Business
Column: The salmon industry faces extinction — not because of drought, but government policies and politics
Snapshots from an environmental and economic disaster:
Kenneth Brown, the owner of Bodega Tackle in Petaluma, reckons he has lost almost $450,000 in the last year.
“I haven’t taken a paycheck in seven or eight months,” he says. He has had to lay off all but one employee, leaving himself, his son and the one remaining worker to run the business.
James Stone, board president of the Nor-Cal Guides & Sportsmen’s Assn., says more than 120 guides who serve recreational fishing customers in and around the Sacramento River and San Francisco Bay have been all but put out of business, costing the economy as much as $3.5 million a year.
Salmon have survived droughts in California for millennia. But when on top of that you have incredible water diversions and temperature pollution, you’re killing these baby fish. And when you kill the baby fish, they don’t come back as adults.
— Scott Artis, Golden State Salmon Assn.
Sarah Bates, the owner of a commercial fishing boat in San Francisco, has seen 90% of her income washed away. She has watched a commercial fleet capacity of nearly 500 boats reduced nearly to zero.
The circumstance affecting all three is the shutdown of the crucial fall-run salmon fishing in California, which the Pacific Fishery Management Council, a governmental body, recently extended for 2024, the second year in a row.
The main reason is the decline of the salmon population in the Sacramento River to such an unsustainable level that there’s reason to fear that it may not recover for years, if ever — unless government policies are radically reconsidered.
Commercial fishers who relied on the fall-run salmon as their dominant source of income have struggled to find alternatives.
“Some people are bringing in black cod or rockfish or albacore,” Bates told me. Some land Dungeness crab. But prices for those products don’t match the value of Chinook salmon.
“That allows for some income, but doesn’t really make up the difference for what you lose,” Bates says. “There are members of the fleet who have taken land jobs, or are relying on household members to pay the bills.”
One can’t minimize the scale of the shutdown, which follows a long-term decline in the fishery and is the first such shutdown since 2008-2009, which was driven by a severe drought. In 2022, the last year of salmon fishing in California, the fleet consisted of 464 commercial vessels, down from 4,750 in 1980.
Private and chartered recreational trips in California, which reached 98,900 in 2022—down from 148,000 in 2012—have also been shut down.
The closing of both categories has rippled across the entire fishing economy, affecting hotels and restaurants that catered to recreational fishing customers as well as bait and tackle shops. For Brown’s Petaluma shop, there are no sales of bait or commercial gear — “no more boots, no more rain slickers, all that business is gone and there’s nothing to replace it.”
There’s more to the salmon crisis than the devastation of livelihoods of tens of thousands of Californians working in an industry valued at more than $1.4 billion annually.
The crisis underscores the utter failure of the state’s political leaders to balance the needs of stakeholders in its water supply. In this case, the conflict is between large-scale farms on one side and environmental and fishery interests on the other.
For decades, agribusiness has had the upper hand in this conflict. It’s not hard to discern why: The growers have more money and therefore more political influence. Westlands Water District, the vast irrigation district sprawled over Fresno and Kings counties in the Central Valley—the largest such district in the nation—spent more than $4.7 million on Sacramento lobbying over the last decade.
During the same period, Stewart Resnick, whose Roll International conglomerate owns the Central Valley almond orchards that are the largest growers of those nuts in the world and enormous consumers of water, donated $2.8 million to political campaigns in California, chiefly to Democratic candidates and in support of ballot box initiatives; among his contributions was $125,000 to oppose the 2021 recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Officially valued at $1.4 billion a year, the salmon fishery can’t hope to compete with agriculture on a dollar-for-dollar basis. The market value of all agricultural products in California was $59 billion in 2022, according to state figures; salmon weren’t counted. The 10 most lucrative farm crops, led by dairy products, brought in some $35 billion that year.
The salmon fisheries are bellwethers for ecological health generally. “Fishermen are directly dependent on a healthy ecosystem,” says Barry Nelson, an advisor to the Golden State Salmon Assn. Their fortunes reflect not merely adequacy of water flows in California rivers and bays, but water quality. Any factor that falls outside a given range can produce a crash in fish populations, endangering whole species while putting men and women out of work.
As my colleague Ian James has reported, a key factor in the survival of the salmon population is water temperature. The diversion of ever more water from the federal government’s Shasta Dam for farm irrigation has driven temperatures in the Sacramento River to murderous levels.
