar recharging stations for electric cars, but Green Sun Rising earns its bread and butter building solar plants in isolated Canadian communities, many in the far North, that have generated all their power with diesel generators.

A solar vehicle charger operated by Windsor-based Green Sun Rising.

People are often surprised Dohring can make a living selling solar power plants, like his latest on Banks Island in the Canadian Arctic, which has 10 weeks a year of constant darkness.

When the sun never sets "However, if the sun never sets in summer, I have a nearly infinite amount of energy supply," says Dohring.

While diesel fuel is cheap down South, by the time it is sent north and turned into electricity it has lost its edge on cost. Green Sun Rising's crucial advantage is that Dohring is competing with some of the most expensive energy on the globe, estimated at as much as $6 to $8 a kilowatt hour. That compares to about six cents per kWh in Alberta.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Dohring has found a niche market, but he is convinced that solar and other alternative energy technologies, including electric cars, are becoming mainstream. Tesla's battery vehicles have continued to sell well throughout the oil glut.

Despite the plunge in the world price of oil, the South China Morning Post reports the Tesla electric vehicle is the hottest selling car in Hong Kong. However, much of the Chinese territory's electricity comes from fossil fuels.

And while cheap gas may give many consumers a reason not to choose electric, that's going to change.

Stephen Munro, an expert at Bloomberg New Energy Finance on low-carbon energy policy, agrees there are changes afoot, but he says new laws — such as those in London and many Chinese cities capping the number of internal combustion engines — not higher gas prices, will force the transformation.

"Alternative-fuel vehicles, just simply because of their market share, are really not in a position right now to be dictating price in the market," Munro says.

More influential, he says, will be investor concerns about the long-term risk to fossil fuel assets.

"These are regulatory risks and policy risks that are going to be applied to fossil fuels and are not going to be applied to alternative energy," says Munro.

"Investors are taking note of that. It's making them look at alternative energy on a lot more of a favourable basis than they did just a couple or three years ago."

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Forces of NO vs. The Forces of Know

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Why The Renewables Revolution Is Now Unstoppable February 1, 2016 Once upon a time, people imagined that replacing fossil fuels with renewables like solar and wind would jeopardize the electric grid’s reliability. Then along came some major countries who showed that it didn’t, and that there really are no limits to renewable integration.

The result was explained last year in a Bloomberg Business piece aptly headlined, “Germany Proves Life With Less Fossil Fuel Getting Easier”: “Germany experiences just 15 minutes a year of outages, compared with 68 minutes in France and more than four hours in Poland.”

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Germany is the most powerful economy on the planet to depend so much on renewable electricity — renewables currently deliver 28 percent of Germany’s total grid power (and up to 40 percent in some regions). The United States has a very long way to go to hit that level, by which time there will be an even wider range of cost-effective strategies to deal with much higher levels of renewables.

Part One of this series explained why the International Energy Agency now projects that, for the planet as a whole, “Driven by continued policy support, renewables account for half of additional global generation, overtaking coal around 2030 to become the largest power source.” Part Two explained why renewables are going to grow so quickly in this country over the next couple of decades, especially wind and solar power, at the expense of both coal and natural gas.

In this post I’ll discuss why it is turning out to be less challenging than expected to incorporate more and more renewables into the electric grid — and to handle periods of time when demand is high but the wind isn’t blowing and/or the sun isn’t shining. As the lead energy specialist at the World Bank, Morgan Bazilian, told Bloomberg after 20 years studying this issue, “Very high levels of variable renewable energy can be accommodated both technically and at low cost.”

A transition to a reliable, low-carbon, electrical generation and transmission system can be accomplished with commercially available technology and within 15 years One very basic strategy is an improved electricity transmission system. After all, “the sun is shining or winds are blowing somewhere across the United States all of the time,” as NOAA explained in a news release for a new analysis. Researchers concluded that “with improvements in transmission infrastructure, weather-driven renewable resources could supply most of the nation’s electricity at costs similar to today’s.” According to Alexander MacDonald, co-lead author and recently retired director of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, “Our research shows a transition to a reliable, low-carbon, electrical generation and transmission system can be accomplished with commercially available technology and within 15 years.”

Quite separate from improving transmission, there are two primary ways the intermittency challenge posed by solar and wind power is being addressed today. First, half or more of the “intermittency problem” is really a “predictability problem.” If we could predict with high accuracy wind availability and solar availability 24 to 36 hours in advance at a regional level, then electricity operators have many strategies available to them. For instance, operators could plan to bring online a backup plant that otherwise needs several hours to warm up.

An even cheaper way to fill the gap from clouds or a lull in winds is to use “demand response,” which involves paying commercial, industrial, and even residential customers to reduce electricity demand given a certain amount of advance warning. As noted in Part Two, the recent Supreme Court decision in favor of demand response puts efficiency and demand reduction on a level playing field with generation, which means we’re going to see a lot more of both in the coming years, since they are the biggest and cheapest “new” sources of electricity by far.

The Court’s 6-2 decision means “consumers will now have an opportunity to receive more value from the new energy technology they put into their homes and businesses,” as former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chair Jon Wellinghoff explained. It “will also mean the expansion of more clean distributed resources.” Here’s why:

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels This is because a smart thermostat not only will lower your bills by more precisely controlling the amount of heating or cooling energy you use; it will also provide you revenue by being able to participate in demand response programs in the wholesale energy markets. This also applies to all other controls for appliances in the home, to solar PV systems on the roof, to batteries and even plug-in electric vehicles.

Now, utilities don’t have to buy a bunch of expensive, dirty fossil-fuel fired power plants that run only a short period of time each year during peak demand (or, say, when it is unexpectedly cloudy or windless) — at a very high cost per kilowatt-hour. They can simply bid for demand response resources, which are much cheaper (and, of course, generate no pollution). Wellinghoff notes, “And it applies not only to consumers in their homes, but businesses too. Large commercial and industrial (C&I) customers with the ability to bid demand response into the wholesale market are now assured the ability to do so, which will benefit the C&I customer and the system as a whole.”

A key point, though, is that new technology is increasingly making it less and less likely for there to be an unexpectedly cloudy or windless day. As a 2014 article on “Smart Wind and Solar Power” in Technology Review put it, “Big data and artificial intelligence are producing ultra-accurate forecasts that will make it feasible to integrate much more renewable energy into the grid.”

It’s already happening: “Wind power forecasts of unprecedented accuracy are making it possible for Colorado to use far more renewable energy, at lower cost, than utilities ever thought possible.” The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder makes these forecasts “using artificialintelligence-based software … along with data from weather satellites, weather stations, and other wind farms in the state.” And that helped Xcel Energy, a major power producer in the state, set a remarkable record in 2013 — “during one hour, 60 percent of its electricity for Colorado was coming from the wind.”

A second way to deal with the variability of wind and solar photovoltaics is to integrate electricity storage into the grid. That way, excess electricity when it is windy or sunny can be stored for when it isn’t. The biggest source of electricity storage on the grid today is “pumped storage” at hydroelectric plants. In such plants, water can be pumped from a reservoir at a lower level to one at a higher level when there is excess electricity or when electricity can be generated at a low cost. Then, during a period of high electricity demand, which is typically a period of high electricity price, water in the upper reservoir is allowed to run through the hydroelectric plant’s turbines to produce electricity for immediate sale.

