Something similar happened to the cod fishing industry in Newfoundland and other parts of eastern Canada 30 years ago. The reason: overfishing, due in large part to technological advances. Here's what happened:
Canada and NAFO continued to overestimate the abundance of cod in the Atlantic Ocean and therefore continued to set dangerously high [Total Allowable Catches]. This was in large part due to the widespread practice of calculating cod populations from catch rates in the commercial fishery – if fishers filled their quotas with ease, then officials believed the stock size was at adequately high levels. However, fishing technology had become so efficient by the 1970s that commercial catch rates remained high even as the cod population dropped to dangerously low levels. Electronic tracking devices could find fish no matter how small their numbers and trawlers could harvest most species with relative ease. ...
Although overfishing in international waters did tremendous damage to northern cod, Canada also failed to maintain a sustainable fishery within its 200-mile limit. The government ignored warnings from inshore fishers and university scientists that cod stocks were in danger and chose to maintain quotas instead of scaling back the fishery, in large part to prevent economic losses and massive unemployment.
By the early 1990s, after decades of sustained intensive fishing from Canadian and international fleets, the northern cod stocks collapsed. The spawning biomass of northern cod had dropped by about 93 per cent in only 30 years – from 1.6 million tonnes in 1962 to between 72,000 and 110,000 tonnes in 1992. In July of that year, Canada imposed a moratorium on the catching of northern cod and ended an international industry that had endured for close to 500 years.
They called off the season in 1992 and it never came back. A pillar of the local economy in the Maritimes was wrecked.
As for climate change and its impact on East Coast fishing, I've read that lobster fishing is no longer a viable industry in Long Island and it's declining in southern New England as waters get warmer and the lobsters permanently migrate north.
I work in the Alaska fishery and am typing this while sat in one of the largest fish processing facilities in the western hemisphere. I have the spare time because, well, there's no crabs coming in and everything else is mostly out of season. About half of the boats on Discovery belong to the company I work for, the largest in the US. So I'll take the opportunity to share some on-the-ground observations.
Overfishing: It's not this. A billion crabs is north of 5 billion pounds, in other words on the order of 100x the US crabbing fleet's capability. I would hazard to guess there isn't enough crabbing gear on the planet earth to have achieved that catch.
Foreign fleets: If this is the case, the real bad news is that the Rusky's and/or Chinese have developed cloaking device technology.
Trawling: We're talking about the bottom-scrapers. They're new on the scene relative to the crabbers. Alaska allows 4 1/3 million crabs as bycatch (waste), amounting to ~20 million pounds, which would be a decent annual catch. Even though this is thought to interfere specifically with breeding grounds, it isn't enough to have caused this depopulation event. It's more than enough to piss of the crabbers though, since it actually is unfair.
Disease: Is there a precedent in Earth's natural history of a 90% die-off in two years due to disease? We might have to go back to the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Which brings us to:
Climate change: There was a similar depopulation event in the early 80s. 1980 still holds the annual catch record at 200 million pounds (~40 million animals), a sustained harvest without noticeable impact on the stock. The waters warmed, population (and yield) suddenly tanked on a similar scale, and never recovered to anywhere near those levels. The basic ecological dynamic of a fishery is this: deep, cold, nutrient-rich waters are pushed by a current into a steep continental shelf, forcing them toward the surface where it fertilizes plankton, the foundation of sea life. The volcanic Aleutian archipelago is such a place, another notable one is Peru's fishery. A change in sea temperature can effect this dynamic, in addition to the breeding and general survival of crabs.
However long it takes for the stock to recover (probably a long time, even if the environmental conditions do return to favorable), one outcome is almost a foregone conclusion: independent crabbers will have be forced out, and only the larger companies, with deeper pockets and more diversified across fish species, will survive, leading to another round of conglomeration.
Mick, thanks for taking the time to share your observations and expertise about this industry.
Just want to say that my point about sharing the Canadian cod industry collapse was to illustrate the long-term effects - it still hasn't recovered 30 years later. And maybe that dovetails with what you're saying about indie crabbers being driven out, although from what I understand of the Canadian situation there is basically no industry now, indie or otherwise.
I agree things aren't looking good long-term. I didn't mean to attack your point specifically but to address the thread as a whole. The Atlantic cod collapse certainly was caused by overfishing, but the situation isn't all that comparable beyond the semi-permanence of the loss. The north Atlantic had a true tragedy-of-the-commons situation, this is most likely climate change, which is even more discouraging.
I'm in PLC/controls, so no expert on commercial fishing. Just hear/saying from those who are.
You also have to take into account the sexual maturity and number of offspring of the species.
Cod reach sexual maturity from 2-7 years, crab in 1 year.
But Atlantic cod apparently lay 200k-2m eggs, alaskan crab between 50k-500k.
Though I can't quite see if the cod number is lifetime or annual.
Doesn't mean we don't need to know why. It's good that the crab season is cancelled, but I really feel for the crab fishermen. After the last few years, and with inflation, to lose a whole season must be devistating.
In uni we had classes about systems modeling and fishing population was one of the examples studied. Overfishing can cause these phenomenons not so muche because you actually fish 1bln unit and are 1bln down, but because even a modest amount of overfishing past a critical point puts your population on a crashing decrease due to reduced reprodution. So if under normal circumstances your next generation would be lets say 5bln crabs, because the reduced population makes it much (non linearly) harder to repro now you only have 0.5bln. And over a couple years everything is dried up even thought you maybe "only" overfished 200mln units.
I suppose it would stand to reason. The talk I've heard has been about the disparity of (nearly) banning crab-harvesting but barely restricting crab-wasting.
> Disease: Is there a precedent in Earth's natural history of a 90% die-off in two years due to disease
On mobile, so I can't provide a link. Look up sea star wasting disease. It's affected several species of sea star from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico. One species, the sunflower star went from being everywhere to a red listed endangered species over just a couple of years.
I'm not readily finding numbers but certainly adjectives like 'devastating', 'massive', etc, so can't specifically compare. Might we suppose that interest of study is correlated with commercial interest? But it does occur to me that it could be a confluence of factors, like the hypothesis about Colony Collapse Disorder in bees having multiple factors synergizing.
It could be overfishing. That's what it was with Cod. The thing is depending on the stock assessment model used for Alaskan Crab, the data fed into said model (surveys, fishery catch etc.) they could have been over estimating abundance and setting too high quotas for years until poof there's no more.
When I was in Norway about ten years ago, I heard a story about Kamchatka crabs, introduced by Soviet scientists to Murmansk and then, due to absence of natural predators started migration first around North Cape and then south towards the Gulfstream. Norway captain of our yacht said, that in warmer waters crabs are more active, so they became an ecological danger of sorts. So I thought that with sea warming we should see a rise, not a drop of crab population, aren't we?
If the world doesn't get over fossil fuel addiction and allowing oil companies to push us to near extinction for their profits, really soon, the worse is yet to come.
Maybe in your part of the world. But grant me that it would be dumb to pay twice as much for electricity as for gas to heat my home to the same temperature which is the case. Heat pumps? For huge numbers of poor people across the world this a Marie Antoinette-esque gesture. I'm aware that there's no evidence she ever said words to the effect 'let them eat cakes' (people had no bread) but we all understand the metaphor.
Let's not forget that much of the cost of electricity is down to the massive costs involved in its distribution.
> Heat pumps? For huge numbers of poor people across the world this a Marie Antoinette-esque gesture.
We were specifically talking about Europe. And there, lots of people even in relatively wealthy countries like Germany still use gas for heating. The government could definitely be encouraging/subsidizing the use of heat pumps instead.
Obviously the idea is for transitioning where it's economically feasible, not demanding that poor people freeze to death, jesus christ.
and the current price is not the total cost, which should include externalities like this. (yes, electricity generation currently is also mostly a GHG emitting travesty, but not fundamentally, like nat.gas.)
Cost of resistive heating is around 2-5x the amount you'd pay for nat gas equivalent. Probably not that dumb, unless your actually point is that poor people just need to be cold for climate change.
As much as I would like to end such an addiction, there aren't even viable replacements for every ICE yet. What do we do about aircraft, freight trucks, and sea vessels?
To be clear, those three categories combined probably represent (spitball) less than 7% of total global emissions. We have a pretty clear path towards eliminating 80%+ of overall emissions, and that would buy us some time to figure out solutions for the remaining 20%.
But since you asked:
1- Freight trucks, for now, will likely be either carbon capture, or a clever EV retrofit like SixWheel. Batteries probably aren’t quite there (in 2022) to go full EV for all applications but the learning curve slope is such that that could conceivably be only 5 years away.
2- Aircraft are most certainly going to be SAF eg a green/renewable fuel until battery tech improves by an order of magnitude (10-20 years?)
3- Similar story for sea vessels on the batteries front, though for those CCS is likely to be the most promising interim solution.
For all of the categories you mentioned there are relatively promising 10-30 year prospects for full electrification and much more short term prospects for emissions mitigation. And these are part of the hardest 20% of emissions.
Long story short the situation is not nearly as bleak as you make it out to be.
> To be clear, those three categories combined probably represent (spitball) less than 7% of total global emissions. We have a pretty clear path towards eliminating 80%+ of overall emissions, and that would buy us some time to figure out solutions for the remaining 20%.
This is a problem that is going to take care of itself. World population is peaking and there's nothing that will get the world back to replacement fertility (2.1 children per woman) in the near term. As the world takes its long gentle slide into depopulation, carbon emissions will taper off. Problem solved.
Not just that, practically every petrochemical (plastic, fertilizer, synthetic rubber, etc) is derived from oil and/or natural gas. We need more fossil fuels to make the green tech in the first place (in the form of mines, powering factories, and producing petrochemicals). To convert the entire globe, we actually need to be producing a lot more than we currently are!
Sure a day may come when there's enough solar/wind/nuclear to restrict oil/natural gas to petrochemical production, but until that day green tech, like all others, follows the price of oil. You want to cut oil production now? Say good-bye to the green transition.
This is actually why I'm buying an ICE truck rather than an EV. We need fossil fuels for so much, including fertilizer. It feels irresponsible to buy an electric.
That would be rather logical now, wouldn't it? However, I'm afraid that when someone says that we must reduce our dependence on petrochemicals I must mention that there are things for which we have no replacement for petrochemicals. I must argue that eliminating petrochemical use is impossible any time you ask to reduce use. I don't make the rules.
Would you like to hear about how some Americans need a truck to do work too? Just go ahead and mention that we should aim to use smaller vehicles.
Yeah, how about we shut down large swaths of national economies. That's produced nothing but positive effects for all involved over the last couple of years.
Keep in mind, there are a (relatively) small number of ecomonies and peoples causing the majority of the damage / side effects. The others can continue as they have been.
The current model isn't sustainable. Something *must* change. There can be no actual change without change.
The point is, the economies in question (i.e., the over-contributors) need to change and all we're talking about is getting back to normal. In what reality is a normal that's so deadly so normalized and worshipped?
Something people don't seem to understand is that when it comes to externalities there are economic activities whose benefits exceed the downsides of the negative externality and activities whose negative externality by far exceeds its benefits. The latter makes everyone poorer except the person doing it but that person isn't even getting a reward that is worth the effort, he is just not losing out.
If you internalize a negative externality everyone will get wealthier simply because people only ruin the environment when it is actually worth it. People always say how fossil fuels were necessary for the industrial revolution but that only means that its benefits exceeded its negative externalities and therefore a pigovian tax would actually help it.
No, the others can't "continue as they have been" if things change.
