Elevated fuel costs driven by President Donald Trump’s war of choice in Iran are harming many economic sectors, but they have been particularly harsh on the longline fishing fleet based in Hawaii’s Honolulu Harbor. Diesel hit an all-time high of $7.2919 per gallon in Hawaii on October 23, 2026, as the war drags on and supply disruptions of oil and diesel continue. In one year, the price has increased by more than $2 per gallon, an increase of nearly 40 percent.
In 2022, Hawaii-based fisheries were already experiencing an “all-time low” in profits. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the federal agency that manages the tuna fishery, regularly publishes reports on the fisheries in Hawaii. The agency requires vessels to maintain logs that include many data points including the type of fish caught, where fishing took place, and the amount and cost of diesel used.
Fuel is the single most expensive cost for the Hawaii fleet, accounting for up to half of the cost for each fishing trip. In 2023, the last year for which NOAA analyzed data, 29 cents of every $1 of revenue went to fuel costs. And now record-breaking fuel prices driven ever higher by the war in Iran are making it harder for fishermen to turn a profit.
What is “red diesel”?
Vessels in the Hawaii longline fishing fleet use “red diesel,” which is untaxed diesel used for off-road machinery and farming equipment. It is dyed red to help identify it and differentiate it from regular diesel, but it is chemically the same thing. Red diesel is exempt from the federal diesel excise tax plus some state and local taxes and therefore is cheaper, but it is still affected by the same price fluctuations and inflationary pressures as regular diesel. When regular diesel increases in price, red diesel increases by a similar amount, even if it is overall cheaper due to the removal of the taxes being paid.
Over the past three years, the Hawaii longline fishing fleet has averaged about 1,600 trips to sea targeting both swordfish and tuna, with each trip averaging about 4,000 gallons of diesel. An increase of more than $2 per gallon of diesel would represent paying more than $13 million extra per year, or an average of more than $1 million per month if fuel prices remain this high.
The price of fish in Hawaii is set at auction, not by the fishermen, so they cannot raise prices in order to recover their increased fuel costs. Fishermen are left with the difficult choice of paying fees to stay at the dock waiting for fuel prices to come back down or going out and not catching enough fish to recover costs.
Rolling back marine protections
President Trump signed three presidential proclamations to “unleash” commercial fishing in U.S. waters. The proclamations direct agencies to open five marine national monuments to industrial-scale commercial fishing and threaten to eliminate 87 percent of the nation’s highly protected ocean waters; the rollbacks account for a staggering 21 percent loss in high-level marine protection globally. The administration is also undermining protections for endangered species, selling off vast swaths of seabed to mining companies, undermining the scientific expertise at government agencies, and making it harder for the American public to participate in the management of public natural resources.
The Trump administration is undermining decades of conservation effort ostensibly to help commercial fisheries, but the administration’s actions will not increase the number of fish the longline fishing fleet out of Honolulu Harbor is allowed to catch. Opening protected areas to commercial fleets allows the vessels to fish in new places, but it does not increase the actual amount of fish the fleet is allowed to catch. The annual catch for bigeye tuna for the Honolulu-based fleet in this part of the Pacific Ocean is capped at 6,554 metric tons per year regardless of where the fish are caught, so the Trump administration’s unprecedented environmental rollbacks do not increase revenue for the fleet. In fact, recent peer-reviewed scientific papers have shown large protected areas such as the marine monuments lead to “spillover,” where fish leave protected zones and populate areas open for fishing. Opening marine protected areas could reduce ocean health, and it may even reduce the sustainability and profitability of the industry.
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Conclusion
The Trump administration’s poorly thought-out global policies drive up the prices of fuel for fishermen and all Americans. This article has focused on some of the economic numbers for one fleet in Hawaii, but diesel prices are also threatening fisheries in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Alaska, Maine, and likely others all across the country.
The United States has developed the best network of marine protected areas and the best-managed fisheries in the world over the past several decades. In nearly two years, the Trump administration has undermined both of those accomplishments.