In the International Energy Agency’s 2012 Technology Roadmap: Hydropower, “Pumped storage hydropower capacities would be multiplied by a factor of 3 to 5,” by 2050. The pumped storage will likely be the most useful in China and other developing countries, which is where most of the growth in hydropower is projected to come.

The round-trip efficiency for pumped storage — the fraction of the original energy retained after the water is pumped up and comes back down — is 70 percent to 85 percent. That means 15 percent to 30 percent of the original energy is lost, which is quite good as storage systems go. Consider if you wanted to use hydrogen as the way to store power, using electrolyzers to convert the electricity to hydrogen, then storing hydrogen on-site until the electricity is needed, and finally running the hydrogen through a fuel cell to generate electricity again.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Losses would likely exceed 50 percent, perhaps by a lot. That is a great deal of premium low-carbon electricity to lose, which suggests that fuel cells will only be used for storage in niche applications for quite some time. On the other hand, the round-trip efficiency storing electricity in batteries is comparable to the round-trip efficiency of pumped storage.

The problem has been that, until recently, batteries have been too expensive for them to be used on a wide scale in most storage applications. But as I’ve discussed, battery prices are coming down sharply, as huge investments are being made in various types of battery technologies by electric car companies and others, including utilities. That’s a key reason battery storage for the electric grid use has started to grow rapidly in this country and around the world.

Moreover, in the (slightly) longer term, as the stunning drop in battery prices continues to spur exponential growth in electric vehicles (EVs), it may be possible to access their batteries during the more than 90 percent of the time the EVs are parked. That would potentially allow electric cars to provide storage or other valuable grid services.

Significantly, a 2014 report from the investment bank UBS projects that “the payback time for unsubsidized investment in electric vehicles plus rooftop solar plus battery storage will be as low as 6-8 years by 2020,” so this transition may start sooner than expected.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, is studying how “electric cars might store power from solar panels and use it to power neighborhoods when electricity demand peaks in the evening, and then recharge their batteries using wind power in the early morning hours,” as Technology Review reported. Straightforward modifications to electric cars allow them to send power to run a home or building — and back to the electric grid. In the near future, super-accurate wind and sunlight forecasts, combined with smart charging systems will be able to optimize when EVs should be charged to ensure the cars have the power they need while maximizing their ability to help support the electric grid.

Of course, we don’t have anywhere near the quantity or quality of EVs on the road for such a use.

Then again, we aren’t anywhere near the levels of variable renewables on the grid that require such a strategy. Fortunately, the rapid growth of renewables is now occurring in tandem with the rapid emergence of EVs — and in the coming decades their synergies will benefit both industries. Indeed, as the grid incorporates more and more renewables, the net carbon emissions of EVs will drop lower and lower, a true win-win outcome.

Lastly, as the IEA and NREL have both concluded, concentrated solar thermal electric power plants can build in low-cost storage (of a heated fluid) with very low round-trip losses. There is a great potential for this type of solar power plant to become a major feature of the electricity grid, especially after the 2020s. The IEA projects solar thermal could provide 11 percent of the world’s electricity by 2050 — if the nations of the world keep their pledge to continue ramping up efforts to stabilize carbon dioxide at levels that avoid the worst dangers to humanity.

As the world gets increasingly serious about replacing fossil fuels with low carbon energy, it seems increasingly clear that a combination of the technologies and strategies discussed above will be able to incorporate very large amounts of renewable electricity into the electric grid cost-effectively. The “intermittency” problem is essentially solved. The will-power problem, however, isn’t.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Despite

Supreme Court, Clean Energy and Climate Progress Are Full Speed

Ahead February 11, 2016

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Let’s make one thing perfectly clear - while the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday to put a temporary hold on the Clean Power Plan was disappointing, it won’t revive the fortunes of the coal industry, slow the transition to clean energy, or cripple progress toward meeting the climate commitment the US made in Paris last year.

Yesterday’s decision means the Supreme Court is temporarily pausing the Clean Power Plan from going into effect, while the courts consider the merits of the case. As that legal process unfolds, likely into 2017, something else will continue unfolding as well - the steady progress of the Sierra Club and our allies to retire coal plants and replace them with clean energy. As we outlined in a report released late last year, our strategy gives us a pathway to meet our climate targets, even as the Clean Power Plan makes its way through the courts.

Thanks to coal retirements and the rise of clean energy, US carbon emissions are at their lowest level in two decades and are continuing to fall. In 2015, the US got just 34 percent of our electricity from coal, the lowest level in recorded history, and experts don’t see a reversal of that trend. Since 2010, we’ve won retirement of 231 coal plants that make up one-third of the US coal fleet, and we’re just warming up, with the goal of securing retirement of half the US coal fleet no later than 2017.

The momentum behind clean energy keeps growing, and this pause of the Clean Power Plan won’t slow it down. In 2015 renewable energy - like wind and solar - was our biggest source of new power on the grid, making up 65 percent of all new electricity generation and eclipsing gas for the very first time. As we outlined in that report last year, all this progress has the US already halfway to meeting the 2030 Clean Power Plan carbon reduction requirements, five years before the rule even takes effect.

With grassroots power and market forces on our side, the US will remain on track to meet our Paris commitments in the electric sector, but there is still more the US and Obama Administration must do to avert a climate crisis, including adopting strong standards to reduce methane pollution from all sources in the oil and gas sector.

While the Supreme Court stay is a disappointing development, we are confident that the courts will ultimately uphold the Clean Power Plan, just as they have upheld the EPA’s responsibility to address climate pollution under the Clean Air Act many times before. And in the meantime, we are fortunate to have a proven, resilient, grassroots strategy that ensures we will keep making progress on clean air and water, climate change, and clean energy. We're not taking a break - we're stepping on the accelerator. Join us.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Uruguay

Now Generates Almost 100 Percent Of Its Electricity From Renewable Sources January 27, 2016

At the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, held in Paris this past November and December, Uruguay made quite an environmentally and economically friendly statement. The South American nation announced that it receives 94.5 percent of its electricity from renewable sources including wind and solar. Furthermore, they’ve managed to make ends meet without utilizing government subsidies, or even affecting consumers’ wallets by raising prices.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels There are a lot of reasons why people have a hard time doing things that are better for the earth and their health. From buying organic food to opting out of using fossil fuels, one of the biggest excuses is that the cost keeps them incapable of making the better choice. But this can’t be so for the 3.4 million residents of Uruguay, because the electricity prices are at an all-time low.

The naysayers might wonder about how technology or investment might play a part — two things larger economies have a hard time fathoming — but the South American country was able to make this shift without implementing any drastic measures. Of the process, Ramón Méndez, who is the National Director of Energy, explained at the conference that the components involved are simple: “clear decision-making, a supportive regulatory environment and a strong partnership between the public and private sector.” He continued to say that, by giving investors a secure environment, maintenance and construction costs stay low.