Most of those countries "not causing a problem" accept a great deal of food and fuel imports from the "over-contributors", never mind goods, services and financing. They literally cannot support their populations without these imports. If the global economy comes screeching to a halt as major players scale down and just see to their own needs, many of the minor players literally starve in the dark. Just look at the impact of the Ukraine/Russia wheat supply disruption on North Africa/The middle east for a tiny example of what a global disruption would look like.
The current model can be made sustainable with time, proper policy and technological advancement. If for whatever reason we can't manage that, we're screwed.
People say "growth can't continue to infinity", and technically they're right. Problem is we know what no economic growth looks like. It's some form of feudalism, where powerful entities hoard all the wealth and we all rent the rest. The only attempt at something other than that was 20th century communism, and that... didn't work to say the least. So either we make history by creating the first ever successful re-distributive economic system, on a global scale, or we keep doing what we've been doing for centuries and hope technology and enlightened democracy can save the day.
My vote's on the latter, at least it has an overall positive track record.
> The current model can be made sustainable with time, proper policy and technological advancement. If for whatever reason we can't manage that, we're screwed.
Given history, the human psyche, as well as "progress" to date...then I'm betting on the fact that there are better odds of oil and water mixing.
We'd have a better chance 100 or 200 years ago when the masses we comfortable with and embraced sacrifice. Now it's all about comfort sans any sort of sacrifice. In addition, there's a destructive symbiotic relationship with those expectations and how leaders lead and how political parties think (i.e., short term, at best).
Climate change aside, the current model in the USA simply isn't sustainable. Infant mortality rate, obesity, mental health, gun violence, opioids...the list goes on and on. Covid was an opportunity to adjust course. Maybe even pivot. But we didn't have the will and our commitment to "back to normal" (which is corrupt and problematic at best) is stronger than ever.
We can't get off the sofa. How we gonna face climate change?
As far as technology solutions, we're headed for some form of The Matrix. The masses will be comfortable and consumption and pollution will be far less.
> They literally cannot support their populations without these imports.
That's no accident. It's by intent. Those countries can't develop their own healthy local economies when most everything is shipped in.
Look up clothing donations to Africa. Long to short, there was no way to have say a local cotton + clothing economy when free clothing was been dumped on a given economy.
>Problem is we know what no economic growth looks like. It's some form of feudalism, where powerful entities hoard all the wealth and we all rent the rest.
Powerful entities keep growing and getting a bigger share of the economy so we have to grow it just to not become poorer? Isn't it strange that no growth is considered the same thing as a shrinking standard of living? In any sane theoretical economics model, a lack of growth shouldn't mean a reduction of living standards, it should mean a continuation of our existing very high living standards which also precludes any form of automatic runaway wealth accumulation.
I have read a short anarchist book and I have seen the argument that it is the state that causes the problem but I am not fully convinced that just having a government is the problem but rather something the government does that is invisible to the naked eye. Subsidies are a classic example. Everyone drives because the road is free, nobody wants to pay the fully internalized costs of buses because the subsidy exposure of a car for every potential bus passenger is greater. The bus has to be subsidized to the same degree as the bus to compete! Those subsidies are paid for by taxes which decouples the amount of subsidies received from the amount of effort put in and the amount of labor paid into the system through taxes. This disconnect is most likely the problem when it comes to government activity. You can build a business and receive subsidies proportional to the size of the company while someone else has to pay for the subsidies.
Now, transportation is important but it only serves as an obvious in your face example where the subsidy structure is visible and how competition demands subsidies.
The real question is whether there are state subsidized factors of production. If they exist, then every other industry will have to ask for an equal level of subsidies to continue doing business.
The food industry is a classic industry where doing without a subsidy is unthinkable. The question is, why does food production need a subsidy in the first place? Can't farmers just be obligated to overproduce food on their own and pass this on as higher food prices, why does the government have to pay?
It has most likely to do with land as running a farm is impossible without it. If the land is leased, the farm is under intensive pressure to produce profitable crops rather than a surplus or the farmer won't be able to pay the lease. How is land subsidized? The military complex and police forces are in charge of protecting the country and enforcing property laws. How much can the owner of the land charge to the farmer? At least as high as the subsidy paid on land by providing free protective services plus the quality of the land itself. The latter subsidy might be paid by nature rather than the government but the government could tax this difference and remove the positive externality.
But even if production has succeeded, distribution must still happen and it can only happen through trading via the national money system which is practically speaking a monopoly. If you start out with no money, how do you get more money? By borrowing it for interest. That interest rate forces another profitability pressure on the farmer, he simply cannot produce food for everyone without a subsidy if that interest rate itself originated from a subsidy. Competing borrowers might be borrowing to buy land which receives subsidies thereby outcompeting farmers. There is also the fact that the money system is free but it generates massive amounts of costs for the economy. Printing physical bank notes costs money, providing bank accounts and branches costs money, providing loans costs money and accepting electronic payments require specialized terminals which cost money, opening a shop and providing goods every day aka widespread acceptance also costs money beyond the goods themselves.
What this means is that the holders of money get to sleep while everyone else without money must toil and keep moving and stay active. The subsidy isn't paid out in money but in real terms but the lender can now step in and market these subsidies as if he provided them, he can turn them into cold hard cash by charging interest. Thus the lower bound on interest on money that borrowed from another is somewhere between 3%-5% and the only way it is lower in practice is because banks create new money through loans rather than lending on existing deposits via CDs. If interest originates from subsidies then wealth accumulation must be automatic.
> The question is, why does food production need a subsidy in the first place?
Short answer, it's how politicians buy votes. Subsidies get the votes of the farmers. Lower food prices get the votes of the masses.
To your point, if politicans don't have the backbone to reduce such subsidies, and the masses don't have the will to demand it...how are we going to address a problem 100x as big?
Trains could replace a large portion of trucking and short haul flight. Food production can be much more localised in many places, and supply chains which see products circumnavigate the world several times will end themselves the second they have to pay for externalities.
The remained can be covered by already mentioned mechanisms.
Trucking industry is looking at hydrogen fuel cells. The hope is that renewables will create the hydrogen from water. For aircraft, the dream is to create synthetic fuels from ammonia. Ocean going vessels are hoping Diesel engines can be converted to use ammonia.
Unfortunately hydrogen has really low energy density, electrolyzers are slow, and it is also pretty explosive. I don’t see hydrogen fuel cells being nearly as attractive as EV retrofits or CCS as an interim solution until battery tech cost curves improve to the point of making full electrification a no brainer (probably not that far away…)
It's idiotic from an economic point of view too. There'd still be an industry if they'd scaled it back and made it more sustainable. Instead the industry has been wiped out and that's that.
Top 2 comments are like "oh yeah this is over fishing" when the only thing in common with cod are that they're in the ocean.
Either folks aren't RTFA or are being willfully ignorant. Over fishing to the tune 1bn crabs when juvenile populations from 2018 and 2019 looked great? No way.
Do you have any idea of the quantity of radionuclides released from Fukushima and their half lives? Just a couple of kilometres off the coast of Japan their activity is well below (multiple orders of magnitude) the natural background level. The sea is naturally full of radioactive potassium and uranium, amongst a lot of others.
Wikipedia says its not expected to recover to sustainable levels until 2030. Mind that they take 2-8 years to reach sexual maturity and were reduced to 1% of original population level, so a span of decades to recover is pretty sadly expected.
Interesting what is and isn’t available. Because I clicked this link to see not recognizing the name Finest Kind and was like, oh they play that on the folk program pretty often, I know that song.
Yes, but this is most likely not cause by over-fishing.
Snow crab fishing is relatively strictly regulated since a long time, and while there are always many ways this might be side stepped the amount of missing crabs is way to high in a too short amount of time to just because of over fishing AFIK.
More likely it is a combination of multiple factors putting strain on the population leading to a collapse event. One main driver for many of this factors is probably climate change.
Something similar happened not to far away of where I lived (on a much smaller scale). Tones of fish died. There where many factors which where not grate and in the end too many algae where blamed as main source, but if you look into it it's basically: Low water levels due to multiple years of extremely dry and hot summers strain the ecosystem in various ways and make a explosion algae much more likely. Still that wouldn't have been enough to kill all the fish but throw in the fertilizer from nearby fields even further amplifying the problems and a small contamination with chemicals (which by itself wouldn't have cause it either) and most of the fish died. Or to say it differently with climate change putting strain of water ecosystems we might need much stricter limits about what human causes we allow to put strain on them.
Picking on you, sorry, but what do you mean when you say 'climate change'. I don't think you're saying anything, it's like saying 'bad thing'.
What caused what exactly. Eg, if day warmer waters mean there is less habitat that the crabs can live in, I get that. Or if the deep, cold ocean temperatures have not changed, then that's not it. Or if the crabs have been poisoned by fertiliser, then say that.
I do resent the idea of this catch all term 'climate change' that appears to have answered something while saying nothing. I guess it appeals to us on self masochistic/'original sin' grounds - we want to blame ourselves, and that is a decent, scientific sounding answer that passes muster.
Fwiw, given one of mikedeen's comments, it sounds to me like trawling, and the destruction of habitat, is also a possibility.
I think it’s pretty clear from context that “climate change” in this case is shorthand for “human-caused warming and carbonization of oceans,” even if that’s not explicit.
“Climate change” is an overly broad term, true, but it’s also very easy to understand what is meant by it in 90% of situations.
If I tell you I got into a car accident “because of bad weather,” you should assume that I don’t mean that it was too hot outside.
I don't get the original sin rethoric at all. We made it harder for crabs to live now they are gone and we want them back. The expectation should be that humans do whatever is necessary to bring them back themselves rather than expecting the crabs to do our work for us.
I have large cognitive dissonance to "we shouldn't be the world police" and "globalism is bad." At face value I agree, but...
If you believe in the rule of law and human rights, then globalism seems like a natural consequence, as does policing the world.
What would happen if you let China have global hegemony and they become the over-fishing police? What type of enforcement do you think they might have (or non enforcement, or selective enforcement).
It seems clear with world scale commons, there must be both a common set of laws (globalization) and an entity capable of enforcing those laws (America is the world police).
Unfortunately, as someone who the intelligence agency in my land said, ultimate power brings ultimate corruption. If there is no #2 then no one can police #1
Yes, sadly this is more true than ever. America is all about due process and socialism for the rich and powerful, and plea bargains and rugged capitalism for the poor and unfortunate.
We have no right to preach rule of law (which more than anything means consequences for billionaires and politicians), when we don't practice it at home.
I suppose the best the argument can get is that many governments would be much worse police at least for the time being.
I think Europe does have the capacity (but maybe not the will) to check America's power.
Because the West in general is ideologically cohesive and generally follows a country which, alone, is a sole superpower.
China is never going to be able to outproduce the ~billion people in the west economically, and will never be able to have an overwhelming military edge over NATO sufficient to set up and for at least a decade enforce its own version of the liberal international order. The US was able to do so because, once the USSR fell, it was able to do things like invade Iraq and Afghanistan and play a hand in destroying Syria and Libya. Unless China gets such overwhelming advantage militarily, it's not going to be able to overpower NATO outside of Asia, and as a result won't be able to dictate an international order.
I think if Chinese people were to throw off their slave shackles and liberalize, then Chinese hegemony would be permissible/possible. I don't see any reason that's not possible, Taiwan is exactly an example of an ethnically Chinese society doing just that.
America was ceding power to China through making it's supply chain vulnerable. If it were not for Xi's disastrous reign, that likely would have continued. America was losing, China snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Another fallacy is that there is a strategy to out-compete via producing more. Russian and Chinese strategy is to corrupt and destroy institutions such that the west produces less and becomes another low trust society. Given recent political happenings, I would say this is an effective strategy that is showing both success and results.
