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.”
It has been a bumpy road for the electric vehicle market as declining federal support and plateauing public interest have eaten away at sales.
But EV sellers could soon receive a boost from an unexpected source: The war in Iran is pushing up gas prices.
As Americans look to save money at the pump, more will consider switching to an electric or hybrid vehicle. Average gas prices in the U.S. have risen nearly 17% since Feb. 28 to reach $3.48 per gallon. In California, the average is $5.20 per gallon.
Electric vehicles are pricier than gasoline-powered cars and charging them isn’t cheap with current electricity prices, but sky-high gas prices can tip the scales for consumers deciding which kind of vehicle to buy next.
“We probably will see an uptick in EV adoption and particularly hybrid adoption” if gas prices stay high, said Sam Abuelsamid, an auto analyst at Telemetry Agency. “The last time we had oil prices top $100 per barrel was early 2022 and that’s when we saw EV sales really start to pick up in the U.S.”
In a 2022 AAA survey, 77% of respondents said saving money on gas was their primary motivator for purchasing an electric vehicle. That year, 25% of survey respondents said they were likely or very likely to purchase an EV.
As oil prices cooled, the number fell to16% in 2025.
In California, annual sales of new light-duty zero-emission vehicles jumped 43% in 2022, according to the state’s Energy Commission. The market share of zero-emission vehicles among all light-duty vehicles sold rose from 12% in 2021 to 19% in 2022.
“Prior to 2022, we didn’t really have EVs available when we had oil price shocks,” Abuelsamid said. “But every time we did, it coincided with a move toward more fuel-efficient vehicles.”
Dealers are anticipating a windfall.
Brian Maas, president of the California New Car Dealers Assn., predicted enthusiasm for EVs will rebound across California if oil prices don’t come down.
“If prior gasoline price spikes are any indication, you tend to see interest in more fuel-efficient vehicles,” he said.
Rising gas prices could be a lifeline for EV makers at a time when federal support for green cars has been declining.
Under President Trump, a federal $7,500 tax incentive for new electric vehicles was eliminated in September, along with a $4,000 incentive for used electric vehicles.
In California, the zero-emission vehicle share of the total new-vehicle market was 22% through the first 10 months of 2025, then dropped sharply to 12% in the last two months of the year, according to the California Auto Outlook.
Meanwhile Tesla, the most popular EV brand in the country, has grappled with an implosion of its reputation with some consumers after its chief executive, Elon Musk, became one of Trump’s most vocal supporters and helped run the controversial Department of Government Efficiency.
Over the last several months, Ford, General Motors and Stellantis have pared back EV ambitions.
Other automakers, including Nissan, announced plans to stop producing their more affordable electric models.
The Trump administration has moved to roll back federal fuel economy standards and revoked California’s permission to implement a ban on new gas-powered car sales by 2035.
David Reichmuth, a researcher with the Clean Transportation program in the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the shift in production plans will affect EV availability, even if demand surges.
That could keep people from switching to cleaner vehicles regardless of higher gas prices.
“This is a transition that we need to make for both public health and to try to slow the damage from global warming, whether or not the price of gasoline is $3 or $5 or $6 a gallon,” he said.
According to Cox Automotive, new EV sales nationally were down 41% in November from a year earlier. Used EV sales were down 14% year over year that month.
To be sure, oil prices can fluctuate wildly in times of uncertainty. It will take time for consumers to decide on new purchases.
Brian Kim, who manages used car sales at Ford of Downtown LA, said he has yet to see a jump in the number of people interested in EVs, hybrids or more fuel-efficient gas-powered engines.
Still, if the price at the pump stays stuck above its current level, it could happen soon.
“Once the gas prices hit six [dollars per gallon] or more and people feel it in their pocket, maybe things will start to change,” he said.
A total of 59 gigawatts of U.S. clean energy projects are facing delays at a time when demand for power from AI data centers is surging, according to a trade group study.
Developers are seeing an average delay of 19 months over issues such as long interconnection times, supply constraints and regulatory barriers, the American Clean Power Assn. said in a quarterly market report.
The backlog is happening despite the growing need for power on grids that are being taxed by energy-hungry data centers and increased manufacturing. The Trump administration has implemented a slew of policies to slow the build-out of solar and wind projects, including delaying approvals on federal lands.
The potential energy generation facing delays is the equivalent of 59 traditional nuclear reactors, enough to power more than 44 million homes simultaneously.
“Current policy instability is beginning to impact investor confidence and negatively impact project timelines at a time when demand is surging,” American Clean Power Chief Policy Officer JC Sandberg said in a statement.
Despite the hurdles, developers were able to bring more than 50 gigawatts of wind, solar and batteries online in 2025, accounting for more than 90% of all new power capacity in the U.S., the report found. Clean power purchase agreements declined 36% in 2025 compared with 2024, signaling that the build-out of clean power in the U.S. could be lower in the 2028 to 2030 time period, according to the report.
Chediak writes for Bloomberg.
The high-stakes feud between Paramount Skydance President Jeff Shell and Las Vegas gambler and self-professed “fixer” Robert James “R.J.” Cipriani spilled into court on Monday.
Cipriani filed a lawsuit against Shell on claims of fraud and eight other counts, alleging that he reneged on an oral agreement to develop an English-language version of a Spanish music show that streams on Roku TV.
He is seeking $150 million in damages.
In the 67-page lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Cipriani claims that in exchange for providing “sophisticated, high-value crisis communications services, entirely without compensation” over 18 months, Shell had agreed to develop the show “Serenata De Las Estrellas,” (Star Serenade), but failed to do so. Cipriani and his wife were to be named as co-executive producers.