That river, Nelson points out, is “the most important salmon-producing system south of the Columbia River.” But California authorities haven’t required the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which owns and manages the dam, to meet temperature standards downstream of the dam, even though it has the power to do so. “The state just hasn’t done its job,” Nelson says.
Talk to stakeholders in the salmon fishery, and one term keeps cropping up: “water management.” Their point is that drought isn’t the most important factor in the survival of the species — policy is, specifically the management of water supplies so that they’re balanced among users and serving irrigation demand from farmers doesn’t wipe out competing interests, especially during dry years.
To better understand the threats to salmon, it helps to know about their life cycle. Salmon live and breed on a three-year timeline. Adult fish swim in the ocean, but migrate upstream to lay eggs in the gravel beds of inland rivers. After they hatch, the baby fry and juveniles, called smolt, begin migrating downstream, typically via San Francisco Bay, and out to sea. Then the cycle begins again.
The critical period for the fall-run salmon in the Sacramento is while the eggs are incubating in their gravel beds. At water temperatures of 54 degrees, they start being cooked to death. Irrigation releases from Shasta suck down the reservoir’s cold water, leaving surface water heated by the sun; that’s what ends up in the Sacramento River at spawning season.
In recent years, water in the spawning beds has been measured at 70 degrees or higher. In 2021, state biologists reported, 99% of winter-run Chinook salmon failed to reach the San Francisco-San Joaquin River delta and the bay.
“Salmon have survived droughts in California for millennia,” says Scott Artis, executive director of the Golden State Salmon Assn. “But when on top of that you have incredible water diversions and temperature pollution, that’s what’s killing these baby fish. And when you kill the baby fish, they don’t come back as adults.”
The need for painstaking water management is the result of human interventions in California’s natural environment. Over the last 100 years, rivers across the Central Valley were dammed to provide irrigation for farms, blocking salmon from their natural habitats. The federal government opened salmon hatcheries to compensate, but they have not produced enough fish to make up for the losses from poor water management.
Meanwhile, the water demands of California growers became less flexible. Crops that could be fallowed during dry spells, leaving more water for the environment, were supplanted by almond and pistachio orchards, which require water in wet years and dry. California almond acreage rose to 1.38 million last year from 418,000 in 1995. In the same period, pistachio acreage rose to more than 461,000 from 60,300.
The crisis that has unfolded in 2023 and this year has its roots in actions taken during the Trump administration. In 2019, Trump installed David Bernhardt, a lobbyist for agricultural water users, as Interior secretary.
As an attorney in private practice, Bernhardt had sued the government on behalf of the giant Westlands Water District to challenge its enforcement of the Endangered Species Act, which conflicted with Westlands’ interests. As Interior secretary, Bernhardt advocated for loosening enforcement of the act.
In 2020, Bernhardt and Trump implemented an increase in water deliveries to big farmers under conditions that spelled disaster for the salmon fishery, among other ecological issues. California objected, asserting that Interior’s official biological opinions, which concluded that the increases wouldn’t adversely affect salmon and other species, bore no “rational connection [with] the facts.” The Natural Resources Defense Council labeled the opinions “a plan for extinction” of salmon and other endangered species.
They went through anyway. The demands from agribusinesses in the Central Valley for more water had received a friendly hearing from the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress, who recognized that the valley was perhaps the only strongly Republican part of California. They decried the passage of water from inland reservoirs to rivers and out to sea as wasteful; as I wrote at the time, their single-minded service for the growers deprived the salmon fishery of its lifeblood.
The impact of the Trump policies was destined to be felt three years on. Indeed, last year only 6,160 adult salmon were estimated to have spawned in the Sacramento River, the worst level since the drought year of 2017 and obviously well below the annual average of 175,000 spawning from 1996 to 2005, the best period for the health of the salmon fishery over the last four decades.
In January, Newsom responded to the salmon crisis with an action plan encompassing restoring salmon habitats, modernizing hatcheries, and removing impediments to salmons’ upstream migrations. The fishery community supports many of those initiatives, but also recognizes that the package is largely aspirational, for money hasn’t been appropriated to fulfill all its elements.
The Newsom administration also outlined plans in March 2022 to reach a series of voluntary agreements with agricultural water users over water sharing. Environmental and fishing groups, which weren’t part of the negotiations, weren’t impressed — a coalition of those groups, including the Sierra Club and the Golden State Salmon Assn., panned the proposal as “incomplete, unenforceable, inequitable, inadequate, and [lacking] a scientific foundation.”