It's not hard to imagine an America where every single American is paying rent to a Chinese landlord. That is winning a war without firing a single gun.
Military might is only one form of power. Economic and social power are not null.
> If you believe in the rule of law and human rights, then globalism seems like a natural consequence, as does policing the world.
You might ask, what problems is globalism going to solve that treaties and national cooperation can't today? More importantly, what will those mechanisms be and will they be just as vulnerable to the problems of corruption and interconnection that plague the meaningful enforcement of treaties and agreements today?
I haven't heard an actual appeal for structural "globalism" that answers these basic challenges.. as such, I mostly see it as a grift designed to remove democratic and republican control from the hands of individuals and cede them entirely to the technocratic machinations of the "new world order."
Recently, we did have a very globally similar response to a world wide event, and I'm not at all surprised that during that time the rich managed to make themselves much richer and the middle class has mostly taken the hit. If that's a hint to what "globalism" has to offer, you can keep it. We'll have to figure out the fishing problem some other way.
> Recently, we did have a very globally similar response to a world wide event, and I'm not at all surprised that during that time the rich managed to make themselves much richer and the middle class has mostly taken the hit. If that's a hint to what "globalism" has to offer, you can keep it. We'll have to figure out the fishing problem some other way.
You're probably talking about the world wide COVID response, and yes, it was an utter failure. But it was not because of globalism... it was a failure because every country tried to tackle it themselves, incompetently, in their own little vacuum, and the sum total across the world ended up uncoordinated and half-assed. If ever there was an ideal time for "technocracy" and letting the experts take charge worldwide, it was during a global deadly pandemic, but we all blew it.
I think maybe you have the benefit of hindsight, but even so your argument is perhaps unfounded.
First, I think it's worth pointing out that, for the most part [1],politicians operated in good faith, trying to balance multiple factors. There were a variety of strategies persued by different countries [2],and its somewhat unclear which was actually best in the long run. Social scientists will be dissecting the long term effects for decades.
Finally, the overall outcomes have been exceptionally mild. Globally a very large absolute number of people died. But as a fraction of total population it was tiny. A vaccine was developed, and distributed, such that everyone who wants to be vaccinated has been, probably many times.
Finally I don't think people would have responded any better to technocrats than politicians. Technocrats are not good at guiding large population groups, and are mistrusted by many.
In truth we still don't know which approach was (long term) the best, or even what the "best" ultimately means.
[1] the event itself was unprecedented in living memory, and there was no relevant historical data to lean on. Experts were consulted, only to get lots of speculation and varying opinions. In truth experts had very limited data to work with and most would have preferred a lot more data before making recommendations.
[2] Some countries had simple border structures (new Zealand) and could persure a total-close approach. Some had national lock downs, some had no lockdown (Sweden).
Overall though it seems outcomes were better in places where populations had a high degree of trust in their authority structures. Places like the USA with high volumes of distrust fared the worst. Changing the authority would not have changed that mistrust.
In some countries politicians erred on the side of safety - at the expense of the economy, in others maintaining personal freedoms, at the expense of a few deaths, was the primary goal. Which makes sense. Personal freedom advocates have never minded other people dying to maintain those freedoms. And the overall death rate was low enough that there was no real mass-fear of death coming to me.
You might ask, what problems is globalism going to solve that treaties and national cooperation can't today? More importantly, what will those mechanisms be and will they be just as vulnerable to the problems of corruption and interconnection that plague the meaningful enforcement of treaties and agreements today?
The difference is, much as the same with a democratic nation.
In a democratic nation, citizens collectively elect representatives, and then laws are passed. Once in place, citizens are bound by those laws, and will be encouraged by various means ; fines, jail, etc, to obey that collective decision.
Now imagine if our democracy was "treaties are made with all citizens of the nation, but you don't have to agree or sign the treaty."
Succinctly put, treaties aren't something you can make another nation sign, and if signed due to force, really force them to comply with in their local area.
A global government however, could punish citizens of any country, should they fail to follow global laws passed.
That said, I am highly uncomfortable with the idea of a global government, because there is such a wide range of belief systems out there, some of them totalitarian, many of them non-democratic, many of them tied deeply to religion, and I don't think the outcome could last, or be pretty.
People's actions do not need to be violent in order for the governments to respond with violence. Disobedience is enough. You know it very well. This is just how it works.
What the key difference here is, between a democracy and a totalitarian government, is just who decides when violence will be employed.
In democratic states, violence is allowed by specific actors, such as the police, in specific situations, such as when other forms of mediation fail, under specific guidelines.
This means that democracy attempts to replace the mob (anarchy), and the totalitarian (no law, power vested in one), with a more structured form of violence.
Note that absolutely no system will work perfectly, at all. There will be flaws, issues, but from where I sit, most western democracies do a fairly good job of this.
That's because the truth is, violence absolutely will occur, no matter what, no matter the form of government (or lack of) in place. Humanity always has individuals which will prey upon itself, and the only response in such cases is violence of some sort.
So how do you want your violence?
The anarchistic mob? Emotionally run, able to fly out of control, meting out punishment on emotion and adrenaline?
The totalitarian, deciding rule of law on whim, then meting out punishment in any way chosen?
Or the democratic approach, with laws debated, considered, and meted out by democratic choice, in a controlled way?
Again, democracy is not perfect, but it is the best we currently have.
And yes, it is violent at times, for humanity is violent at times.
We always have been, and will be, else we will no longer be human.
You may be thinking, "No! Democracy let thing $x happen to person/group $y. It has failed us!"
The thing is, most democracies attempt to constantly improve upon this.
Take the US, for example. Compare racism in the 50s, to now.
If you think racism, and police brutality connected to it is bad now, your head would spin, and probably explode, if transported to the 50s.
What you really need to consider, is what happens under alternative forms of governement.
Do you believe a totalitarian would do better at the above? Anarchy?
Hardly.
So how do you want your violence?
Pick carefully.
If you pick democracy, as I have, then the next step is to work on improving how that violence is meted out.
Help steer it, to make it as fair, as gentle as possible.
I am not 5 year old kid and I do understand how things work so there is no need to move so much air. Out of 2 murderers I would "prefer" the one that kills 10 people instead of 10,000. They're still murderers to me.
>"The thing is, most democracies attempt to constantly improve upon this."
Judging by last 30 years I'd say that government in most "democracies" are working to make things worse for common people.
The problem with our current approach to globalism is that it is built on top of a political system - representative democracy - that doesn't really scale well. Or rather it does on paper, but it's hard to see how one person "representing" literally millions of people can be effectively held to account by any of them. And a single world government - even a proto-government with just enough teeth to enforce the basics - would require even worse ratios.
But there are other systems. E.g. in a council democracy, on every level, every delegate is personally responsible to few enough people from the level below that accountability can be near-instant. You can't add levels indefinitely, either, but I think that the breakdown (of democratic governance) there still happens at scales much larger than with representative democracy.
Unfortunately, there are numerous problems with fish farming.
For one, predatory farmed fish, such as salmon, are often fed from fish meal made from wild fish, which means there's no net benefit.
Fish are farmed intensively, in much denser populations than found in the wild. In this type of environment, water pollution and animal welfare are serious concerns — disease and parasites such as lice are a big problem. It's not hard to find reports of farmed fish in horrifying condition and conditions.
As a side note, intensive farming of pigs, chickens and cattle is a major source of pollution of inland waterways. This is a direct cause of the dramatic decline of freshwater fish populations in many parts of the world.
Disease like CWD and avian flu can result in massive culls of farmed animals. High density animal farming bears risk of epidemics, and fish farming is no exception. As with most things in life, there are no easy answers.
So often that you could say almost always. To make the joke even funnier, the feed is loaded with supplements and medications which are extremely disruptive to local biomes. There is nothing sustainable about most forms of fish farming, and the externalities are absurd.
The percentage of wild fish as a proportion of feed has been going down. Researchers and companies are aware of this problem. Duckweed and farmed insect formulated fish feed are being tested and produced right now. It's still not great that wild fishes not fit for human consumption and whose capture is contributing to overfishing are used to support fish farming.
3. Let private interests have unfettered access to the Commons
4. Problems!
The tragedy is supposedly Commons, but clearly the problem is private interests having unregulated access to the Commons. Tragedy of Private Interests?
In any case this seems like more of a climate change issue (again…)
How is it a fallacy? Isn't the whole idea behind it exactly what you said? The tragedy is not the commons itself, it's the tragedy of what happens to the commons.
After all, the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is what happens to Romeo and Juliet.
Fallacy in the sense that it is supposed to demonstrate a problem with the Commons while ignoring the context in which it is used. Maybe because privatization is taken as a given, a thing to not even be questioned, thus the Commons has to fit in to the world of private property as we know it today or else be deemed flawed. (Private property as we know it cannot be flawed: it is axiomatic.)
From Wikipedia:
> Faced with evidence of historical and existing commons, Hardin later retracted his original thesis, stating that the title should have been "The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons".
It is telling that it retains its original name. We teach it speficially as “the problem” with “the commons”.
Why does everyone—including in this thread—think of “the tragedy of the commons” in terms of “the commons” instead of “private property” as we know it? Why is that the knee-jerk response?
Also from Wikipedia:
> Although taken as a hypothetical example by Lloyd, the historical demise of the commons of Britain and Europe resulted not from misuse of long-held rights of usage by the commoners, but from the commons' owners enclosing and appropriating the land, abrogating the commoners' rights.[1]
This theory might be right or wrong. But why is it never even mentioned that enclosure of the Commons happened at some point, and that apparently use of the Commons by commoners might have worked (just might)? Because private property as we know it today is axiomatic. Hence the question is merely about regulating or not regulating the access to the Commons from such private interests; the last part about private interests cannot be questioned.
A third problem/point is that it is just a hypothetical. People just take a thought experiment at face value as something-that-always-happens! But such dynamics do not always come about:
> Elinor Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for demonstrating this concept in her book Governing the Commons, which included examples of how local communities were able to do this without top-down regulations or privatization.[2]
-
> Romeo and Juliet
Deaths are tragedies in the sense of bad things that happened. How would you prevent a future double-suicide? Not by naming it after some irrelevancy, like the Tragedy of the Efficacy of Oral Poisoning. You learn from the story and don’t poison yourself just because you think someone that you love has died. (I think that’s what it is about?)
The supposed “tragedy” of the Commons is a recurring thing. Not merely a thing that happened but something that can happen again. So how do you prevent that? By focusing on whatever caused the tragedy and fixing that. Not by focusing on the victim.
I think we are actually in agreement and I think this is just a quibble with the nomenclature.
As I was taught, the tragedy of the commons is just any situation where the Nash equilibrium (all actors acting independently optimally in their own interests) is not Pareto efficient (no actor can be made better off without making another actor worse off). In my mind I don't really even associate it with property rights (and I certainly don't think private property is axiomatic), so personally I was surprised at your interpretation of it being a fallacy.
This has to be the most obtuse thing I've read today. First, you bait us in with the bold claim "tragedy of the commons is a fallacy", but then it turns out you're not actually going to show a flaw in the idea that the tragedy of the commons is real. Instead you're just playing a word game which leads to some vaguely socialist talking points.
Its particularly tedious as the phrase "tragedy of the commons" has nothing to do with assigning "blame" to the commons (or to the private interests). The phrase itself is not an prescription, merely a diagnosis. Literally no one uses "tragedy of the commons" as capitalism apologia. What an absurd straw man.
No actually, lets not rename all the well established concepts in economics just to give them a certain political lean. That's not actually helpful to understanding anything.
