Inside the Massachusetts State House hangs a five-foot wooden fish known as the Sacred Cod. It has watched over the House of Representatives for generations, a reminder that cod was once central to the state’s economy and identity.

The Sacred Cod dates to 1784, when Boston merchant and former legislator John Rowe gave it to the House as a tribute to Massachusetts fishermen. Rowe owned the Eleanor, one of the ships involved in the Boston Tea Party. The carving has moved around Beacon Hill over the centuries, but has hung in the House chamber since 1895.

It represents more than quaint colonial nostalgia. Cod built Massachusetts. It supplied ports, shipyards, processors, merchants and fishing families. Cape Cod bears its name. Gloucester and New Bedford remain among America’s most important fishing ports; New Bedford leads the nation in seafood landing value.

Yet the real cod is not doing nearly as well as its wooden stand-in.

Atlantic cod stocks were hammered by overfishing in the 1980s. Massachusetts now regulates cod fishing tightly in the name of rebuilding the population. The state’s 2025 Atlantic Cod Management Transition plan emphasizes stock recovery using “the best available science.” In the Southern New England Cod Management Area, fishermen generally cannot retain cod caught in Massachusetts waters.

That makes the state’s enthusiasm for offshore wind development in and around sensitive fish habitat difficult to square.

When the Trump administration moved in January 2025 to pause new offshore-wind leasing and review federal wind permits, it cited, among other things, the need to protect marine life and maintain “a robust fishing industry for future generations.” The pause offered Massachusetts and federal regulators a chance to reconsider whether industrial construction belongs near one of the region’s most important marine habitats: Cox’s Ledge.

Instead, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell celebrated in June when Democratic-appointed federal judges invalidated the Trump administration’s wind-permitting pause. Campbell praised the ruling as protection for Massachusetts’ investments, jobs, reliable energy, and climate objectives. (RELATED: Gone With The Wind: Trump Admin Scraps Offshore Eyesore For Fossil Fuel Development)

Those investments are enormous. Massachusetts has poured at least $311 million into this endeavor, including investments in New Bedford ports to support the offshore-wind supply chain. The projects operating off the Massachusetts and Rhode Island coasts are largely developed, financed, or imported by foreign companies, including Denmark’s Ørsted and Spain’s Iberdrola and its subsidiary Avangrid.

At 28.14 cents per kilowatt-hour in May, New England had the nation’s highest regional average residential electricity price outside Hawaii, according to the Energy Information Administration. Massachusetts averaged 28.82 cents, while........

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