A recent article in The New York Times (NYT), “How Climate Change is Causing ‘the Gentrification of Seafood’,” blames primarily climate change for how expensive seafood has become in recent decades. This is misleading. Later in the article, the author admits that seafood prices have always fluctuated, and economics and overfishing can also impact the cost and availability of fish and shellfish. This is a much better explanation for seafood prices than blaming the weather, sea surface temperatures, and fossil fuel use.
The NYT claims that climate change is increasing ocean temperatures and reducing the supply of fish, forcing prices upwards, but also quite early in the post admits that “more people” are also going after those supposedly “fewer fish and shellfish.”
With that admission, the NYT complicates their own narrative. Human populations are growing, and the popularity of seafood has been increasing as diet trends promote eating fish and shellfish as easy ways to get lean protein. Trends on social media like TikTok made eating canned fish like sardines look epicurean and health conscious to younger consumers who otherwise would probably turn their noses up at it. Seafood consumption has been rising; in 2024, sales reports showed that four-year sales growth in both frozen and fresh fish increased 31%, and shellfish experienced a 23% growth in sales.
Lest we forget, after Biden banned Russian seafood imports, demand on US-caught fish expanded, and prices increased.
Economic pressures are much larger influences on especially local seafood costs. In 2024, seafood prices had actually been trending downwards in the United States, despite inflation, but pressures change quickly. The spike in fuel costs is likely a large part of why seafood is so comparatively expensive right now. Marine diesel is over $7 per gallon right now, while last year it was closer to $6.50. That might not sound like a huge change, but large fishing boats that do multi-day excursions might have tanks that hold over 250 gallons, and commercial crabbing boats have fuel requirements of 48,000 gallons or more.
Another factor that this article, which focuses largely on the Pacific Northwest, mentions only very briefly, is that local cost inflation due to how trendy the area is will also impact food prices in general, including eating out at seafood restaurants. NYT even admits that “[m]any aspects of Seattle life have become more expensive with the influx of high-earning tech workers who have relocated there for companies like Amazon, beginning in the 2010s.”
That is obviously not because of climate change.
Increasing pressure on fish stocks in general is a known issue, however that hasn’t stopped record fish catches from happening in recent years. As described by Climate Realism before when refuting similar claims coming from media, the most recent all-time record was set in 2020, and some groups studying fisheries estimate that production is expected to continue growing into the 2030s.
Warmer waters may push cooler water species away from where they once lived, this is true, but it is not a catastrophe and is not evidence that climate change is decimating fish stocks. The NYT claims that, while admitting seafood prices have never been stable, “over the last 20 years, climate change-related phenomena have added steady pulses of volatility,” listing “droughts, heat domes, marine heat waves, sea ice anomalies, ocean acidification, atmospheric rivers and toxic algae blooms” as climate-driven issues that have supposedly “upended” Pacific Northwest fisheries. They say this as if all these issues were not present in previous decades, which is blatantly false.
Marine heatwaves have always happened. One of the most prominent marine heatwave conditions that regularly occur in the Pacific, and which is ongoing right now, is the El Niño–Southern Oscillation. It is natural, and has always occurred. Even this year’s very strong El Niño is hardly unprecedented and not unique to the last two decades. Previous years with similarly strong ENSO in the satellite era alone occurred in 1982-83 and 1997-98.
Likewise atmospheric rivers are a common feature of the Pacific Northwest’s climate. Meteorologist Anthony Watts explains in “Wrong, Washington Post – History and Data Contradict Claims of Worsening ‘Atmospheric Rivers’,” that studies using satellite as well as sounding data looking at the regions the West Cost atmospheric rivers originate found that there is no trend towards intensifying or declining events.
It is true that bacterial and algae blooms can make shellfish toxic, and they are more common in warmer water conditions, which is why the oyster harvest seasons usually do not go into summer months in the Southeastern United States. If the window has shifted, harvest times can also shift. Still, the NYT implies that paralytic shellfish poisoning, for example, is a recently emerging phenomenon, when records going back as early as the 1700s and into the 1920s show that these events poisoned and killed people enjoying seafood on the West Coast. But again, there are plenty of places with warmer waters than the Pacific Northwest that also have thriving shellfish harvesting communities, like Louisiana.
Climate change is, ironically, a red herring in this story.
The most frustrating thing about articles like this, is the mixing of truth with exaggeration, where the New York Times and other outlets like it will choose to amplify the role of warming while downplaying factors that are much more immediate and powerful. What is implied by this framing, is that YOUR use of fossil fuels and their byproducts is making it so that it is harder for people to afford their favorite foods. Because YOU won’t give up your car or eating red meat, a poor family in Connecticut or Oregon can no longer afford cod. It is nonsense and certainly not part of “all the news that’s fit to print.“