People call out tragedy of the commons a lot, for cases where it seems like purely a tragedy of capitalism. Nobody overfished these crabs to eat themselves. A globalized food market was willing to pay for crab, and has no mechanism to value long term supply. People who think it’s wrong to overfish will stop, and people who don’t care will replace them as long as the market is willing to pay.
What part of that requires a “commons” to tragically be uncared for? It’s money + markets. We see the same thing in any “natural resource” - wood, mining, oil, wild mushrooms, ivory, you name it.
> cases where it seems like purely a tragedy of capitalism
We have evidence the Hudson Bay was being overfished for oysters in the decades preceding European settlement. Any explanation beginning and ending with capitalism is about as useless as blaming every problem on greed.
Your single example of over-exploitation outside of capitalism doesn’t refute my point at all. Nobody thinks it’s impossible to over-exploit without capitalism, it’s that without capitalism we don’t have a huge incentive to do it, and it happening on a GLOBAL scale. But yeah, ok, some declines in oysters in one body of water.
Capitalism has been the dominant economic system for over two hundred years. It is more specifically pertinent to this time and place than some inborn human characteristic or tendency.
Do you have a link to more on indigenous/pre-colonial overfishing of oysters in Hudson Bay? Google is not turning up anything but contradictory sources for me.
> link to more on indigenous/pre-colonial overfishing of oysters in Hudson Bay?
Sure! It’s from this book [1].
Decreasing oyster size (implying younger harvests) in New York mounds was explicitly contrasted with the sustainable extraction from the Chesapeake Bay. (None of your sources mention the Hudson.)
Better delineation than capitalist and indigenous might be trading and non-trading.
> trigger warning
This is a needless way to undercut oneself. (It’s also mean.)
Thanks. You're right, those sources do not mention Hudson Bay, despite my Google search including the words. I should know better.
I've recently started enjoying oysters and other shellfish so I'll add the book to my reading list. Looks very interesting!
edit: "New York mounds" -- is this about Hudson Bay (the one in Canada) or the Hudson River estuary, in New York?
The first source I linked doesn't mention the river either, but second source does claim no prehistoric declines of oyster sizes in the Hudson River estuary. Still going to read the book and then make my up my mind
Veganism, like all other idealogies that could be described as “if only everyone did X,” will never, ever be as widely-adopted as you’d like without authoritarianism driving that adoption.
Also — I’m saying this as a former vegan — I have developed so many food allergies that I literally cannot be vegan anymore (the vast, vast majority of my food allergies are plants). And yes I carry an epi-pen, they can kill me, etc. If I ate plants only, I would die.
Reality is a whole hell of a lot more complicated than those casually pushing ultimatums on the internet ever seem to realize or acknowledge.
Your first paragraph is probably right, just like we need laws against rape and slavery. Go back in history and you’ll find people who would have said “I can’t imagine a world without that” on those issues too. I’m all for it.
Well, what aspect would you say that I'm comparing between these seemingly unrelated things? Hint: they don't need to be ethically equivalent for me to make my comparison.
Bio reactors would be nice, if they were already here. But they are not and for the near future might not be. We may lose the ability to repair the damage already done before they come.
But you know ... plants are already here. We could stop damaging the planet now if we'd manage to switch to plant-based diets.
The issue is that people en masse don’t actually care all that much about the cruelty of killing animals so long as it’s not reasonably torturous. The future, however dystopian you may see it, is sustainably growing the animals we want to eat for slaughter.
Define reasonably torturous. Please see https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch and come back to tell me that we know how to humanely grow & kill animals, and that we don't cause them unreasonable suffering by our farming practices.
Define sustainably. If everybody ate like an average american, we would need 4+ earths. Don't forget to count in the wildlife & destruction of oceans. Sustainable economies are mostly plant-based.
We eat animals because we were taught to and because the system is set up this way. We can change that and lose nothing (not even the pleasure from the food, however alien vegan food seems to you), and gain/solve everything. We just need to open the eyes and learn to cook differently.
Or eat our way to our extinction. What will we say to our children / grandchildren ? That we liked the steak too much?
These have flopped. Most people who like meat want real meat. Most people who don't like meat don't want fake meat. The remainder is the market for fake meats, and it has proven small.
They have not flopped. They are extremely popular among vegetarians.
They flopped as "meat substitutes" because they are not in fact meat substitutes and never were. They are flavored soy protein. They are junk food. Absolutely nothing like lab-grown meat or any other kind of meat, in neither form nor function nor nutritional value.
Saying they’re absolutely nothing like meat in form or nutritional value doesn’t make sense to me - the Whopper and Impossible Whopper are basically the same item. An impossible patty has very similar fat/protein content to a beef (80/20) patty but with more carbohydrates (beef having none).
Impossible patties seem a legitimate meat substitute for those who choose to purchase them.
Counting macronutrients is a pretty poor way of comparing foods. They have different amino acids, fats, trace minerals, and vitamins, and are digested differently in the body. They don't even smell the same or behave the same when cooking.
This isn't some kind of pro-meat screed, either. It's just not true that they are equivalent culinarily or nutritionally. They are a pretty good approximation of beef, but they're not the same.
If the Whoppers seem the same, it's because Whoppers are junk food, and Impossible meat is kind of just vegan junk food.
I wonder what it is that drives the human desire for meat. Meat substitutes seem to be trying to solve the environmental issues by taking advantage of that inbuilt natural desire, albeit imperfectly. I have to wonder if thay is an easier strategy than trying to change people's habits on a mass scale.
I actually like Impossible Burger. It doesn't take like a burger exactly, but it tastes good. And if you screw up an Impossible burger, it doesn't taste nearly as bad as a screwed up beef burger, which gets as dry as leather.
they flopped because they're expensive. I've tried both. They're both more or less edible. But impossible burgers are more money than just buying beef, and not as good. Why is this pea protein more money than beef?
I don't think those will really ever make a noticeable dent in the market. Most people don't want plant based burgers, especially with the negative reputation of soy and masculinity. I think lab grown meat will be the future. If you are able to present it in packages that look exactly like the cuts that one can currently buy in the store I see no reason they wont catch on.
That's a ruse/tactic of the meat industry, nothing more. Meat/dairy is full of estrogens, phytoestrogens are in fact protective against real estrogens.
Btw, I don't think that masculinity depends on eating corpses / animal secretions.
Among the phytoestrogens, it seems like hops are exceptionally potent and disruptive to human hormones as well. This is a bit ironic because it’s a common ingredient in beer, another thing sometimes associated with masculinity.
Various sources put beyond burgers at less than a kg of co2 per kg of food, whereas turkey is close to 20kg of co2 per kg of meat.
The thing with plant based meat is that even with processing, it’s virtually impossible to come close to farmed meat in terms of water, energy, and feed. Since the animals eat the plants their meat is compared to, they will have eaten the equivalent of what they’re being compared to in a very short period of time to begin with. Then you are comparing the processing and delivery carbon which is negligible in the scheme of things.
People (even very intelligent people) often seem to estimate the carbon footprint of plant based diets incorrectly by several orders of magnitude.
Where are you getting that from? Other data suggests that even worst case production of plant sources of protein come out far ahead of even the best case production of meat, dairy, etc.
> plant-based foods emit fewer greenhouse gases than meat and dairy, regardless of how they are produced.
> […]
> Plant-based protein sources – tofu, beans, peas and nuts – have the lowest carbon footprint. This is certainly true when you compare average emissions. But it’s still true when you compare the extremes: there’s not much overlap in emissions between the worst producers of plant proteins, and the best producers of meat and dairy.
That's precisely the problem. I cannot provide one, and neither can you. Neither of those companies internally audit their CO2 footprints, and their supply chains are opaque:
Quite literally wild. There is nothing quite like watching David Attenborough walking us through the absolute ruthlessness of the animal kingdom in his plummy staccato voicing. There is no doubt that had cows evolved differently they would be as torturous to their prey as any other animal.
I think we can definitely do better, but I think it's equally clear that mother nature is not very opinionated on the topic.
Every horrifying thing beyond imagination has happened in nature, including all sorts of rape, torture, murder, and infanticide, much of this by humans as a part of that nature.
Does this justify humans in engaging in rape, torture, murder, and infanticide?
This is a discussion of ethics, not what nature allows (which is everything possible within the laws of physics).
I don't think it is an appeal to nature fallacy because I have no implicit axiom that "what is natural is good." The statement I made seems, to me, closer to "what is natural is." without a strong opinion on it's level of good.
Your argument is that we should re-write the the laws governing our reality, something we have only recently become able to accomplish, and something we can't necessarily predict the consequences of.
In a discussion of ethics (and physics) our bodies desire amino acids that exist in animal flesh and will provide us with reproductive advantage for acquiring them, something we (up until recently) must have killed animals to acquire. If you want to have an ethical discussion (I do because they're interesting) the physics of the matter must be spoken to or accounted for.
Pain is a physical concept. Social relationships are a physical concept (there are physical forces governing these relationships in our brains). There's research that plants can communicate damage or danger, is that a pain analogue? Is the fundemental ethical issue suffereing, suffering of those left behind (in social creatures), "theft" of future?
Then there's the equally (to me) compelling question that an animal would eat me if it could, from an ethical point of view, I think that gives me a right to eat it. Why does that fail under your reasoning system?
So far it seems like your axioms are that:
We have power
That power makes us responsibile
I am not clear on what you think we are responsible for
If we are responsible to minimize total suffering in a pragmatic way, why is it then not our responisbility to wipe out other creatures that cause torturous deaths?
When I think about these problems it seems to fall into this uncomfortable category where conclusions more or less depend on your perceived meaning of life and corresponding priorities.
You can look at the universe as this absurd physical machine just banging away where the suffering of another sentient being simply “is”. Yes, of course it is.
You can also look at the same absurd universe and realize that, to some degree, consciousness seems to confer some amount of agency. You get to decide what matters to you. You get to decide on what life means to you. As you go, you can construct your part of the universe to some extent.
For me, I see it as meaningful to reduce suffering as much as it’s practicable. I recognize that death, suffering, and the messy reality of nature is part of what generated my own life. I recognize that I can’t end that cycle, nor should I because most of nature relies on it.
However, within the realm of the universe that I have this agency, I can choose to try to reduce that suffering. I can try to make this corner of the universe slightly less painful. I can respect and admire the bizarre miracle of sentience, and do my best to sustain it rather than destroy it.
Perhaps that’s meaningless. I don’t have any amazing expectations.
Similar to climate change though, I ask myself “what is the harm in taking action”? What do I lose by caring enough to change?
The answer has been a dramatic improvement to my well-being, and much more peaceful and content outlook on nature and life.
It doesn’t make sense for everyone, but I urge people to consider that complacency with the natural order of things isn’t necessary or inherently wise. Eating celery is as natural as killing a deer or as eating a lentil or catching a fish. Some of these end lives we recognize as very similar to our own, others seem less destructive. We can choose to do less harm, as we wouldn’t want harm done to us. Perhaps that’s worth something. Perhaps it’s not.
> I don't think it is an appeal to nature fallacy because I have no implicit axiom that "what is natural is good." The statement I made seems, to me, closer to "what is natural is." without a strong opinion on it's level of good.
I did take your first comment, and this one, to be implicit, if not explicit, arguments that because these things happen in nature, it is okay (good) for us to do it as well. Apologies if that's not what you're saying!
>Your argument is that we should re-write the the laws governing our reality, something we have only recently become able to accomplish, and something we can't necessarily predict the consequences of.
My argument is simply that we should have compassion for others, humans and all other sentient beings included, and work to relieve suffering as much as we can. I think this is not too far off from how most people feel about humanity, but that we are only (historically recently) beginning to apply this way of thinking on a larger scale to the rest of the living beings who share this world with us.