The formula sounds simple, and seemingly attractive. It was also achieved in just 10 years. In order to improve their carbon footprint, the windy country implemented more and more wind farms, providing foreign investors an inviting fixed state utility price over a 20-year period. Companies are lining up for it, no doubt. The country now utilizes wind energy as their main source of electricity.

The formula has permitted a great mix of renewables. Along with wind, they also utilize solar, biomass, and hydropower. The low-carbon package makes up 55 percent of Uruguay’s energy, including transportation fuel.

Globally speaking, renewables make up a mere 12 percent.

Editorial Comment: 1. Hydropower will no longer be a viable option for many due to increasing costs and climate change.

2. Hydropower is not ecosystem-friendly

Also announced at the summit was Uruguay’s pledge to slash carbon emission by a whopping 88 percent in just two years. Méndez has set his goals high, but why not? Our entire world continues to experience the repercussions of our detrimental carbon footprint, and Uruguay is simply trying to reduce their part. It’s also a financially sound system, giving countries all over the world even more reason to listen up. “For three years we haven’t imported a single kilowatt hour,” Méndez explained.

“We used to be reliant on electricity imports from Argentina, but now we export to them. Last summer, we sold a third of our power generation to them.”

This isn’t to say that things are running perfectly in the country, however. The fact is, not all sectors of Uruguay rely heavily on renewable sources. In terms of transportation, oil still reigns king, accounting for 45 percent of the total energy mix. Nonetheless, the country’s motivation and actions have implemented positive changes, and should, if anything, inspire the rest of the world to listen up and find new, planet-friendly formulas too.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Geothermal

 Canada's First Geothermal Plant Is Being Built in the Oil Industry's Backyard March 27, 2015 At the end of last year, on a leased property two hours southeast of Regina, Saskatchewan, Deep Earth Energy Corp. began preparations for Canada’s first geothermal power plant.

Unlike other renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, geothermal energy runs 24/7, and isn’t subject to seasonal variations as with hydroelectric. And according to CanGEA, the Canadian Geothermal Energy Association, Canada has enough geothermal potential to supply at least 5% of its electricity via geothermal. So why is this only Canada’s first plant?

The country’s abundance of other energy sources—such as oil and coal in Alberta, nuclear power in Ontario, and hydroelectric in Quebec and British Columbia—certainly haven’t helped. And investors have been understandably wary of betting millions on an industry with notoriously slow startup times and few viable sites.

In other words, it would seem that the risk hasn’t been worth the reward.

But Deep Earth Energy thinks it has found a winning combination of relatively low cost, location and, most importantly, a proven power resource. The company is taking advantage of existing oil industry data to skip the high cost of exploration, and is using new drilling technology that the company claims is earthquake-safe. It also helps that the Saskatchewan site is in a populated area where the locals are no strangers to energy development, and access roads already exist.

If successful, the company’s planned 5 MW pilot plant will produce enough energy to serve around 5,000 homes.

At first glance, it may seem strange that the landlocked province of Saskatchewan would be the birthplace of geothermal energy in Canada. Aside from the fact that Saskatchewan is one of the country’s top producers of oil and gas, almost all geothermal plants around the world, from the Philippines to Iceland, are found near and around tectonic plate boundaries where hot underground reservoirs are located relatively close to the surface. Logic says that British Columbia and the Yukon, where the Pacific plate meets the North American plate, would make the most sense.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels But Southern Saskatchewan is nowhere near any plate boundaries, and that’s where binary cycle technology comes in.

Typically, a geothermal developer will drill multiple foot-wide holes several kilometers into the ground.

These holes bring hot water to ground level where it flashes into steam due to the considerable pressure change, and the steam drives a turbine to generate electricity. But in Saskatchewan, the hot water aquifers are not only deeper, but also not hot enough to flash into steam once the water reaches the surface.

With binary cycle technology, hot water is brought up to the surface and into a heat-exchange chamber where it makes contact with a heat transfer fluid—usually isobutane, which has a low temperature boiling point. As the fluid boils, the resulting isobutane vapour drives a turbine to generate electricity. Once the isobutane vapour condenses, it is pumped back into the heatexchange chamber to repeat the process again.

The hot water, which loses heat after coming into contact with the isobutane, is reinjected into the ground where it quickly picks up the Earth’s heat and is soon ready to be brought to the surface once more.

A binary geothermal system. Steam is used directly from the wells to drive a turbine generator.

Wastewater from the condenser is injected back into the subsurface to help extend the useful life of the hydrothermal system.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Deep Earth plans to use this technology to harness the 120°C heat of a vast underground aquifer first discovered by a US oil company, Amerada Petroleum, in the 1950s. The 40,000 square kilometer aquifer is larger than Vancouver Island and has the potential to produce hundreds of megawatts of power. Each plant would appear as little more than Quonset huts dotting the landscape with the rest of the action happening three kilometres underneath the prairie grass—a familiar scene, given the region’s existing development of oil and gas.

Less familiar in the province is the potential for seismic activity—something that, according to geologist and geothermal specialist Ryan Libbey from McGill University, isn’t entirely avoidable.

“Microseismicity associated with changing stresses in the reservoir due to production and reinjection is common in geothermal developments,” he said.

“However these events are largely too small to be detected without very sensitive geophones,” and according to Libbey, Deep Earth’s pilot plant “is located in a stable sedimentary basin distal from any major active faults, which completely negates the possibility for a serious seismic event induced by the geothermal development.”

But there have been exceptions. For example, in 2006, a 3.4 magnitude tremor damaged buildings in downtown Basel, Switzerland. This project, however, utilized a new technology known as Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS), which differs greatly from the binary cycle technology Deep Earth will use. Still under development, EGS is more akin to the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing.

High-pressure water is pumped deep underground to crack the rock, thereby creating an artificial hot reservoir. Proponents argue it could triple the global potential of geothermal, but nobody wants major earthquakes in their backyard, and so Deep Earth is taking a safer tact.

An Enhanced Geothermal System. 1. Reservoir 2. Pump house 3. Heat exchanger 4. Turbine hall 5. Production well 6. Injection well 7. Hot water to district heating 8. Porous rock 9. Well 10. Solid bedrock.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Ultimately, the project’s biggest problem might be money. With $4 million already spent on feasibility studies, Kirsten Marcia, the CEO of Deep Earth, said she still needs to raise $5 million more from investors before she can receive approval for the loans that will finance construction of the plant itself. And because typical geothermal projects can take more than ten years to start—and sometimes fail entirely if the characteristics of the underground reservoir don’t meet expectations—it doesn’t take much for investors to lose faith and funding to dry up.

Borealis Geopower’s project near Valemount, BC is still stuck in the preliminary exploration phase, while another promising project near Pemberton, BC was abandoned in 2014 after Ram Power Corp. spent $30 million drilling exploratory wells only to find that the resource was not good enough.