Nor were the proposed voluntary agreements favored by two key federal agencies. The Environmental Protection Agency wrote in January that the absence of strong mandates for higher water flows in the Sacramento River meant that the plan would have only a “insignificant impact” on water temperature in the river. The National Marine Fisheries Service questioned whether the $740 million in state and federal funding needed to implement the voluntary agreements was realistic, since none of it had been appropriated.
In other words, Newsom’s approach involves a heaping helping of hand-waving. From the standpoint of the salmon industry, his other water policies, including a 45-mile water tunnel under the delta and fast-tracking construction of the Sites Reservoir in the western Sacramento Valley, will make things worse. The tunnel would turn the delta into “a deathtrap for salmon,” Nelson says, and the Sites Reservoir would degrade downstream waters, possibly increasing temperatures.
In many respects, the policies on the table are antiques. Some were developed without regard for the effects of global warming, and others reflect thinking that emerged in an era when California authorities thought the water supply was abundant, even unlimited.
That won’t do anymore. The federal government already lists Sacramento River winter-run Chinook salmon as an endangered species and the spring run as a threatened species. The all-important fall run might not be far behind.
California’s water policies need to be subjected to a thorough rethinking, and money to fix all that’s broken needs to be appropriated, not just put on somebody’s wish list.
Fishermen and -women are a constitutionally optimistic class. “There’s always hope that things will get better,” Artis told me. But hope is waning. “We have to educate the Legislature and the public so we get those water flow and temperature protections, or we’ll be here again year after year with fishery closures.”
Welcome to the age of AI hacking, in which the right prompts make amateurs into master hackers.
A group of cybercriminals recently used off-the-shelf artificial intelligence chatbots to steal data on nearly 200 million taxpayers. The bots provided the code and ready-to-execute plans to bypass firewalls.
Although they were explicitly programmed to refuse to help hackers, the bots were duped into abetting the cybercrime.
According to a recent report from Israeli cybersecurity firm Gambit Security, hackers last month used Claude, the chatbot from Anthropic, to steal 150 gigabytes of data from Mexican government agencies.
Claude initially refused to cooperate with the hacking attempts and even denied requests to cover the hackers’ digital tracks, the experts who discovered the breach said. The group pummelled the bot with more than 1,000 prompts to bypass the safeguards and convince Claude they were allowed to test the system for vulnerabilities.
AI companies have been trying to create unbreakable chains on their AI models to restrain them from helping do things such as generating child sexual content or aiding in sourcing and creating weapons. They hire entire teams to try to break their own chatbots before someone else does.
But in this case, hackers continuously prompted Claude in creative ways and were able to “jailbreak” the chatbot to assist them. When they encountered problems with Claude, the hackers used OpenAI’s ChatGPT for data analysis and to learn which credentials were required to move through the system undetected.
The group used AI to find and exploit vulnerabilities, bypass defences, create backdoors and analyze data along the way to gain control of the systems before they stole 195 million identities from nine Mexican government systems, including tax records, vehicle registration as well as birth and property details.
AI “doesn’t sleep,” Curtis Simpson, chief executive of Gambit Security, said in a blog post. “It collapses the cost of sophistication to near zero.”
“No amount of prevention investment would have made this attack impossible,” he said.
Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment. It told Bloomberg that it had banned the accounts involved and disrupted their activity after an investigation.
OpenAI said it is aware of the attack campaign carried out using Anthropic’s models against the Mexican government agencies.
“We also identified other attempts by the adversary to use our models for activities that violate our usage policies; our models refused to comply with these attempts,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement. “We have banned the accounts used by this adversary and value the outreach from Gambit Security.”
Instances of generative AI-assisted hacking are on the rise, and the threat of cyberattacks from bots acting on their own is no longer science fiction. With AI doing their bidding, novices can cause damage in moments, while experienced hackers can launch many more sophisticated attacks with much less effort.
Earlier this year, Amazon discovered that a low-skilled hacker used commercially available AI to breach 600 firewalls. Another took control of thousands of DJI robot vacuums with help from Claude, and was able to access live video feed, audio and floor plans of strangers.
“The kinds of things we’re seeing today are only the early signs of the kinds of things that AIs will be able to do in a few years,” said Nikola Jurkovic, an expert working on reducing risks from advanced AI. “So we need to urgently prepare.”
Late last year, Anthropic warned that society has reached an “inflection point” in AI use in cybersecurity after disrupting what the company said was a Chinese state-sponsored espionage campaign that used Claude to infiltrate 30 global targets, including financial institutions and government agencies.