>In a discussion of ethics (and physics) our bodies desire amino acids that exist in animal flesh and will provide us with reproductive advantage for acquiring them, something we (up until recently) must have killed animals to acquire. If you want to have an ethical discussion (I do because they're interesting) the physics of the matter must be spoken to or accounted for.
Sure, but I think you are agreeing here that as of recently, we no longer must kill these animals to acquire these nutrients?
>Pain is a physical concept. Social relationships are a physical concept (there are physical forces governing these relationships in our brains). There's research that plants can communicate damage or danger, is that a pain analogue? Is the fundemental ethical issue suffereing, suffering of those left behind (in social creatures), "theft" of future?
Whether or not plants can react to stimuli and communicate amongst themselves is a different question from whether they are sentient. For example, we have billions of cells within our body, each reacting to their environments, communicating with one another, being born and dying in countless numbers as we sit here typing. Are we conscious of any of that?
Consciousness in my mind is much like sight, it's not a given that every living organism can see, you have to have the biological structures whose explicit purpose is to create that sensation of sight. Take away the eyes, sever the nerves, or take an organism who has never evolved those eyes or optic nerves (or their analogues), and there is no sight.
Consciousness beyond not being a given for all living things, also seems extremely fragile. Administering only a few mg of a drug to a person will eliminate their consciousness during e.g. general anesthesia. Only a relatively small amount of damage to the brain can similarly end it, even though we still have all those structures that consciousness requires and they're largely still functional!
So in short, I don't think we see any sort of way that plants could actually be conscious, as we understand consciousness, they just don't have the necessary parts. Further, even if each blade of grass were as fully conscious as a human being, it would still be more ethical to consume plants directly rather than animals, because for every 10 calories of plants we feed to a cow, we get roughly 1 calorie out. So we are killing roughly 10x as many plants by eating a steak, calorie for calorie, than we are by eating those plants directly.
This is without even accounting for all the plant, animal, and human life destroyed in the act of clearing rainforests to create more grazing area for cattle, and to grow more soy (of which over 80% of global production goes to animal feed) to feed those cattle.
And further without accounting for all the plant, animal, and human life that is being and will be destroyed by climate change, to which the raising of those cows is a major contributor.
The fundamental ethical issue is in causing unnecessary suffering. We do not have to torture others to survive, so why would we, just because it feels good? That seems like a clear ethical issue.
>Then there's the equally (to me) compelling question that an animal would eat me if it could, from an ethical point of view, I think that gives me a right to eat it. Why does that fail under your reasoning system?
I mean, if a rapist would rape you, does that give you the right to rape them?
> I am not clear on what you think we are responsible for
The consequences of our actions, especially as far as our actions cause other sentient beings, including humans and animals, to suffer and die.
> If we are responsible to minimize total suffering in a pragmatic way, why is it then not our responsibility to wipe out other creatures that cause torturous deaths?
This question is probably a good test of utilitarianism. The creatures that cause by far the most suffering and death on Earth are humans, but I would not be comfortable wiping out humans, any more so that I would be comfortable wiping out any other sentient species.
Would you flip the lever on a trolley to run over 10,000 people to save 100,000? In the abstract someone might easily say yes, that it's the reasonable course of action to minimize the amount of suffering and death, which must unavoidably happen in one way or another.
While I don't have a perfect answer to that, I can say with certainty that in the non-hypothetical we can dramatically reduce the amount of suffering that we cause to other people and animals, and in so doing not only not have to kill ourselves, but actually benefit our environment, and by extension all of humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom simultaneously. It's a win win for all, the only cost would be to our palate pleasure, a fleeting sensation that we enjoy for only a few minutes a day.
The thing is, there are a lot of horrible ways that people die. Cancer, alzheimer's, violence, crippling injuries, chronic pain and depression leading to suicide, war, etc. etc.
Does this justify us enslaving people and torturing them (debatedly) less in a factory farm and slaughtering them at a young age?
If we were truly logically consistent creatures then yes but that's not really how it works. We carve out an exception for ourselves because some combination of not wanting this to happen to us and not doing it to others is the trade and because species that don't kill their own probably did better so it's a deeply ingrained evolutionary instinct.
Which by the way is why "othering" is such a powerful and dangerous thing. We can short circuit that evolutionary safeguard by getting people to see a group as "not their own." And the reverse actually works too which is why we have much much stronger feelings about people killing dogs -- "they're with us."
We're pack animals, this is pretty much expected. I doubt wolves feel any remorse killing a deer despite not hunting other wolves. And any other species on earth would view us the same way. And hell, we actually feel like we've done good by introducing predators into ecosystems who are going to brutally murder game we've deemed is overpopulated.
So look I don't know man this shit is complicated. The ethics of predators killing for food is weird. We're the only animal I know that grows other life with intention. It feels like really uncharted territory. The fact that we do it for plants too is also deeply fucked up even more than what we do to animals. Imagine chilling in a field with the body parts of thousands of your clones grafted into some other person's clones just to have your genitals harvested. Imagine being grown specifically for your corpse to be put on display.
Regarding plants, I replied elsewhere in this thread as to why I think they aren't conscious, but even if each kernel of corn were as fully conscious as a human being, it would still be more ethical to eat them directly than to feed that corn to a cow and then eat it. The reason for this is because for every 10 calories of plant matter we feed to a cow, we get ~1 calorie of meat out of it. So by eating the crops directly we are killing 90% fewer plants, without even taking into account all the plant, animal, and human life being destroyed in clearing rainforests for cattle. Without even accounting for all the plant, animal, and human life that is being and will be destroyed by the climate change to which the rearing of these cattle is a major contributor.
Otherwise I appreciate that you can see that it's all largely arbitrary, self-serving, and this way of thinking is what has lead to every other atrocity in our history. I think we are capable of being better.
"Othering" is itself an evolutionary development. Innate human altruism is deeply parochial, which comes out in many experiments, but especially those with young children. And it makes perfect sense when you think about it from the "selfish gene" perspective. We also know from observation that genocidal wars are something that other apes practice occasionally, so "othering" within species is likely something that predates our speciation as humans.
If you look at the statistics, in the developed world factory farming makes up about 98% of all meat produced commercially.
Before I stopped eating meat, I thought the meat I was buying came from good sources. The farms were nearby, conditions seemed okay, it was organic, etc.
The reality is that all of these animals don’t have good lives. They don’t eat well. They live in bizarre conditions. The vast majority (nearly 100%, again) end up in feed lots if they’re cattle. They’re fattened and then killed essentially as adolescents of their species. Forcefully inseminated, taken from their mothers, killed as babies for veal, fed absurd amounts of antibiotics in some cases, many die in their pens, etc.
This is normal. It’s how we farm. Industry is good at putting a smile on it, talking about values and generations of farmers and doing it right… But these animals are bred and killed for cash, no one gives much of a shit about them, and it’s all very grim.
The excelsior pig farm near me in Abbotsford, British Columbia is a great example. This farm wasn’t exceptional. It’s just another pig farm. But pigs were dead in their pens, cannibalizing each other, dead in trash bins, dead in dumpsters, covered in feces, sores, and wounds.
You’re not going to get rid of that. Meat as we know it doesn’t exist without this race to the bottom circus of torture. People are eager to believe their meat habit isn’t based around this or that something better is around the corner, but it’s simply not the case. These animals are here for profit, yet no one is willing to pay enough for them to live comfortably. So they will suffer.
Most of the meat I buy is from a local farmer in the Midwest. We buy an entire cow at a time and some pork. Yes we eat meat outside of this, but it's not often. I don't need to solve the entire industry to take a different path myself.
Frankly, meat tastes a lot better when the animal is treated better.
I personally think your argument is really twisting the data in your favor, but it's not a debate I am really interested in having. I've researched this extensively.
If you're talking about it from an animal rights angle, even animals raised on small idyllic farms have their throats slit at an early age. Would we want our throats slit?
Would we want to be funneled down a chute with our family members, watching them disappear behind a metal sheet and then get shot in the head one by one in front of us, until our turn comes?
If you're talking about it from an environmental angle, moving from CAFOs to grass-feeding small farms for e.g. cattle would necessitate more land, the animals would grow more slowly, they would produce more methane due to digestion of grass vs feed, we would subsequently have to raise larger herds of animals to supply the same amount of meat, and all of this would actually result in a worse impact on the environment.
Factory farming is actually largely the result of the industry optimizing animal rearing to produce the most meat for the least amount of inputs.
What is the ethical problem? What kind of solution would there be?
How would that philosophical thinking apply to other apex predators, such as spiders who poison and wrap their prey while they hopeless wriggle to death for minutes or snakes who suffocate their prey to death sometimes breaking major bones, or a cat killing a rodent for fun? Do we have a responsibility to intervene against other torturous predators, why or why not?
I am curious about your philosophical reasoning on the topic, I am not asking rhetorically.
Other apex predators don't have the intellectual capacity to develop abstract ethics, so they can't be held responsible for the suffering they instictively cause. But we do have the capacity, we have used it to develop our ethics, and now we're responsible for the conclusions that stem from it.
If you mean it in a sense of whether we're morally obligated to prevent predation in general - I actually think that we are in the (very, very, very) long term, but the limiting factor is the ability to do so without collapsing the ecosystem. If there were a magic wand that you could waive and make "the lion lie down with the lamb" - with full knowledge that both species would still do fine in this new arrangement - I think it would be highly unethical to not use it.
The ethical problem is in causing unnecessary harm to others.
The philosophical thinking would apply to those who are capable of entertaining and acting upon it. The spiders are obligate carnivores, so have no choice in the matter, and likely no concept of the issue.
That said, I think your point about responsibility to intervene is actually interesting. There's a whole ethical matter concerned with this question.[1] My personal take on it is that we have a responsibility insofar as we have power over the matter.
We have the power to control our own actions, but I don't see any way we could reasonably resolve the issue of wild animal suffering, at least in the near term with our current technological capacity. If hypothetically we did have a way to end all suffering on Earth without fucking it all up, I don't see how we couldn't feel an ethical responsibility to do so. Were we the ones suffering we would hope others would do it for us.
> The ethical problem is in causing unnecessary harm to others.
What is a strong definition or test for necessity?
> My personal take on it is that we have a responsibility insofar as we have power over the matter.
Our ability to have power and therefore responsibility is a result of incredible amounts of time undergoing evolution that resulted in us being the beings we are today. Our interventions could rob other creatures from achieving similar levels of power, responsibility, or understanding. How does that fit in with your ethics beliefs?
What if we created interventions to accelerate other animals abilities to "think empathetically." Do we have a responsibility to do that? What if it requires a natural process (applying natural selection to animals that do not display empathy/do not have empathy genes).
> If hypothetically we did have a way to end all suffering on Earth without fucking it all up, I don't see how we couldn't feel an ethical responsibility to do so.
What about the flip side, what if we could cause pleasure. Do we have a responsibility to cause pleasure?
What if we started taking animals and hooking electrodes up to the pleasure centers of their brains, and turned the machine on for the rest of their natural lives, while feeding them ethical nutrients via IV. Is that a philosophically good thing to do?
If there are no beings, there is no suffering. That's an easy answer. If we had a theoretical hyper-heroin that would function against all animals, we could drug every creature into a happy ending. Is that a philosophically satisfying intervention?
>What is a strong definition or test for necessity?
In this context I'm defining it as whether we need to do it to survive.
> Our ability to have power and therefore responsibility is a result of incredible amounts of time undergoing evolution that resulted in us being the beings we are today. Our interventions could rob other creatures from achieving similar levels of power, responsibility, or understanding. How does that fit in with your ethics beliefs? What if we created interventions to accelerate other animals abilities to "think empathetically." Do we have a responsibility to do that? What if it requires a natural process (applying natural selection to animals that do not display empathy/do not have empathy genes).