But when they do work as planned, the returns of a successful geothermal plant are impressive. At current electrical prices in Saskatchewan ($0.10/kwh), a rough calculation suggests that Deep Earth’s $40 million project could pay for itself in just 15 years—and then continue to produce energy for many decades more. The world’s oldest geothermal electricity generator, located in Larderello, Italy, has been operating for over 100 years. Though it started off small with a single 250 KW dynamo in 1913, the combined geothermal generating capacity of the region now tops 700 MW. Although Deep Earth’s 5 MW plant may seem puny compared with the gigawatts of wind power going up around the country, it’s the first step to proving that geothermal is a viable contender for clean energy in Canada, too. And the nascent geothermal industry hopes that funding will snowball once the first plant is pumping power into the Canadian grid. Geothermal may be a big gamble, but the potential payoffs are too great to pass up.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Ocean Waves  Wave energy plants in Brazil

 Pontoon Power Converter

 Wave Star working prototype proving the harvest of energy from waves

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

ď ś Harnessing wave energy to light up coastal communities February 8, 2016 Oscilla Power develops a wave energy converter sturdy enough for the ocean, practical enough for the grid There's a new renewable energy player in town and it's about to make waves in the industry. Despite its massive potential as a source for renewable energy, the ocean is unlikely to contribute meaningfully to electricity supplies without dramatic, innovation-driven reductions in the cost of energy conversion.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels That's where engineers Balky Nair, Rahul Shendure and Tim Mundon come in with their company, Oscilla Power. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), they're developing a utility-scale wave energy harvester called the Triton. It's a sturdy system with few moving parts -- rugged enough to stand up to harsh seas with little need for maintenance. This technology shows promise as a means for delivering utility-scale electric power to the grid at a price that is competitive with conventional fossil or renewable technologies.

The team plans more tests with increasingly larger and more sophisticated prototypes. At full scale, each Triton system will be 30 yards wide and will power more than 650 homes.

The research in this episode was supported by NSF grant #1127503, Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II: Materials for Renewable Energy Systems.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Carnegie completes final milestone for CETO 5 Perth wave energy project January 27, 2016 ASX-listed Carnegie Wave Energy has successfully completed 12 months of operations of its ground-breaking CETO 5 Perth Project, thus ticking off the final milestone required for its various government grant funding agreements with both state and federal governments.

Carnegie officially switched on the onshore power station for its Perth Wave Energy Project a year ago, marking the launch of the world’s first commercial-scale grid connected wave energy array and the first time in Australia that wave-generated electricity has been fed into the grid.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels The WA-based company said in a statement on Wednesday it had now submitted all grant milestone invoices to the WA government’s Low Emissions Energy Development (LEED) Fund and the Australian government’s Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).

Additionally, the company said on Wednesday it had also recently received a $200,000 CETO 6 milestone payment from ARENA for completion of the concept design.

As reported here in October last year, the CETO 6 design has a number of advantages over the CETO 5 model, including a roughly four-times increase in rated capacity to 1MW. The new design also eliminates the need for heavy offshore lifts (and associated costly heavy lift vessels), adding to a much simplified installation and maintenance program.

Further the CETO 6 has more advanced control systems, with power generation contained inside the Buoyant Actuator, which goes to increased system efficiency.

An electrical export cable (or umbilical) is also used to deliver the power onshore, reducing transmission losses compared to the current CETO 5 Perth Wave Energy Project, which uses a pipeline with high pressure fluid.

Carnegie says the incorporation of the power generation equipment offshore also increases the market for CETO, making it able to take advantage of deeper, and further off-shore wave resources and sites.

The team has also identified a preferred project site for the CETO 6 array, some 10km offshore from Garden Island.

In December, Carnegie Wave announced it had been awarded $800,000 of funding from the Australian government towards its plans to use its CETO technology to develop a renewable energy microgrid for the island nation of Mauritius.

The Mauritius project would be based on the company’s Garden Island Microgrid Project, which – announced last year – will consist of Carnegie’s CETO 6 array, the existing reverse osmosis desalination plant currently operating on Garden Island after being switched on in October, plus 2MW of solar PV power generation and sufficient energy storage to allow safe, stable and reliable interaction with the electricity grid.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

One of the main aims of the Garden Island project has been to provide a viable commercial model for islands, and edge of grid and remote communities.

And it has already generated a lot of interest. In April, Carnegie signed a deal to develop wave energy projects in Chile and Peru, to help supply renewable energy and water to some of the region’s remote island outposts.

The funding for the Mauritius project, which will be controlled by the Mauritian Ministry of Finance and Economic Development, will go towards the study and design of high penetration renewable energy microgrids incorporating wave energy on Mauritius and the neighbouring island of Rodrigues.

Just two weeks earlier, Carnegie closed its latest funding round, having raised $7.5 million towards the commercialisation of its CETO technology – $2.5 million more than it had hoped to raise.

Carnegie said on Wednesday it had now received 100 per cent of the grant payments from the WA government, and was set to receive another $955,043 from ARENA, having has submitted the final CETO 5 milestone invoices.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Coming Soon: The World’s Largest Tidal Power Plant Will Generate Electricity For 175,000 Homes September 13, 2014 Funding has just been secured to break ground on the world’s largest ocean current-driven power plant on the shores of Scotland. The plant is expected to supply the electrical needs of 175,000 homes once completed, with the initial delivery of electricity expected by 2016.

The first phase of the project will include 61 tidal turbines which will supply Scotland with enough power for 42,000 families. Eventually there could be as many as 269 water turbines installed on the array, creating 398 megawatts of electricity. $83 million has been raised to start the first phase of the power plant.

Scotland has a goal of being completely off of fossil fuels by 2020, and this projects puts them on the path to meet that ambitious target.

Tidal energy works in a very similar manner to wind energy; in fact, the turbines look very similar. According MeyGen, the builder of the plant, “Sea water is 832 times denser than air and so a 5 knot ocean current has more kinetic energy than a 220 MPH wind. Therefore ocean currents have a very high energy density and a smaller device is required to harness tidal current energy than to harness wind energy.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Tidal current energy takes the kinetic energy available in currents and converts it into electricity. As oceans cover over 70% of Earth’s surface, ocean energy (including wave power, tidal current power and ocean thermal energy conversion) represents a vast source of energy, estimated at between 2,000 and 4,000 TWh per year, enough energy to continuously light between 2 and 4 billion 11W lowenergy light bulbs.”

Due to the slower moving blades in a water current powered turbine, it is less likely that they will cause harm to sea life or the surrounding ecosystem. Tidal turbines are much less disruptive to the flow of water than other types of tidal power such as ‘barrages’, which actually trap and release rising tide water.

The project will be built in the Pentland Firth in Scotland.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Here is a graphic that shows how the project will look when completed.

Here’s a short video that shows how tidal turbines work:

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Microsoft sinks to new depths with underwater data centre experiment Why schlep data cross-country when we live on the coast, near free cooling?

February 1, 2016 Microsoft has revealed that it's trialed an underwater data centre.

Project Natick saw Redmond sink a capsule about a mile offshore from Seattle, an approach felt to have potential because about half of humanity lives on or near coastlines. Microsoft's thinking is that it's a good idea to put data centres near their users, rather than taking data on latency-inducing cross-country journeys. Throw in the fact that immersion in water is a handy way to get temperatures down and the idea was felt to have merit by Microsoft leadership.

