Group urging President Obama to increase regulations
PORTLAND, Maine —During the summer season, Commercial Street is jammed with people who are buying Maine’s signature food – lobster.
Some say carbon emissions could chase the lobsters away, but one lobsterman said there are bigger things to worry about with the driving force in the state’s seafood industry.
“We love seafood and Vermont isn’t the best place to get that, so I’m stocking up the car and driving home,” Hannah Allen said.
Representatives from Maine’s conservation, lobster, restaurant and tourism industries gathered Tuesday in Portland to call attention to the effects that global warming could have on Maine lobster.
“In a way, it’s sort of a canary in the coal mine with respect to the effects of the changing climate,” said Rick Wahle of the University of Maine.
The state is already seeing the effects of climate change in the Gulf of Maine and there is a push for public support of new environmental changes recently proposed by President Barack Obama. The president is asking the Environmental Protection Agency to work with states and industries to put new carbon pollution standards in place for power plants.
“If we continue to see increasing temperatures, lobsters are more likely to stay out in deeper water or migrate east,” said John Ready of the Ready Seafood Company.
Bill Coppersmith, who has been a lobsterman for 36 years, said he sees fuel prices as a bigger factor in driving the industry, and he’s not worried about global warming affecting his business.
“I mean, the only thing that I’m worried about is these environmentalists turn around and come up with these cockamamie schemes and it drives the price of fossil fuel up and then people don’t come to Maine to visit them or it costs a lot of money to truck them out of here and then the price goes down on them.”
The president’s initiative focuses on the carbon produced by power plants, not vehicle emissions.