If we're talking about the current state of the world, our interventions are actually resulting in the deaths of countless individuals as well as the extinction of the majority of nonhuman life on Earth. Arguably what comes after environmental collapse may very well be the death of a large number, if not the majority of humans as well.
Animal industry is directly responsible for a lot of this in the form of the direct killing of wild animals for food and other products, as well as indirectly in the form of environmental destruction from farming animals.
An argument to end animal industry is in fact an argument to allow the most nonhuman life to proliferate, which serves your hypothetical about allowing others to survive and evolve.
If we're talking about my hypothetical of ending all suffering, that could go any which way. Are we ending suffering just by neurally neutering all creatures and allowing them to only experience pleasure, even as they're being devoured alive? Are we somehow genetically modifying all carnivores and omnivores to become herbivores, and then modifying plant life to be able to supply the global population, and then again ensuring that their fertility rates and lifespans are such that their populations remain static? Are we leaving everything as it is and then just segregating all herbivores from the carnivores and then airdropping in packages of Beyond Antelope to all those carnivores on a weekly basis?
Who knows man, depending on how you choose to go about it you could still allow nonhuman life to go on existing and evolving. Although granted, the course of their evolution would be altered by our actions, just as the course of their evolution is inevitably being altered by our current actions, and as they will be regardless of what we do or don't do just based on our dominance of the planet and inevitable influence upon all life on it.
My argument is simply that in the real world, we stop torturing and killing fellow sentient beings when we don't have to. I think it's not an unreasonable position to hold, and it seems as if it would benefit the majority of life on Earth, humans included, as opposed to harming it.
> What about the flip side, what if we could cause pleasure. Do we have a responsibility to cause pleasure?
> What if we started taking animals and hooking electrodes up to the pleasure centers of their brains, and turned the machine on for the rest of their natural lives, while feeding them ethical nutrients via IV. Is that a philosophically good thing to do?
> If there are no beings, there is no suffering. That's an easy answer. If we had a theoretical hyper-heroin that would function against all animals, we could drug every creature into a happy ending. Is that a philosophically satisfying intervention?
Fully automated luxury Earth dildos for all animals and insects, at work 24/7.
Who knows? If we could ascertain consent that would probably be the guiding principle. Some people would want some sort of existence consisting of pure pleasure, some would not. If we really want to get into it I would argue that even those who would not have never experienced absolutely all encompassing drug induced euphoria, it's hard to not want something that every neuron in your brain is telling you is nirvana.
I'm not arguing we should do this, I frankly don't know whether it's more dystopian to submit all living things to nonconsensual pleasure comas or to simply let them live out their lives with all the agony that may entail.
However what I will say is that all this is pretty far off the rails, and unattached to the reality we currently inhabit and the abilities we currently possess within it.
The reality we currently inhabit is one in which we are exterminating all nonhuman life on Earth, and torturing billions of animals to death per year in the most horrific ways imaginable, simultaneously destroying the environment which will result in unimaginable amounts of human suffering and death, just because we enjoy the taste. We can instead choose to be kind to those who share this world with us, they and we would be better off for it.
King Salmon fishing was shut down in much of Alaska this season as well. I was there during the time and driving through the Kenai Peninsula was much different than previous years. Normally, you'll see people lined up on the river all over the place.
There was at least one piece of good news this year. The river that hosts the Fat Bear competition had a record number of salmon this year. I think the estimate was 74 million.
The captain's take on the issue includes climate change, over crabbing areas known to be struggling and trawling. The article also includes an explanation as to how cod could be responsible due to climate change offering less ice protection for the crab.
Right, and so with that, demand should taper down a bit. But only until other things become more expensive and now that food source is the cheaper one...
But really, is it really the problem? I'm considering the idea from both angles of supply and demand right now. I mean, once upon a time ago, stuff like crab and lobster was considered poor persons food. It was so plentiful that the story goes 'You could just walk down to the local ocean side and scoop some out of the ocean without any trouble'.
The way I see it is this. Pricing is indicative of supply and demand. If demand is high enough, suppliers will attempt to meet that demand. When demand wanes, supply burgeons, thus creating a reason to lower prices so that demand matches supply again. So in a sense, while price would seem to be the culprit, I think it more or less comes down to the fickle nature of the human.
Take red lobster for example. I never eat there, because they always somehow have some 'sale' happening. This means one of two things for me. Either they are selling old product as "fresh" which is not possible in many places they operate, or they are selling under the 'actual' price to increase demand to help meet supply.
Now extend that to the rest of the industry. Where does that land us?
In my mind, it means we are over fishing the species, all because other companies like RL allow for it to happen by continuously artificially spiking demand. Because at the end of the day, even if RL doesn't make profit, the fishermen do. RL and others like them keep buying it. It doesn't matter to the supplier of these restaurants if the food is being eaten or tossed. It's already caught.
Well, I don't like any seafood, so, on the one hand this does not affect me at all. On the other hand... this is just one more piece of data to add to the ever growing pile of how badly we are ruining the planet for any life above the level of single cell organisms. We are screwed.
Sure it does. The billions who subsist on seafood will now have to eat eggs, pork, beef. This will cause supply issues of those things. If you're a vegetarian you might be safe, though those too will be in higher demand maybe.
There's also water shortages, see the drought that's drying up the Mississippi river. Without water we'll have less and less crop yields.
We slowly had changes happen over 3 decades, then all of a sudden hit a turning point where we're breaking records yearly, maybe even monthly, and starting to get some feedback loops brewing.
The govts of the world though don't seem to think it's a big priority, lucky for them they're all ran by old people who will be dead before it really gets out of hand.
Yeah, no one "subsists" on eggs, pork, and beef. Subsistence diets are rice and beans. Anyone eating beef on a regular basis is living well. Like, kings of history well.
Food shortages/expenses is probably one of the few things that would actually get the average person to revolt/do something other than work their crap career-job that cant buy them a house.
This could be fun ! I mean when it happens it will be awful for those that have homes, good careers, etc. But still will be an interesting part of history to observe.
a billion seems like such a huge number when you consider its referring to giant crabs. Had no idea there were that many; but never really thought about it. Seems insane for there to be that many let alone for that many to be missing.
At least we still have lab grown meat, as it appears we'll soon have to get all our sustenance from labs since we'll probably be the last living creature on earth, sooner than later.
This is wild to see. Especially after one of the best salmon seasons this summer in AK. Prices being high helped, but the salmon population was excellent.
There are many ways to solve the specific problem of overfishing, mostly to set aside zones where fishing is not allowed so the population can recover. This is at the level of government and states, having little to do with anything within my power.
Changing the industry overnight isn't in any one person's power any more than electing the next president, but the sum of our collective votes does decide the victor.
Large scale boycotts of the industry will drop demand, and so production, and finally the impact on the fisheries.
You can already see this at work with the decline of the milk industry in the US as consumers have lowered their consumption by about 49% since 1970.[1]
All done by the power of consumer choice.
Millions of people are already voluntarily choosing to engage in these boycotts against these destructive industries, without waiting to have a gun put to their heads. It's worth considering taking part in order to have some positive impact on the world, while also continuing to push for systemic change, in my opinion. It doesn't have to be either/or.
That's talking about people drinking milk or milk with cereal. Overall dairy consumption has increased ~20% over the same time period, mostly due to cheese and yogurt[0].
Changing the industry is not in one person's power, but it is a small number of people (owners of the several large producers and the regulatory guys) who do change it; this (overnight) cancelling of the season is a counterexample to your point.
Sorry, I'm having trouble parsing that historical spreadsheet. If I'm reading it correctly, it looks like per capita (consumption?) was 564 pounds in 1970 and 603 pounds in 2010, a 6.9% increase.
Either way, if that is actual consumption then that's an increase in total dairy use and I appreciate the correction.
I would argue my point still stands in terms in drinking milk consumption, it at least has dropped by nearly 50%, and that means that we would be producing a lot more dairy overall today if consumer habits hadn't shifted away from milk (and the growth in cheese and yogurt consumption had increased in the same fashion as it has, which admittedly may not have been the case).
Another example would be the massive growth of plant based milks and vegan/vegetarian products and restaurants into multi billion dollar industries over the last few decades, displacing a commensurate amount of demand from animal based industries.
My point is also not that governments, corporations, and the powerful don't have any influence over the state of the world. It was that large scale boycotts and pressing for systemic change can be done simultaneously, and do not have to be mutually exclusive.
I'm going off the 2021 numbers, 667 pounds/capita/annum. I'll confess I was too lazy to pull up the calculator app and get ~18% increase. This wasn't due to a conscious consumer boycott, people just decided that drinking milk is kinda gross (see: McPoyle)
A better example to illustrate your point might be the grape boycotts of the 1960s, when Cesar Chavez/Dolores de la Huerta/UFW & company successfully appealed to the American working man to boycott (specifically California) grapes until the growers agreed to basic labor rights.
In any case, my point is that industry/the powers that be aren't actually to blame, as evidenced by their readiness to cancel the season. As this is most likely caused by climate change, we should be boycotting the fossil fuel industry, if only we could
Creating zones is one thing, enforcement is another. Hopefully technology can help solve this because I honestly don't see any other way - the oceans are too vast.
Enforcement is a solved problem - ships can be tracked by various means, ports where catches can be offloaded can be audited, crews can be arrested and ships impounded when in port. No one is going to overfish if they can't economically get their catch to market and get paid for their troubles. The issue is getting everyone to enforce the policies consistently - the leaders of different jurisdictions may not see eye to eye on what level of protection is optimal, and the people actually doing the enforcement may be willing to turn a blind eye to violations depending on circumstances.
I suspect the difference between you and those being sanctimonious to you are that they lie about their indiscretions. They probably have cars or pets or don't live in dense residential areas.
Whatever plastic particles you're eating in fish flesh really are a drop in the bucket. You'd get a lot more benefit by throwing away all your clothing, carpets, bedding, etc that contain synthetic fibers and replacing them all with pure cotton, wool, silk or flax but I doubt you're in a rush to do that. Unless you're willing to go that far, nothing else you do will make a difference.
How feasible is it to grow crabs in captivity? We need to start farming food, no way natural ecosystems can support themselves _and_ humans at current levels.
Searching suggests it is done more in SE Asia than in the US (this might be a "what does the cuisine focus on?")
RAS Vertical Farming for Mud Crabs - https://youtu.be/XQJmZz4mdWY (there's a bit of an accent, I'd recommend subtitles)
I'll also suggest a watch of How America's Biggest Indoor Shrimp Farm Sells 2 Million Shrimp Every Year - https://youtu.be/1AK_RQ1uaGs (the American diet tends to have more shrimp than crab). And for crawfish (not indoor) https://youtu.be/_bggaA5AURA
Interestingly, raising animals in captivity is much much more difficult than I imagined.
IIRC - Guns, Germs, and Steel had a pretty good point that we didn't so much domesticate animals and plants as there were plants and animals that were pre-disposed to domestication.
Meat from carnivores tends to not be very good/tasty for a variety of reasons. iirc most of it is mainly due to the fact that other carnivores process meat similarly to how humans do so it's not as nutritious/tasty. Also many carnivores tend to also kind of be scavengers whose meat is generally quite quite bad.
It's a common trope to state bad input taints meat taste but I think it's unproven. I think it's more likely that apex diet concentration of complex organic molecules causes taste differences.
Feed pigs on acorns exclusively, yes you get a specific ?malic? Acid outcome in fat.
Feed sheep on seaweed, same with iodine. Corn vs grass fed beef, same.