The company therefore constructed the capsule depicted above (here for readers on mobile devices, placed a single rack of servers inside, filled it with pressurized nitrogen, clamped heat exchangers to the hull, connected it to the Net and powered it up. The capsule, dubbed “Leona Philpot” after a Halo character, was then sunk near the California town of San Luis Obispo and chugged away doing actual work for over 100 days, at a depth of 30 feet.

Once retrieved, the capsule was in rude health, having lasted longer than expected and even giving a few barnacles a home.

This experiment was powered from terra firma. In future, Microsoft imagines it might be possible to power sunken data centres with wave energy.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Trials are planned near existing wave energy generation trials. Redmond's plans now call for such data centres to have a five-year working life, as that matches that lifespan of servers in its cloud. The capsules are hoped to survive twenty years.

Cooling is one of the big, big contributors to data centre operating costs, so anything that cools kit without the need for an extra input is welcome. El Reg also notes that many large cities already have good locations for such data centres, because submarine cable landing sites are generally protected zones into which shipping is not permitted and fisherfolk are prevented from doing much more than throwing over a single hook. Submarine cables are also well-armoured when close to shore, perhaps representing a good conduit for power. If cable operators allow Redmond anywhere near their precious assets. If not, Microsoft has a whole bunch of regulation to arrange to make this idea float.

Let's also consider that a densely-packed server rack can demand peak loads of 20kw or more. A location with enough wave energy to supply that much juice reliably might not be the best place to locate a data centre. If Microsoft can use waves to send the energy it needs into the grid, well and good. But the idea of co-located generation for a sunken data centre substantial enough to make a difference to a city’s citizens sounds a little optimistic.

Redmond's also not revealed costs. Nor has it explained the state of the servers once they were hauled up. As anyone who deals in matters maritime learns quickly, things left in the sea for a long time don't do well, even when sealed into tubes.

Which is not to say Microsoft's idea is foolish, but there's clearly a long way to go before we get from an impressive experiment to underwater operations. And while that work goes on, terrestrial data centres will also be improving their already impressive power usage effectiveness ratios while content delivery networks and myriad other technologies improve the delivery of content to users without the need for underwater data centres. Or the PR splashes this one's generated.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Solar

 City of Vancouver looks to cut red tape for green energy Listen January 20, 2016 The City of Vancouver plans to change the the way permits are handled for homeowners looking to install solar panels on their homes.

In the past, the process was lengthy and expensive. In 2014, the cost of installing a solar energy system in Vancouver was six times that of an equivalent system in Toronto or Calgary.

“When we started 10 years ago, it was really simple. You needed an electrical permit and that was it and then a couple years ago, they decided you needed building permits as well, which lengthened the process and made it more expensive, made it complicated,” said Rob Baxter, one of the cofounders of Vancouver Renewable Energy Co-Op. Baxter said there has been an explosion of interest in solar technology. Last year, his company installed more solar energy systems than they installed in the previous 10 years combined.

For years, he’d been asking the city to make the process less prohibitive.

It seems now, they’re finally listening.

In response to Baxter and others, the city said Wednesday changes are being made to its solar panel policy, making it clearer what the permit fee should be based on: the cost of the installation, not the cost of the panels. Staff are also trying to cut out unnecessary steps like the need for an engineer to sign off on every installation.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels “So that, in many of the situations, will help streamline this because you won’t need to have an engineer involved,” said Sean Pander, the City of Vancouver’s Green Buildings Program Manager.

“With the weight of the solar panels, many of the safety concerns in most cases can be addressed without involving an engineer,” said Pander, adding that, over time, the panels have become lighter.

The new streamlined process should be in place within the next two months and will bring Vancouver more in line with other jurisdictions.

Advocates say this latest change is a significant step in the right direction. They’re now focused on lobbying the provincial and federal government to offer homeowners more incentives to go green.

“Even a grant like they give for the electric cars of $5,000 towards the install of the system, or something like that would be nice,” said Mark Tizya of Novo Solar Systems. “Maybe GST incentives.

Anything would help.”

Tizya, who is also a member of the BC Sustainable Energy Association, said homeowners are already looking at solar power because of the continued rise in electricity rates. He said it wouldn’t take much from the government to sweeten the deal.

“If they also have cash incentives, things like that — even just for a few years to prime the pump, to get more people motivated to do this. Once you start seeing your neighbours with solar on their roofs, you’re more inclined to get it done as well.”

The city is asking homeowners to weigh in what the new policy should be by way of this solar panel survey that be viewed here.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Phase one of Morocco’s vast $9bn Ouarzazate solar power plant provides 160MW of its ultimate 580MW capacity.

 Morocco to switch on first phase of world's largest solar plant Desert complex will provide electricity for more than 1 million people when complete, helping African country to supply most of its energy from renewables by 2030 February 4, 2016 Morocco’s king will switch on the first phase of a concentrated solar power plant on Thursday that will become the world’s largest when completed.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels The power station on the edge of the Saharan desert will be the size of the country’s capital city by the time it is finished in 2018, and provide electricity for 1.1 million people.

Noor 1, the first section at the town of Ouarzazate, provides 160 megawatts (MW) of the ultimate 580MW capacity, helping Morocco to save hundreds of thousands of tonnes of carbon emissions per year.

“At around 2pm, the king will press a button, the parabolic mirrors will start turning, the heat will begin to turn the turbines and the plant will come to life,” said Maha el-Kadiri, a spokeswoman for Masen, Morocco’s renewable energy agency.

King Mohammed VI will then lay the foundations for Noor 2, the next stage of the solar complex.

Noor 1 had been due to open in December but was delayed by unspecified “agenda concerns,” elKadiri said.

After it is switched on, the plant will initially provide 650,000 local people with solar electricity from dawn until three hours after sunset.

“It is a very, very significant project in Africa,” said Mafalda Duarte, the manager of Climate Investment Funds (CIF), which provided $435m (£300m) of the $9bn project’s funding. “Morocco is showing real leadership and bringing the cost of the technology down in the process.”

The north African country plans to generate 42% of its energy from renewables by 2020, with onethird of that total coming from solar, wind and hydropower apiece.

Morocco hopes to use the next UN climate change conference, which it hosts in November, as the springboard for an even more ambitious plan to source 52% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030.

“Between now and [the next conference], many projects will have come to light and we will prove that we can match our energy demands with renewables,” the country’s energy minister, Abdelkader Amara, said at a meeting during the Paris climate summit in December.

Such a move would have regional implications. CIF estimates that if international banks and governments deployed another 5GW of solar energy, electricity production costs could fall by 14%.

Scaling that up to 15GW would cut costs by 44%.

Some $3.9bn has been invested in the Ouarzazate solar complex, including $1bn from the German investment bank KfW, $596m from the European Investment Bank and $400m from the World Bank.

If the dreams of its architects are realised, the resulting energy will eventually be exported north to Europe, and eastwards to Mecca, as well as providing a secure source of energy at home.

