By GottaLaff
Sen. Ted Stevens may be leaving a final holiday gift behind for one of his most loyal constituencies: the Alaska commercial fishing industry. Using loopholes in the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the outgoing Bush administration is looking to allow fishery management councils, dominated by fishing interests, to determine whether new policies would harm the environment.I'd have used the "something's fishy" line, but this isn't funny.
A bipartisan alliance of more than 75 lawmakers and dozens of interest groups are protesting the proposed rule change, saying it lessens protections that keep U.S. fisheries from harming the environment. [...]The only thing Bush wants to keep alive is profit.
The Joint Ocean Commission, Greenpeace and other environmental groups say that up until now, the environmental law has helped protect endangered sea turtles and rebuild shrinking fish populations.
But Bush’s proposed changes would significantly weaken those protections, they say, by allowing the interest-group-heavy councils to be in charge of the environmental compliance.
Currently, the commerce secretary has the final say on proposed fishery management activities. But the National Marine Fisheries Service is responsible for ensuring the environmental reviews are done properly and the councils provide recommendations.
This proposed rule would instead allow the councils to ensure the review is done fairly.
“It doesn’t take much to decide how the fishing industry is going to review their own fishing activities and decide whether they’re environmentally friendly,” said Lee Crockett, fisheries policy director for the Pew Environment Group. “They’ll do a full NEPA analysis and then promote alternatives that they want to do.”
Environmentalists argue that this could weaken the environmental regulatory process in the Interior Department and other agencies.
For instance, greens say it would allow special interests to decide whether fishing-related activity would threaten wildlife protected under the Endangered Species Act.
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