Generative AI also has been used to extort companies, create realistic online profiles by North Korean operatives to secure jobs in U.S. Fortune 500 companies, run romance scams and operate a network of Russian propaganda accounts.
Over the last few years, AI models have gone from being able to manage tasks lasting only a few seconds to today’s AI agents working autonomously for many hours. AI’s capability to complete long tasks is doubling every seven months.
“We just don’t actually know what is the upper limit of AI’s capability, because no one’s made benchmarks that are difficult enough so the AI can’t do them,” said Jurkovic, who works at METR, a nonprofit that measures AI system capabilities to cause catastrophic harm to society.
So far, the most common use of AI for hacking has been social engineering. Large language models are used to write convincing emails to dupe people out of their money, causing an eight-fold increase in complaints from older Americans as they lost $4.9 billion in online fraud in 2025.
“The messages used to elicit a click from the target can now be generated on a per-user basis more efficiently and with fewer tell-tale signs of phishing,” such as grammatical and spelling errors, said Cliff Neuman, an associate professor of computer science at USC.
AI companies have been responding using AI to detect attacks, audit code and patch vulnerabilities.
“Ultimately, the big imbalance stems from the need of the good-actors to be secure all the time, and of the bad-actors to be right only once,” Neuman said.
The stakes around AI are rising as it infiltrates every aspect of the economy. Many are concerned that there is insufficient understanding of how to ensure it cannot be misused by bad actors or nudged to go rogue.
Even those at the top of the industry have warned users about the potential misuse of AI.
Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has long advocated that the AI systems being built are unpredictable and difficult to control. These AIs have shown behaviors as varied as deception and blackmail, to scheming and cheating by hacking software.
Still, major AI companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google — signed contracts with the U.S. government to use their AIs in military operations.
This last week, the Pentagon directed federal agencies to phase out Claude after the company refused to back down on its demand that it wouldn’t allow its AI to be used for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
“The AI systems of today are nowhere near reliable enough to make fully autonomous weapons,” Amodei told CBS News.
The iPic dine-in movie theater chain has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and intends to pursue a sale of its assets, citing the difficult post-pandemic theatrical market.
The Boca Raton, Fla.-based company has 13 locations across the U.S., including in Pasadena and Westwood, according to a Feb. 25 filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of Florida, West Palm Beach division.
As part of the bankruptcy process, the Pasadena and Westwood theaters will be permanently closed, according to WARN Act notices filed with the state of California’s Employment Development Department.
The company came to its conclusion after “exploring a range of possible alternatives,” iPic Chief Executive Patrick Quinn said in a statement.
“We are committed to continuing our business operations with minimal impact throughout the process and will endeavor to serve our customers with the high standard of care they have come to expect from us,” he said.
The company will keep its current management to maintain day-to-day operations while it goes through the bankruptcy process, iPic said in the statement. The last day of employment for workers in its Pasadena and Westwood locations is April 28, according to a state WARN Act notice. The chain has 1,300 full- and part-time employees, with 193 workers in California.
The theatrical business, including the exhibition industry, still has not recovered from the pandemic’s effect on consumer behavior. Last year, overall box office revenue in the U.S. and Canada totaled about $8.8 billion, up just 1.6% compared with 2024. Even more troubling is that industry revenue in 2025 was down 22.1% compared with pre-pandemic 2019’s totals.
IPic noted those trends in its bankruptcy filing, describing the changes in consumer behavior as “lasting” and blaming the rise of streaming for “fundamentally” altering the movie theater business.
“These industry shifts have directly reduced box office revenues and related ancillary revenues, including food and beverage sales,” the company stated in its bankruptcy filing.
IPic also attributed its decision to rising rents and labor costs.
The company estimated it owed about $141,000 in taxes and about $2.7 million in total unsecured claims. The company’s assets were valued at about $155.3 million, the majority of which coming from theater equipment and furniture. Its liabilities totaled $113.9 million.
The chain had previously filed for bankruptcy protection in 2019.
In an expansion of its business of processing pharmaceuticals in Earth’s orbit, Varda Space Industries is renting a large El Segundo plant where toy manufacturer Mattel used to design Hot Wheels and Barbie dolls.
The plant in El Segundo’s aerospace corridor will be an extension of Varda Space Industries’ headquarters in a much smaller building on nearby Aviation Boulevard.
Varda will occupy a 205,443-square-foot industrial and office campus at 2031 E. Mariposa Ave., which will give it additional capacity to manufacture spacecraft at scale, the company said.