“Morocco knew their demand for electricity was growing at 7% a year and that they were dependent on imports for 97% of that energy,” Duarte said. “They had a vision to promote renewables at a time when oil prices were high and they undertook regulatory reforms, put institutions in place, and they have done a great job.”

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 IBM Solar Collector Magnifies Sun By 2000X – These Could Provide Power To The Entire Planet February 24, 2014 A team at IBM recently developed what they call a High Concentration Photo Voltaic Thermal (HCPVT) system that is capable of concentrating the power of 2,000 suns, they are even claiming to be able to concentrate energy safely up to 5,000X, that’s huge.

The process of trapping the sunlight produces water that can be used to produce filtered drinkable water, or used for other things like air conditioning etc. Scientists envision that the HCPVT system could provide sustainable energy and fresh water to communities all around the world.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels “Each 1cmX1cm chip can convert 200-250 watts, on average, over a typical eight-hour day in a sunny region. In the HCPVT system, instead of heating a building, the 90 degree Celsius water will pass through a porous membrane distillation system where it is then vaporized and desalinated. Such a system could provide 30-40 liters of drinkable water per square meter of receiver area per day, while still generating electricity with a more than 25 percent yield or two kilowatts hours per day. A large installation would provide enough water for a small town.” (2) The heat is absorbed into hundreds of tiny solar cells called photovoltaic chips. These gather the energy and are then cooled by microchannled water, which is why they are safely able to concentrate such large amounts of solar energy.

According to Greenpeace, this technology can establish itself as the third largest player in the sustainable power generation industry. A study published in 2009 predicted that solar power could supply all the world’s energy needs, with minimal space. (1) Greenpeace estimates that it would take only two percent of the Sahara Desert’s land area to supply the entire planet’s electricity needs.(1) A common problem with modern-day solar collectors is that they can only take in a minimal amount of energy. This means that useful heat is wasted, cannot be harnessed and is thrown away. This technology eliminates that problem. Solar panels taking in too much energy run the risk of melting themselves due to mass amounts of heat. This is changing, as we continue to explore more efficient ways of energy generation, it’s becoming clear that it’s time to do away with the old, and usher in the new, clean, green technologies.

This project is being funded by the Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation. They are supplying a three-year $2.4 million grant to develop the technology. Prototypes have been developed and are being tested.

This is another great technology that could provide power to the entire planet for free! Good reasons as to why we cannot implement this technology are non existent. At the end of the day, it seems that big oil corporations will do whatever they can to prevent change from happening, but the power of the people is greater. All we have to do is come together, create, and cooperate.

Below is a video of IBM research scientist Bruno Michel giving an overview of the project.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

ď ś This Solar Road Will Provide Power to 5 Million People February 1, 2016 The French government plans to pave 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) of its roads with solar panels in the next five years, which will supply power to millions of people.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels “The maximum effect of the program, if successful, could be to furnish 5 million people with electricity, or about 8 percent of the French population,” Ségolène Royal, France’s minister of ecology and energy, said according to Global Construction Review.

France’s Agency of Environment and Energy Management said that 4 meters (14 feet) of solarized road would be enough to supply the electrical needs of one household, excluding heat. One kilometer (0.62 miles) will supply enough electricity for 5,000 residents.

The project is the result of five years of research between French road construction company Colas and the French National Institute of Solar Energy.

The project, “Wattway,” was introduced last October. The technology consists of extremely thin (7 millimeters) yet durable panels of polycrystalline silicon that can transform solar energy into electricity. The panels are also said to be 15 centimeters wide and heavy-duty skid resistant to reduce auto accidents.

“These extremely fragile photovoltaic cells are coated in a multilayer substrate composed of resins and polymers, translucent enough to allow sunlight to pass through, and resistant enough to withstand truck traffic,” Colas said in a press release.

The panels are rainproof and have passed snowplow tests “with flying colors,” according to the Wattway FAQ page. The company also boasts that their panels can last as long as conventional pavement, or 10 years depending on the traffic. Wattway panels can last roughly 20 years if the section is not heavily trafficked, such as stadium parking lot.

In terms of efficiency, Wattway said its panels have a 15 percent yield, compared to 18-19 percent for conventional photovoltaic panels.

The solar roads concept isn’t new. SolaRoad, the world’s first “solar road,” has been in operation in the Netherlands since November 2014, but it’s already generating more power than expected. EcoWatch has also featured a similar Idaho-based project, Solar Roadways, whose Indiegogo campaign became extremely successful when their video went viral last year.

Although there are detractors, solar roadways have been touted as an excellent way to harness the sun’s energy. “Roads spend 90 percent of their time just looking up into the sky. When the sun shines, they are of course exposed to its rays,” Jean-Lic Gautier, manager of the Center for Expertise at the Colas Campus for Science and Techniques, said in a press release. “It’s an ideal surface area for energy applications.”

The panels will be applied directly to existing roads in France. “There is no need to rebuild infrastructure,” Colas CEO Hervé Le Bouc told Les Echoes last year. “At Chambéry and Grenoble, was tested successfully on Wattway a cycle of 1 million vehicles, or 20 years of normal traffic a road, and the surface does not move.”

Minister Royal said installation of the panels will begin this spring and proposes to pay for them by raising taxes on fossil fuels, Gas2.org reported.

She said it was “natural” to raise taxes on fossil fuels given that the cost of oil is currently so low, adding that new taxes would contribute between 200-300 million Euros ($220-440 million) to the Positive Energy initiative.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 World’s First See-through Solar Panels

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Rendering of the solar power plant in Kagoshima prefecture

ď ś Japan has finally figured out what to do with its abandoned golf courses July 16, 2015 During real estate booms, developers have a tendency to build more than is necessary. When those booms go bust, we get to sit back and watch as people come up with creative uses for all that waste.

This is what's happening in Japan, where developers built too many golf courses over the last few decades after demand shot up in the 1980s. Now the industry is in decline, with participation in the sport down 40% from the 1990s, and abandoned golf courses are starting to pop up.

Kyocera's solution: turn the abandoned green space into solar farms. Japan has been hungry for alternative energy ever since the 2011 Fukushima disaster made nuclear power an unattractive option in the country, and golf courses just happen to be perfectly suited for solar power — they're large open spaces that often get lots of sunlight.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Kyocera's first project, now under construction, is a 23 megawatt solar plant on a golf course in Kyoto prefecture. When it goes live in 2017, the plant will produce enough power for about 8,100 households.

The company is also developing a 92 megawatt solar plant — generating enough energy for over 30,000 households — on an abandoned golf course in Kagoshima prefecture. No word on when that project will go live.

For Japan, using golf courses for solar power makes a lot of sense. But in other countries where golf is on the downswing, like in the U.S, suburban courses could have equally useful second lives as green spaces or infill development.

In sprawling suburbia, these large swaths of land could house densely-packed residential developments, shops, community centers, libraries, schools, and all sorts of other buildings that could help rebuild a long-lost sense of community.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Hydropower

 What You Need To Know About Columbia/Snake River Dams & Salmon The Columbia/Snake Rivers of the Pacific Northwest once hosted the world's greatest wild salmon runs, with up to 16 million fish each year. Today, it is the most heavily dammed river system on earth.