“This case arises from the oldest form of fraud: a powerful man took everything a less powerful man had to offer, promised to repay him, lied to him when he asked about it, and then refused to compensate him at all,” states the complaint.
Cipriani — who has producer credits on a 2020 documentary about Vegas, “Money Machine: Behind the Lies,” and the 2015 movie “Wild Card” — intended to make “Serenata” as a “lasting legacy for his mother,” Regina, saying the effort “has been the driving force and the most important thing consuming [Cipriani’s] entire life of almost sixty-five years,” according to the suit.
The show was inspired by a song that the Philadelphia-born Cipriani used to sing to his late mother when he was growing up.
The litigation is the latest twist in a simmering behind-the-scenes scandal that has left much of Hollywood slack-jawed.
For weeks, Cipriani had threatened to file a lawsuit against Shell, with the potential to derail his comeback at Paramount, three years after he lost his job as NBCUniversal’s chief executive over an inappropriate relationship with an underling.
Cipriani’s suit alleges Shell wasdesperate for help in quelling negative stories about him.
It also portrays him as someone who was indiscreet, allegedly sharing sensitive information during the period when the Ellison family, through Skydance Media, was preparing to close its deal to acquire Paramount and then was actively pursuing Warner Bros. Discovery to add to its growing entertainment and media empire.
The eventual rift between the unlikely pair began in August 2024. Patty Glaser, the high-powered entertainment litigator, convened a meeting between the two men.
During the meeting with Shell, the executive expressed to Cipriani his concern that emails and texts between him and Hadley Gamble, the CNBC anchor Shell had been involved with, would come out, saying “that would absolutely destroy me,” according to the suit.
Cipriani claims in his lawsuit Shell was facing “catastrophic personal exposure arising from his conduct toward yet another woman in the media industry,” similar to what had prompted his ouster from NBCUniversal and that he “solicited” his “crisis communications services.”
According to the suit, Cipriani was in a position to help him, having engaged in a “longstanding practice of exposing misconduct in the entertainment and media industries.”
Robert James “R.J.” Cipriani in Amazon Prime Video’s 2025 series “Cocaine Quarterback.”
(Courtesy of Prime)
A high-rolling blackjack player, Cipriani’s colorful résumé includes aiding the FBI in the arrest and conviction of USC athlete-turned global drug kingpin Owen Hanson, who was sentenced to 21 years in federal prison, and filing a RICO suit against Resorts World Las Vegas.
Leveraging his “unique media relationships and industry influence,” Cipriani said in his complaint that he provided Shell with “ongoing threat-monitoring and intelligence services,” and “took proactive steps to suppress, redirect, or neutralize” negative coverage against Shell before publication.
Cipriani said Shell expressed “effusive gratitude” to him after he planted a story about another entertainment industry figure “in order to divert media attention” away from Shell. “Thank you thank you thank you,” Shell wrote in a text to Cipriani, according to the lawsuit, which included a copy of the text.
During tense negotiations over Paramount’s streaming rights for the highly successful “South Park” franchise last summer, Shell allegedly asked to talk to Cipriani about the matter. Cipriani then “orchestrat[ed] the placement of a highly favorable news article,” that was “devastating to Shell’s and Paramount’s adversaries in the dispute,” the suit states.
After a story published in a Hollywood trade, Cipriani wrote to Shell on WhatsApp, “I’m the one that put the article out for you!!!” and “I didn’t want to tell you till it hit so you have plausible deniability.”
According to a message cited in the lawsuit, Shell responded, “I love you!!!! …Thank you Rj,” adding “I owe you dinner at least!”
Despite those boasts, Paramount ultimately paid “South Park” creators millions more than Skydance had intended. To remove obstacles from Skydance’s path to buy Paramount, the media company agreed to two blockbuster deals that include paying the “South Park” production company more than $1.25 billion to continue the cartoon — making it one of the richest deals in television history.
During the course of their relationship, Cipriani further alleges that Shell alerted him to a then-pending $7.7-billion Paramount deal for the rights to UFC fights, while Netflix “believed” it had a “handshake deal” for the same rights, according to the suit.
Cipriani disclosed in his lawsuit that he filed a whistleblower complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission over the disclosure of material information, claiming that Shell told him that not even UFC President Dana White knew of the transaction. In a WhatsApp message cited in the lawsuit, Shell told Cipriani that the deal was “very hush, hush until we sign.”
While the gambler continued to provide his services to Shell gratis, their relationship began to sour.
Cipriani became enraged that Shell did not uphold his end of the alleged deal to help him with the TV show, viewing it as a slap to him and his mother.
In February, the pair met to resolve their growing dispute. According to the lawsuit, also in attendance was an unidentified entertainment attorney who had represented both men in separate matters.
Patty Glaser has been widely reported as having represented Shell and Cipriani. She introduced them in summer 2024, as The Times reported Saturday.
“We were presented with a draft complaint riddled with clear errors of fact and law,” Glaser said in a statement last week. “We will strongly respond.”
The February meeting did not go well.
Shell not only “refused to compensate” Cipriani, but also told him that he could not “assist” him “in obtaining a television show or other entertainment industry opportunity.”
Cipriani further alleged in his lawsuit that during their “failed summit,” Shell revealed his “disdain” for David Zaslav, the Warner Bros. Discovery CEO, and disclosed that Paramount intended to “sweeten” its pending hostile offer for the studio to fend off Netflix prior to announcing its intention to do so publicly.
After the meeting, Cipriani stated in his complaint that Shell’s attorney privately offered Cipriani a “$150,000 personal loan” to resolve the dispute.
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