Citing climate change, Obama fences in huge Pacific area after wheeling and dealing

Weeks after the White House was warned that a plan to vastly expand a maritime preserve and no-fishing zone in U.S.-controlled Pacific waters would harm the American fishing industry and geopolitically advantage China, the Obama administration has gone ahead anywaywith some concessions to make the environmental medicine, administered by presidential fiat, go down more smoothly.

The concessions did nothing, however, to assuage congressional Republicans led by Rep.Doc Hastings of Washington state, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, who accused the administration of taking secret, unilateral action to expand the preserve. He warned that the economic consequences of this decision will be grave, further eroding the U.S. seafood industry and harming the well-being of the U.S. territories.

The decree that President Obama signed on Thursday boosted the size of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, a 77,000-square-mile preserve south and west of Hawaii, to some 490,000 square miles of protected area around a speckling of U.S.-controlled islandsan area that Secretary of State John Kerry, who hailed the move, declared to be twice the size of Texas.

(Actually, its slightly less: Texas is 268,820 square miles in area.)

The decree essentially bans all commercial fishing and deep-sea mining (which doesnt exist yet in any case) in the huge tract in perpetuity, though the announcement said there would be some exceptions for recreational and traditional fishing that is consistent with the conservation goals of the Monument.

That was significantly less than the roughly 780,000 square mile area initially proposed by the administration and its environment and energy czar, John Podesta, for the expanded preservea straightforward extension of a fishing ban to the full extent of the 200-mile, U.S. controlled exclusive economic zone (EEZ) around the islands.

The scaled back area to some extent mollified fishermen and fisheries experts who operate as part of the U.S. governments own management apparatus in that region, and who were deeply unhappy at the original proposal.

A delegation representing the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council visited Podesta and other administration officials in Washington earlier in September to argue that the proposed expansion, urged on by environmental organizations including the Pew Foundation, was a bad idea.

It would, they said, hurt a $100 million a year fishing industry based in Hawaii and give China, which is rapidly expanding its deep-sea fishing fleet, new and unfair opportunities to poach where law-abiding American boats would no longer travel.

The administration evidently listenedin part, perhaps, because the local elected officials in the affected area including Hawaii skew decidedly Democratic and this is a mid-term election year. According to an insider familiar with the process, the wheeling and dealing between the administration, environmental interest groups and fishing and political interests went on into Wednesday, the same day the expansion was announced.

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Citing climate change, Obama fences in huge Pacific area after wheeling and dealing