Are wild salmon in danger of extinction?

Yes. 25 years ago, the American Fisheries Society estimated that, of the once-abundant runs of salmon in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and California, at least 106 “stocks” (self-sustaining subpopulations) had gone extinct. Matters have not improved.

In fact, thirteen stocks of Columbia and Snake River salmon and steelhead have been added to the Endangered Species List since the 1990s. And all the remaining stocks that return to the Snake River—the largest and once the most productive tributary of the Columbia—are listed for protection.

What has caused their decline?

Many factors—but none play as large a role as the massive federal dams.

Four such dams on the lower Snake River are driving all remaining Snake River salmon toward extinction. Since the dams were completed, these salmon populations have plummeted by more than 90%.

BONNEVILLE POWER: Ice Harbor, one of the four dams on the lower Snake River.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Why save wild salmon?

Because they're extraordinary.(An example: Salmon have one of nature's best senses of direction, smelling their way from the mouth of the Columbia at the Pacific Ocean, back to the stream of their birth, a journey of over 900 miles and some 5,000 feet of elevation for some salmon stocks.)

Because they're delicious.(And not just to some humans—orcas, bears and others rely on salmon as a critical food source.)

Because they're a crucial barometer of the health of ocean and inland water ecosystems that all of us depend on.

And, because: Healthy salmon populations and a free-flowing lower Snake River will deliver far greater economic benefits than the increasingly costly, aging lower Snake River dams.

VIDEO COURTESY OF EP FILMS After growing to peak physical condition in the open ocean, wild salmon will return to the mouth of the Columbia as mature adults, ready to begin the epic, arduous run back to spawning grounds in the stream of their birth. Watch the salmon in The Greatest Migration

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Is there hope for wild salmon?

Yes! And—although additional steps will be needed—removing the four high-cost dams on the lower Snake River has been identified as the single largest step we can take for salmon recovery.

How are dams destroying salmon?

By impeding the salmon's migratory route.

Juvenile salmon depend on free-flowing rivers to swim downstream to the ocean. Adults must be able to return upstream to spawn the next generation.

It's difficult to accomplish the roundtrip journey with dams in the way. The massive structures profoundly transform natural river systems. Find out what makes dams' reservoirs lethal to salmon.

Don’t the dams provide needed (clean) energy?

No. The importance of the lower Snake River dams for generating electricity has all but disappeared and diminishes further with each passing year as cleaner renewables and energy efficiency increasingly satisfy demand. The Northwest Power Planning Council concluded in 2010 that the region can meet its current and future energy needs without the power from these four dams.

An energy source that’s driving species to extinction is not “clean.” Find out some of hydropower's (dirty) energy secrets.

Why hasn’t the dams’ impact on salmon been addressed before now?

The National Marine Fisheries Service has ignored science and its legal responsibilities under the Endangered Species Act, releasing numerous plans that have failed to avoid the jeopardy caused by the dams.

Many courts have harshly criticized this approach.

Who wants to save wild salmon?

Clean energy advocates, conservation organizations, fishing businesses, the State of Oregon, and the Nez Perce Tribe have all called for a plan that ensures wild salmon will survive.

And, Earthjustice. Will you join us?

What's happening now?

The U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon is deliberating on the federal government’s 2014 Columbia Basin Salmon Biological Opinion. (The BiOp is the plan for protecting Columbia/Snake River salmon from extinction.)

The government's four previous plans were found by the court to be illegal and scientifically inadequate, following lawsuits brought by Earthjustice on behalf of our clients.

The Court could issue a ruling on the latest plan at any time.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Sockeye salmon swim up a Pacific Northwest river to spawn the next generation.

ON THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT'S DAM MANAGEMENT PLANS Harsh Words From The Court More than a decade of court opinions have rejected dam management plans for failing to be lawful and science-based. On behalf of our clients, Earthjustice attorneys have repeatedly sued (and won) to ensure that the dams are operated to protect and restore endangered salmon and steelhead—and to meet the economic, cultural and environmental needs of the region.

A selection of excerpts from the court rulings: IN 2011: “The history of the Federal Defendants’ lack of, or at best, marginal compliance with the procedural and substantive requirements of the ESA [Endangered Species Act] … has been laid out in prior Opinions and Orders in this case and is repeated here only where relevant.” The court went on to call the federal defendants’ plan “neither a reasonable, nor a prudent, course of action.”

– National Wildlife Federation v. National Marine Fisheries Service, 839 F.Supp.2d 1117 (D.Or. 2011)

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels IN 2008: “Under this approach, a listed species could be gradually destroyed, so long as each step on the path to destruction is sufficiently modest. This type of slow slide into oblivion is one of the very ills the ESA [Endangered Species Act] seeks to prevent.”

– National Wildlife Federation v. National Marine Fisheries Service, 524 F.3d 917, 930 (9th Cir. 2008) IN 2005: “The government's inaction appears to some parties to be a strategy intended to avoid making hard choices and offending those who favor the status quo. Without real action from the Action Agencies, the result will be the loss of the wild salmon.”

– National Wildlife Federation v. National Marine Fisheries Service, cv-01-640-RE (Oct. 7, 2005) (Opinion and Order of Remand) at 8

Salmon are astonishingly resilient. There is still a chance for future generations to know wild salmon—if we act now. Earthjustice is working to save wild salmon up and down the West Coast in legal cases involving water releases, dam operations and other harmful activities.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 Indian Tribes Seek to Restore Columbia Salmon Runs SPOKANE (AP) — Some Northwest Indian tribes in the next 20 years want to achieve a long-held dream: restoring wild salmon runs above the giant Grand Coulee Dam. The construction of Grand Coulee in the 1930s blocked salmon runs that historically ran into the millions of fish each year, killing what had been a way of life for Indian tribes in the region.

For decades, tribes were told it would be too expensive to try and restore the runs. But new technology, including so-called "salmon cannons," has raised hopes among tribal members.

"The cost of doing something like this is not as expensive as one thought," said John Sirois, of Upper Columbia United Tribes, which is taking the lead in the effort. "We used to think it would cost too much."

A decision on whether to proceed with the initial study in this effort is expected this spring.

Salmon runs on the upper Columbia and its tributaries were blocked first by Grand Coulee Dam, which was built in the 1930s, and later by Chief Joseph Dam, which was built downstream in the 1950s. Both dams were built without fish ladders and killed a 10,000-year-old Native American fishery.

Salmon have cultural and religious significance for Northwest Indian tribes, and the runs in the upper Columbia River were huge.

"From Kettle Falls and moving up, it was one of the largest runs on the entire West Coast," Sirois said. "It's in the millions of fish."

Five tribes in the region have banded together in the effort to restore those runs. They are the Spokane, Coeur d'Alene, Kalispel, Kootenai and Colville tribes, said Sirois, a member of the Colvilles.

The goal is to conclude all the required studies within five years, and have salmon spawning above Grand Coulee Dam in 20 years, "within our lifetime," Sirois said.

