It's the bottom trawlers(and the mid-water guys that bottom trawl illegally) that bottom trawl over the crab breeding grounds killing everything and not letting anything live there again for decades. They're trying to push it off on global warming, which is a thing, but has little to nothing to do with this issue. They'll keep pushing this as global warming as long as they can. It's not the cause.
The bottom trawlers have already caught, killed and thrown back more crab this year than the limit for crab fishermen has been any year the last decade.
And it's not just crab. They're collapsing the salmon and halibut fisheries as well. More or less the same reason. Insane by-catch and habitat destruction.
Banning the bottom trawlers is the #1 thing that we need to happen for Alaska. It will eventually effect our hunting as well.(It'll take a good while, but salmon are the nitrogen that allow us to have vegetation for moose, bou, etc to eat. And of course the salmon for bears.) The Yukon River Salmon fishery has already completely collapsed.
Our representatives are starting to care due to pressure, but it'd be really nice if we could get the rest of the country to care, because it's a Federal fishery. The representatives in CA, WA, and OR are in the pockets of the industry and couldn't be screwing us more if they tried. Some of ours are as well, to very much include our current Governor.
They are so destructive, honestly we need the boats sunk so they can't go destroy another ecosystem if we manage to ban them. Which is what they've done. The boats that trawl up here used to be on the east coast until they collapsed their fishery there(and then they were banned). Then they moved to the west coast, and collapsed the fishery there(and then they were banned). Now they're in Alaska, collapsing the fisheries here, we need to ban them before they collapse ours.