But "predators eat trashy meat so their flesh is trashy" doesn't ring true. "Obligate carnivore predators in the feline family process meat differently, and emit proteins into their own flesh" may be a mouthful but it's where I am.
I did a decent amount of research into this a while back. They (blue crabs) can be grown in captivity, but they’re cannabalistic, so they have to be kept apart from each other. This makes it pretty inefficient and high overhead. The crab farming operations I’ve seen literally have each crab in its own little compartment - this is too labor intensive to be feasible outside of places with very low wages like the Philippines and Indonesia.
If someone can figure out how to keep crabs in large pens without them eating each other, they will make a lot of money. I’m not sure if that’s possible with selective breeding. Maybe we need to wait until crab legs can be “printed” or grown in a lab
No idea, but I see more plant-based food in our future generally. It's gotta be way, way cheaper to farm crops than fauna and farm-raised seafood comes with it's own issues with mercury, etc.
No one speaks of the elephants in the room
1. Russia is well known to fish illegally in bearing Seas
2.There was a boom in warm waters for warm water fish that
some fisherman switched to, if you watch a certain
Discovery series you know which fish even.
3.Alaska is one of the states that succeeded in
protecting fish populations as opposed to some other US states.
Since we're all speculating, I would guess that ocean acidification could be at play here. The arctic regions are carbon sinks so they experience acidification earlier than other parts of the ocean. When the CO2 is absorbed into the ocean it causes the pH level to decrease, making the waters more acidic. This inhibits CaCO3 (calcium carbonate) formation found in many ocean species like crabs.
If there's a rapid die off of this magnitude there aren't many other problems which would match this level of impact. It could be something else environmental like the water temperature but it doesn't seem like an anthropogenic problem. Similar problems have happened already for other species like oysters.[0]
I was an intern with NOAA in a fisheries lab studying ocean acidification back in college in 2011. There was a large die off in oyster farms the year before which wiped out a good size of their production. The issue then was that the farms were cycling the water in directly from the ocean into the tanks without adjusting the pH. As the pH in the ocean water dropped, it killed off all of the oysters in the farms all at once. They had to do a quick about face to treat the water to regain the catch.
Ocean acidification seemed like a problem that would get worse and worse over time. The estimate back then was that it would take roughly 50 years for the CO2 in the air to equilibrate with the CO2 in the ocean. Since we won't stop emitting any time soon it's going to get a lot more acidic.
I'm a decade behind on the status but back then it seemed like there were a lot of unknowns around the problem too. I'm not sure if more has come to light on the impacts it might have for ecology or the biochemistry of different species. It was a complex problem so predicting the outcome seemed extremely difficult. Hopefully more is known but if not surprises like this would likely crop up. For shellfish, once it goes under a certain pH threshold for a species the young will be unable to form shells which can cause them to die en mass in a short time period.
It doesn't seem like a problem that we can engineer our way out of. The best we can do is probably to monitor and perform science experiments to see some of it coming. Then try to mitigate the damage.
It seems like NOAA would have been able to call out the calcification problem for the snow crab in advance though since there have been issues with other crab species.[1] They probably would have detected the pH change in the waters too so this might not be the cause. Either way it's an interesting subject to learn about.
What of the other parts of the world willing to fish into extinction? It's nice to hear we are doing something to benefit a species that is suffering but is this anything? Are we not just driving them into someone else's snare?
Oddly enough, there’s decent evidence that preserves that ban fishing are effective for preserving the biodiversity in the larger region that includes zones where fishing is allowed.
Thinking about how many sea animals produce large quantities of offspring, I wonder if the answer is that while normally competition for food & predators limit how many survive in those situations a fair number can expand out of the protected area, with the predator population artificially low after having crashed along with whatever was overfished.
> I'd argue the biggest impact is on... the crab population?
The biggest impact of a lower crab population is a lower crab population. That's tautological, makes no sense, and why the article doesn't mention it. The decline in population already happened.
To be fair, news on the economy gets more clicks than news about falling animal populations. Just another perverse incentive that makes the system the way it is
We just came along and put some faces on paper so we could stop killing each other over whose fishermen get to catch crab. Then we called it capitalism and pretended that our economic systems transcend natural science.
I am willing to bet it is illegal fishing boats from countries I dare not to list for being downvoted. It is well known that some countries list a few hundred boats but in reality have fleets of tens of thousands of boats that operate under the radar. They over fish and destroy entire ecosystems and no one is doing anything about it.
But China is overfishing in the public, not "under the radar", and they usually only go up to someones territorial waters, do not completely cross. Moreover, I very much doubt they would dare do so to a semi-powerful western state, let alone the US. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/insider/a-clear-look-at-c...
I remember chilling north coast of Santa Cruz late one night after a surf sesh, and boats pulling up to shore, unloading people and other items. This was right about when (was it Golden Budda?) in Soquel got busted for smuggling chinese machine guns? Sure they cross territorial waters.
(Man I was bummed. They had the best hot and sour soup.)
Or there are corrupt fishery regulators who are giving wild overestimations of fish population in return for kickbacks from fishery associations/cartels.
If it was the Big Bad, there would be political uproar. But if it was good ole corruption, it would be business as usual.
> They over fish and destroy entire ecosystems and no one is doing anything about it.
That's not just hyperbole, it's flat wrong. Some organizations try to do things about it, even if the methodologies have historically been ineffective. Nobody would be able to completely solve it, while the Oceans are still largely uncontrolled.
Do you have any evidence to back this up, or is this just xenophobic speculation?
China’s encroachment on sovereign waters for fishing is one thing when it’s against South American countries with small navies; it’s another thing entirely when it’s the US. I doubt they’re behind this.
How many states are there with access to pacific waters that could potentially have thousands of unregistered fishing vessels and whom a poster would be uncomfortable naming explicitly for fear of backlash?
It's a logical guess that the only country that could have thousands of unregistered ships would be china, one of the worlds leading industrial powers with a large pacific coastline. It's xenophobic speculation that china does in fact have these ships and specifically are the cause of this population collapsing.
Portuguese fisherman were the big thing off the coast of Canada. Definitely not unique to China, although they seem to use fishing boats as a political tool like Russia uses little green men. But that's closer to their shores.
China has been the subject of multiple high-profile news stories (and popular HN threads) about overfishing. They’re also the standard xenophobic bugbear on HN.
The overfished. Simple as that. Snow crabs have been becoming smaller and smaller because the biggest ones were not living that long anymore. It happened to cod fisheries in eastern Canada and it is happening everywhere until it's too late.
No, it's not that simple. The snow crab fishery is pretty highly regulated and considered to be sustainably harvested (by NOAA, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, others). As mentioned in an another article [1] from August on the recent disappearance, there were large numbers of juveniles in 2018 and 2019. Something else is going on. Overfishing certainly may play a role, but something else is likely the primary factor.
> considered to be sustainably harvested (by NOAA, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, others)
maybe they considered incorrectly, based on historical data that doesn't reflect recent conditions
also possibly that regulations are being flaunted by bad actors
it could seem improbable that either of those would lead to a sudden catastrophic decline, but many systems do experience a point where what had been a linear decline suddenly craters in a non-linear fashion
By contrast cod that folks keep referencing collapsed 90% over _30 years_. An issue with a single season does not suggest that the regulations weren't strict enough. They now do need to become more strict as a reaction to the population but fishing is not the only pressure on a population and I find it difficult to believe that snow crab would be fished basically to extinction in < 700 days
I don't know much about snow crab but Dungeness and various oysters in the Pacific Northwest US are threatened by rising ocean acidity caused by increased CO2. Warmer water is also allowing green crabs to take hold. Farther south urchins have killed off a lot of kelp forest in a way that seems not to self-correct. Easy to imagine there are similar problems all over the ocean.
At least the urchin problem is caused, in part, by the mysterious sea star wasting disease - a disbiosis of their microbial layer that leads to rapid death. Sea stars are the natural predators of the urchins, and with their disappearance, the urchins flourish and take down the kelp.
I think it's just the western coast of North America that has this problem, rather than the entire Pacific. For example in New Zealand, which is in the Pacific, there were never any sea otters. Urchins, regarded locally as a delicacy, are not particularly abundant.
Absolutely not an expert here and would love to be corrected but my poorly informed personal impression is that the whole idea of a sustainable amount of fishing and whether all species even have a number that is safe to harvest (especially given that no species exists in isolation), let alone what that number is, is on fairly shaky grounds scientifically. Meaning that a lot of this is guesswork based on too little information and "doing something is better than doing nothing" compromises with the fishing industry. If a species population has appeared to be stable for x number of years with y amount of fishing, does that mean that it's sustainable? Indefinitely? Given other changes in ecosystem and environment?
Thank you. The problem with a lot of the discussion around this topic is that most people are heavily biased as they derive great pleasure from consuming these animals, and so certain ideas and theories are ignored or under represented.
Notice that this article is from 2021 for last year's catch.
"The 2021 fall harvest of Bristol Bay red king crab, another important source of revenue for that fleet, was canceled for this year because of too few females."
The collapse has been happening for years. This year it's just another species. Species by species it's going to collapse. Next will be shrimp and krill.
Don't be surprised when the salmon runs collapse too, because for 3 years now every single year has been a 90% decline.
This likely isn't true due to the scale of disappearance of crabs.
*90% of the are gone - in only 2 years*
That's not just overfishing, something much worse has happened.
The cod overfishing was also a very unfortunate tale, but they saw the signs and tracked them catching fire and burning to the ground the entire time, just didn't do anything about it.
Here, AFAIK, they were bewildered at how this occured.
Other sources I've seen are blaming the dramatic heat during the summer of 2019. It "scrambled the broader marine ecosystem" causing die-offs and migrations for many species of fish. Snow Crabs are primarily deep water scavengers so they had plenty of food that year, but have struggled since.
Some people don't want to hear that because it's counter to their world-view. Earth isn't warming. Everything is OK. We can continue burning fossil fuels while having zero impact to the environment. Is there a word describing this mass wishful thinking?
That mass wishful thinking is call “climate change denial”.
We keep adding more and more evidence that climate change is happening. Even on a local scale we can all see significant changes in our local climate from year to year. The older among us can see this even more clearly if they chose. From what we know of the atmosphere there HAS to be heating from the rapid increase in CO2.
You can stick your fingers in your ears as much as you want but it won’t prevent this from happening and at an accelerating pace.
The same people who get pumped up by football games and tailgaters, war epics, and 'badassery' and doing stupid but 'brave' things like shooting fireworks out your ass, are the same people who will deny anything that's 'too scary' not to.
Or attribute it to "God's will" and then still assume he'll take care of things so they can just go on ignoring the issues.
Reminds me of the cowardly lion who could talk a big game,but was inwardly afraid of everything. Even xenophobia and racism --it's ALL rooted in fear of 'others' fear of this. Politicians know damn well the power of fear, and have used it w/ great success to stay in power and keep left/right workers divided on stuff like abortion/gun rights.
Also the solutions being pushed kind of suck for most people. We’ve had 50 years of sustainability and eco-asceticism. Denial is a perfectly fine reaction to the solutions being proposed.
A dollar a gallon tax on gasoline would be more than enough to capture the CO2 it releases.
Other energy sources are similar.
These costs are way below what happens when some oil producer throws a tantrum or starts a war. However, unlike wars, etc., such a tax would directly cut into oil company profits.
Your crazy if you think the government isn't going to just piss that money away. Its already at ~$.50 a gallon with federal and state taxes. And the oil companies will just stop producing to lower supply and inflate the price. More taxes are going to hurt the individual , companies have enough money to get around it. No, we need a revolution.