Grand Coulee Dam is the largest hydropower producer in the nation, generating enough energy to supply 2.3 million households with electricity for one year. The dam is a mile across and 550 feet tall.

Killing the salmon runs was a "tragic and historical wrong that was done to native peoples," said Donald R. Michel, executive director of the united tribes.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates Grand Coulee, remains neutral on the effort to restore salmon runs, Tim Personius, the deputy regional director, said. But the agency does support initiating feasibility studies on the topic, he said.

"When the study is complete, Reclamation will evaluate it with regional partners and stakeholders and decide what if anything to do next," Personius said.

In this June 1, 2011 file photo, water is seen being released through the outlet tubes at Grand Coulee Dam, Wash. Some Northwest Indian tribes in the next 20 years want to achieve a long-held dream: restoring wild salmon runs above the giant Grand Coulee Dam. The construction of Grand Coulee in the 1930s blocked salmon runs that historically ran into the millions of fish each year, killing what had been a way of life for Indian tribes in the region

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

 A Look at Restoring Wild Salmon Runs on the Columbia River February 7, 2016 SPOKANE — The hope of restoring wild salmon runs above the giant Grant Coulee Dam would take a step closer to reality if the decision is made to proceed with an initial study on the issue.

Salmon runs on the upper Columbia River and its tributaries were blocked by Grand Coulee Dam, which was built in the 1930s, and by Chief Joseph Dam, which was built downstream in the 1950s.

Both were built without fish ladders and killed a 10,000-year-old Native American fishery.

A look at the issue and considerations: Fish Ladders It's too soon to determine if fish ladders, the traditional method by which fish swim up and through dams, will be the solution, John Sirois, of Upper Columbia United Tribes, said. When Grand Coulee was originally built, the fish ladders required to get fish through the dam were considered too tall to be effective.

One possible solution is the use of so-called salmon cannons, which are essentially pneumatic tubes in which air pressure is used to lift and shoot salmon through the dams. The cannons are being tested by the state Department of Fish and Wildlife and are relatively cheap, Sirois said.

Fish could also be collected and trucked around the dams for release downstream, Sirois said. But that method does not work well with baby salmon that are migrating to the ocean, he said.

The original dam builders should have tried harder to make passageways for fish, he said.

"I try to figure out literally what were they thinking," Sirois said.

Why Tribes Care The creation stories of tribes in the region are similar, with the Creator making salmon to serve as a staple in the diet of the people, Sirois said.

"We have the responsibility and the duty and honor to take care of them," Sirois said of salmon.

"That's at the very heart of what we are trying to do."

Five tribes are involved in the effort to restore the runs: the Spokane, Coeur d'Alene, Kalispel, Kootenai and Colville.

The Study The Northwest Power and Conservation Council, which is charged with ensuring an affordable power system while enhancing fish and wildlife in the Columbia River Basin, has requested a feasibility study on restoring the salmon runs. The council will decide this spring whether to proceed with the initial $200,000 study. If approved, the initial study is to be completed by next year.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels Questions Major questions include whether salmon could survive in the greatly changed habitat above the dams. Researchers would have to confirm that salmon could survive before any restoration effort could begin.

The study proposal is for only the U.S. side of the border. But some of the adult fish would likely swim into Canadian waters, and that could become an issue as the two countries renegotiate the 1964 Columbia River Treaty, which governs hydropower and flood control on the river.

Grand Coulee Dam: Columbia River, Washington State

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

ď ś Proposed Site C Dam: Reservoir Level

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

Wind

 Wind power supplied 97% of electricity needs of Scottish households in 2015 January 14, 2016 Donald Trump might not like Scottish wind farms, but they sure are producing a lot of electricity these days. In fact, Cleantechnica reports that wind turbines generated enough electricity to meet the needs of 97% of Scottish households last year, up 16% from the year before. Meanwhile solar also soared, providing 50% or more of the household electricity or hot water needs during a total of seven months of the year.

That's pretty impressive stuff. And it may bode well for Scotland to reach its goal of 100% renewable electricity by 2020.

Now Scottish Renewables, a clean energy industry group, is calling for Scotland to scale up its ambitions—gunning for a total of 50% renewable energy across electricity, heating and transportation needs. Niall Stuart, the organization's Chief Executive, argued that this is not all that far fetched: “Scotland’s ambitious climate change and 2020 renewable energy targets have signaled a clear intent for the country to lead the way in the transition to a low-carbon economy. "Together, renewables now produce the equivalent of 15% of Scotland’s energy use across electricity, heat and transport. But with only four years to go, it is now time to look beyond 2020 and for Scotland to set a stretching target for renewables to produce the equivalent of at least 50% of all energy use across electricity, heat, and transport by 2030. That may seem ambitious but we will be more than halfway there by the end of this decade, and Sweden - the European leader - already sources half of all energy from renewables today."

I argued before that the Paris climate deal may come to be seen as a turning point. Once it's clear that we will eventually transition to a 100% renewable energy economy, it seems inevitable that we will reach tipping points after which the question no longer is how fast we can afford to switch, but rather how much will it cost to get left behind.

The latest figures coming out of Scotland suggest that those tipping points may not be too far off.

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels

ď ś Whopper of a Wind Farm to Power 1 Million Homes February 4, 2016

March 2016 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2016– Transitioning from Fossil Fuels A wind farm that would be the largest in the world and power more than a million homes has been given the go-ahead in Britain.

Offshore wind developer Dong Energy said Wednesday a final decision had been made to construct the 1.2-gigawatt Hornsea Project One scheme off the coast of Yorkshire in northern England.

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Scheduled for completion by 2020, the giant development would span 160 square miles (407 square kilometers) and use 174 wind turbines, each one 190 meters tall — higher than London's landmark "Gherkin" tower.

"It is ground-breaking and innovative, powering more homes than any offshore wind farm currently in operation," said Brent Cheshire, Dong Energy's UK country chairman.

"To have the world's biggest ever offshore wind farm located off the Yorkshire coast is hugely significant, and highlights the vital role offshore wind will play in the UK's need for new low-carbon energy."

Wind energy has grown rapidly in Britain in the past decade, helped by strong winds and suitable geography, now producing 10 percent of Britain's energy needs, according to trade group RenewableUK. The industry body said that the development would help Britain to meet pledges to limit greenhouse gas emissions made at the World Climate Change Conference 2015 (COP21) in Paris last year.

"This offshore wind farm will play an important part in meeting our Paris climate commitments, but will also help create the new energy infrastructure this country desperately needs," said RenewableUK deputy chief executive Maf Smith.

The construction of Hornsea Project One will provide 2,000 jobs, and it will employ 300 people once the scheme is finished, according to Dong Energy.

The government has agreed to guarantee to underwrite a price of £140 (184 euros, $204) to give Dong Energy investment certainty.

Amber Rudd, the energy and climate change secretary, said government help meant "the UK is the world leader in offshore wind energy and this success story is going from strength to strength."

"DONG Energy's investment shows that we are open for business and is a vote of confidence in the UK and in our plan to tackle the legacy of under-investment and build an energy infrastructure fit for the 21st century," Rudd added.