Originally built in the 1940s as an aircraft facility, the complex has a history as part of aerospace and defense industries that have long shaped the South Bay and is near a host of major defense and space contractors. It is also close to Los Angeles Air Force Base, headquarters to the Space Systems Command.
Workers test AstroForge’s Odin asteroid probe, which was lost in space after launch this year.
(Varda Space Industries)
Varda is one of a new generation of aerospace startups that have flourished in Southern California and the South Bay over the last several years, particularly in El Segundo, often with ties to SpaceX.
Elon Musk’s company, founded in 2002 in El Segundo, has revolutionized the industry with reusable rockets that have radically lowered the cost of lifting payloads into space. Though it has moved its headquarters to Texas, SpaceX retains large-scale operations in Hawthorne.
Varda co-founder and Chief Executive Will Bruey is a former SpaceX avionics engineer, and the company’s spacecraft are launched on SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rockets from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County.
Varda makes automated labs that look like cylindrical desktop speakers, which it sends into orbit in capsules and satellite platforms it also builds. There, in microgravity, the miniature labs grow molecular crystals that are purer than those produced in Earth’s gravity for use in pharmaceuticals.
It has contracts with drug companies and also the military, which tests technology at hypersonic speeds as the capsules return to Earth.
Its fifth capsule was launched in November and returned to Earth in late January; its next mission is set in the coming weeks. Varda has more than 10 missions scheduled on Falcon 9s through 2028.
For the last several decades, the Mariposa Avenue property served as the research and development center for Mattel Toys. El Segundo has also long been a center for the toy industry as companies like to set up shop in the shadow of Mattel.
The Mattel facility “has always been an exceptional property with a legacy tied to aerospace innovation, and leasing to Varda Space Industries feels like a natural continuation of that story,” said Michael Woods, a partner at GPI Cos., which owns the property.
“We are proud to support a company that is genuinely pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, and are excited to watch Varda grow and thrive here in El Segundo,” Woods said.
As one of the country’s most active hubs of aerospace and defense innovation, El Segundo has seen its industrial property vacancy fall to 3.4% on demand from space companies, government contractors and technology startups, real estate brokerage CBRE said.
Successful startups often have to leave the neighborhood when they want to expand, real estate broker Bob Haley of CBRE said. The 9-acre Mattel facility was big enough to keep Varda in the city.
Last year, Varda subleased about 55,000 square feet of lab space from alternative protein company Beyond Meat at 888 Douglas St. in El Segundo, which it started moving into in June.
Varda will get the keys to its new building in December and spend four to eight months building production and assembly facilities as it ramps up operations. By the end of next year, it expects to have constructed 10 more spacecraft.
In the future, Varda could consolidate offices there, given its size. Currently, though, the plan is to retain all properties, creating a campus of three buildings within a mile of one another that are served by the company’s transportation services, Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Barr said.
“We already have Varda-branded shuttles running up and down Aviation Boulevard,” he said.
Idaho lawmakers introduce bill to phase out state funding for Hispanic Affairs commission
Chicago property taxes jump — but unevenly
Heavy rain soaks central Indiana, but drought relief uneven across the state
Iowa women’s wrestling star Kylie Welker on competing for official NCAA championship
Former Kansas high school wrestling coach charged with producing child pornography
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Indiana Members Credit Union announced as new anchor tenant at Bottleworks District
Map: 4.9-Magnitude Earthquake Shakes Louisiana
Paxton vows he’s ‘staying in this race’ even if Trump backs Cornyn in Texas GOP clash
Which Kurdish groups is the US rallying to fight Iran?
Man accused of plot to assassinate Trump testifies Iran pressured him, says Biden and Haley were other possible targets
DHS defends McLaughlin against allegations husband’s company profited millions from ad contracts: ‘Baseless’
-
World1 week agoExclusive: DeepSeek withholds latest AI model from US chipmakers including Nvidia, sources say
-
Massachusetts1 week agoMother and daughter injured in Taunton house explosion
-
Wisconsin4 days agoSetting sail on iceboats across a frozen lake in Wisconsin
-
Maryland5 days agoAM showers Sunday in Maryland
-
Florida5 days agoFlorida man rescued after being stuck in shoulder-deep mud for days
-
Denver, CO1 week ago10 acres charred, 5 injured in Thornton grass fire, evacuation orders lifted
-
Massachusetts3 days agoMassachusetts man awaits word from family in Iran after attacks
-
Oregon6 days ago2026 OSAA Oregon Wrestling State Championship Results And Brackets – FloWrestling