Many fish were much larger in the not so distant past. Marlin in Caribbean used to be huge compared to todays catch. Pictures from the 1950's and earlier, you see some just massive Marlin. They're big today but nothing like how they used to be. But we have a whole lot more people on the Earth today.
Also, a lot of people are comparing this to the Canadian DFO's handling of the Cod fishery. Sorry, this is not like that. Both in time line and management style. This fishery was just shut down, it's had its numbers slashed previously as well. In the Cod situation they had their foot in the accelerator until the very end.
I understand your mindset, what I can't understand is why you offer religion as solace. These very real world problems won't pray themselves out. With your approach we might as well just act as if nothing is happening and be happy. That's a solution that might work for old people on their way out, but it's absurdly inadequate and insensitive for the young generations.
>With your approach we might as well just act as if nothing is happening and be happy.
That's what we're already doing, only we're not happy and the panic is making us collectively fight and make worse decisions. Calm people make better decisions than panicked people staring in the face of existential evaporation.
Most environmentalists would argue that we've been far too calm, leading us to not take the issues seriously and not make the requisite drastic changes to our civilizations.
The anthropocene will be visible in every history of the planet as one of the most rapid changes in every geologically and archaeologically observable metric, on the scale of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
The asteroid may vanished in a massive conflagration, but people don't talk about it because that particular lump of space rock went extinct, they talk about all the other changes that came about as a result of its admittedly short time in our atmosphere and ecosystem.
Citation needed. It really depends on the geological time scale you're talking about. Geoscientists are still in debate of whether the Anthropocene should be added as it's epoch - yes, humans have had an impact, but it's hard to concretely state that the impact will be noticeable enough that another species would demarcate our existence as such.
No earth is, there are things on the planet besides us and inanimate objects. There is a whole biosphere that we are destroying for small incremental gains. this is a very human-centric viewpoint. So what if a particular action does not improves standard of living for humans if it impacts billions of other species and breaks delicate ecosystems. Honestly I am at a point where I dont care as much about human prosperity (think higher levels of maslow's hierarchy of needs) as about saving the biosphere.
> Our ability to change the earth for the worse exceeds our willingness to change ourselves for the better.
Jack up the cost of carbon so that willingness to change increases and the relative cost of lower carbon options becomes more attractive. Right now we are effectively subsidizing our collective suicide by not internalizing externalities. It’s nuts.
Someday, maybe we'll be able to bring back well-known extinct species like passenger pigeons where biological material may still exist in a museum somewhere. We're never going to bring back the thousands of arthropod species that have gone extinct since the industrial revolution[1] - many of which we never knew about in the first place.
> However, it is likely that insect extinctions since the industrial era are around 5 to 10%, i.e. 250,000 to 500,000 species, based on estimates of 7% extinctions for land snails (Régnier et al., 2015). In total at least one million species are facing extinction in the coming decades, half of them being insects (IPBES, 2019).
> Meh, our ability to change the earth grows every year sooner or later we'll fix it.
You are talking about geoengineering.
It would be way better not to have to do such things in the first place. This is like "meh, sooner or later we'll be able to grow entire organs, you can keep smoking". Sure. But is that day coming soon enough? And what are the drawbacks of such a large intervention?
Besides, species are going extinct every day. We can't get them back.
Technologically, we get closer to the ability to fix it.
BUT the fact that this kind of collapse keeps re-occurring means that humans are turning out to be collectively too stupid to actually fix such things until after a disaster happens.
The Tragedy Of The Commons has been known about for centuries. Yet it keeps happening again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, [ . . . ] etc., including in this very instance.
All humans need to do is adjust to the reality. Yet the fact that some of the adjustments will mean that some of the people will need to change how they make a living, causes too many humans to argue vociferously that the change will be delayed. Humans even start wars over this kind of stupidity. And then, THE EARTH SYSTEM COLLAPSES, and forces everyone to make the change.
The only question now is how big a disaster will happen and how recoverable it is. If we are lucky, the disaster will be just in the sweet spot of [bad enough to force the stupid mass of humanity to change it's ways], but not quite [bad enough that it cannot be recovered once those ways are changed].
That our ability to change the world is increasing? I mean we are clearly affecting it more then we ever had in the past. Or do you want a citation from the future?
But, we always affect it in negative ways. Our ability to change the world in negative ways says nothing about our ability to ever fix it since we have absolutely no experience doing that.
Not always. We mostly fixed the ozone hole. Acid rain is largely gone from North America. Rivers in much of the world are much cleaner than they were in the last half of the 20th century. Air quality has likewise improved in many places.
I think that as areas achieve a certain level of plenty, their focus shifts from shorter-term thinking to longer-term thinking. And most places around the world are reaching that tipping point.
As a fisherman who practices sustainable fishing and abides by the regulations in place, and has witnessed the rebound of several species I target, I call bullshit.
Cod collapsed 90% in _30 years_ and was not regulated in nearly the same way as snow crab is. Your dismissive tone isn't constructive and betrays your lack of knowledge.
Ah yes, how dare I challenge a fisherman whose income is based on 'harvesting' from the ocean (imagine an entire industry the existed by going into national forests and harvesting whole herds of elk or flocks of birds, people wouldn't stand for it, but somehow fisherman are ok). I read through his previous comments, nothing indicates it is beyond the pale for me to ask he expand on this 'rebound'. He stated there was a rebound, I asked what 'rebound' means as he provided pretty nebulous information. Should I not be allowed to ask him to expand on his statement? Especially since he claims his 'rebound' allows him to call 'bullshit' on others.
The problem is that "sustainable" is always based on past observations. There were 40+ years of observations for these crab and a stable fishery. But if the environment changes for the worse, the data-based definition of "sustainable" for a stock might not change fast enough to compensate.
So the "new sustainability" under climate change has to be much more precautionary than before, and yet not shut down on false signals. It's tricky science even when intentions are good.
>Farmed seafood, in general, is a sustainable option, requiring far less feed per pound compared to other farmed sources of protein like beef, pork, and chicken.
That is one advantage if true but that just means more sustainable than beef, pork, and chicken.
Is there a condition that would prevent their farming? Like the accessibility of the feed?
> Conventional operations use large amounts of fishmeal and fish oil (and hence more wild fish) in their feed. All rainbow trout on the U.S. market is farmed-raised in the U.S., where farming operations are held to strict environmental standards. Improvements to feed have enabled less wild fish to be used.
...byproducts of processing the wild filets. I'm saying I doubt they're catching wild fish for the purpose of selling them to fish farms. Of course, it improves profit and hence incentive
Crass, sure, but true. Humanity is the reason certain animals are even capable of continuing existing. For example, chickens, pigs, cows, etc. The populations (and genetic diversity) would be far less if they were allowed to roam naturally all the time. With farmers releasing cows to free range, as well as keeping and breeding cows, the cow as a species is guaranteed to survive.
It's a complicated subject but the simplest answer goes back to the circle of life. There are two survival strategies of a species. Either becoming a predator, or become very useful prey. Which, in crass terms, basically means that if humans don't buy it (don't eat it, therefore don't insure it's survival), it will die out (e.g. it's "worthless") if it cannot evolve into a predator species.
I'm just curious what percentage of HN members diets is snow crab, and my point is snow crab isn't corn, wheat or chicken, and the only people this is going to affect are the snow crab fisherman, their families, and the economy of the towns in which they live and spend.
This is a super shortsighted view. Every life form in the ocean plays a role in the ecosystem and catastrophic damages like this have first and second order effects all over the place.
I'm pretty sure my point was the only reason for harvesting snow crab is that it is lucrative for these fisherman, yet snow crab isn't an important staple of any diet, so there was absolutely no compelling societal reason to fish them into population collapse or extinction, not even greed. My suspicion is the majority of the product here was wasted, rotted and discarded, so we should really put pressure on commercial fishers in the US and abroad to find another way to support themselves in order to stop them from killing everything in the ocean rather than romanticize a way of life that is economically and ecologically unsustainable, such as is inexplicably done for ranchers, nor should we frame them as sympathetic victims of climate change.
i think the takeaway of the story isn't specifically that this season's snow crab season is cancelled, but that a population has collapsed because of some combination of climate change or overfishing. even if you don't eat crab it's bad news when 1 billion crabs go missing.
I mean is there any mystery here? It's China. China doesn't care about anything except for themselves.
Hundreds of Chinese fishing boats set up just outside of international waters in South America and fished everything in the area and brought it back to China. It's like a sick game of Age of Empires but millions of people are affected.
This doesn't pass the sniff test. The US has the most capable and dominant naval presence on the planet and they use it. Nothing happens near their territorial waters without their permission and they see it coming long before it happens. The "ghost fleet" fishing incidents -- which are a real concern -- happen to countries with minimal maritime defenses.
You can blame China for many things but this definitely isn't one of them. Episodic fishery collapses are a thing that occurs naturally aside from fishing activity, and the Alaskan fishery is one of the best managed in the world.
As far as I'm concerned the countries impacted by those fishing cities should quietly torpedo them. It's a crime against humanity and if China can't support their own population with food they create themselves, they should cull their own population, not selfishly create famine for other countries by overfishing everything they can get their hands on.
I don't like how they keep blaming climate change, even though that doesn't seem to be what happened here. We just had one of the best seasons for crab fishing; does CBS expect us to think climate change in the last year ruined this season? Much more likely is disease, some new techniques in crab fishing that over harvested the sea, or random deviation.
"Larger statistical variance caused by climate change results in outlier event that kills 90% of crab" isn't a great headline. What do you need to believe that climate change is a factor in this event? A sample size of 1 million? A deviation of 5 sigma?
This, in theory, changes every aspect of life by some amount, however minuscule or large it may be. In the case of king crab fishing though we haven't really seen a downward trend. What we've seen is some really good seasons, new techniques, and now very few fish. People like to explain everything away due to climate change but it seems more logical to me this is random deviation or the result of new technology or bad practices by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Assuming this follows a normal distribution we would expect a shortage of crab by over 2 standard deviations in 50 year intervals (or after ~25 years of beginning our recording), and below 3 standard deviations if we repeat this 20 times. We could explain this away perfectly fine without invoking climate change
Canada and NAFO continued to overestimate the abundance of cod in the Atlantic Ocean and therefore continued to set dangerously high [Total Allowable Catches]. This was in large part due to the widespread practice of calculating cod populations from catch rates in the commercial fishery – if fishers filled their quotas with ease, then officials believed the stock size was at adequately high levels. However, fishing technology had become so efficient by the 1970s that commercial catch rates remained high even as the cod population dropped to dangerously low levels. Electronic tracking devices could find fish no matter how small their numbers and trawlers could harvest most species with relative ease. ...
Although overfishing in international waters did tremendous damage to northern cod, Canada also failed to maintain a sustainable fishery within its 200-mile limit. The government ignored warnings from inshore fishers and university scientists that cod stocks were in danger and chose to maintain quotas instead of scaling back the fishery, in large part to prevent economic losses and massive unemployment.
By the early 1990s, after decades of sustained intensive fishing from Canadian and international fleets, the northern cod stocks collapsed. The spawning biomass of northern cod had dropped by about 93 per cent in only 30 years – from 1.6 million tonnes in 1962 to between 72,000 and 110,000 tonnes in 1992. In July of that year, Canada imposed a moratorium on the catching of northern cod and ended an international industry that had endured for close to 500 years.
https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/economy/moratorium.php
They called off the season in 1992 and it never came back. A pillar of the local economy in the Maritimes was wrecked.
As for climate change and its impact on East Coast fishing, I've read that lobster fishing is no longer a viable industry in Long Island and it's declining in southern New England as waters get warmer and the lobsters permanently migrate north.