Our Oceans are Under Attack

Demand keeps growing as supplies “are rapidly dwindling.” Exploding prices add to the demand: This year, a 489-pound bluefin tuna sold for $1.7 million making it “profitable to employ airplanes and helicopters to scan the ocean for the fish that remain; against such technologies, marine animals don’t stand a chance.” Small fish like sardines, anchovy, herring, are also disappearing, meaning less food for bigger fish up the food chain.
Another factor destroying our oceans: “The destruction of the habitats that have allowed spectacular marine life to thrive for millennia,” says Sielen. And yet capitalism continues the “wholesale destruction of deep-ocean habitats ... submerged mountain chains called seamounts,” some higher than Mt Rainier. They are “homes to a rich variety of marine life.” Yet, industrial trawlers bulldoze their way” destroying “deep cold-water corals, some older than the California redwoods.”

 

The 10 dumbest things climate-change deniers say


1. Climate costs must be balanced against jobs and the economy

This is Big Oil’s favorite argument. In fact, the only “jobs and economy” the oil industry cares about are their own hundreds of thousands of jobs, over $100 billion in annual profits and trillions in revenues the last decade. Diamond warns: environmental solutions are not a “luxury” with just a cash outflow. “This one-liner puts the truth exactly backwards. ... Environmental messes cost us huge sums of money both in the short run and in the long run” and “cleaning up or preventing those messes saves us huge sums in the long run, and often in the short run as well.”

2 . Technology will solve all our climate problems

In Robert Gordon’s provocative National Bureau of Economic Research paper, “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?” we learn that not only is America’s GDP dropping to under 1% by 2100, Silicon Valley innovations and new technologies will not be a new Industrial Revolution reversing the trajectory of this future. “This faith in the future is based on an unsubstantiated track record that technology has solved more problems than it created, and will solve existing problems without creating new problems,” says Diamond. “Actual experience is the opposite.”

3. If you exhaust one resource, just switch to another that works as well

Jeremy Grantham’s GMO firm manages $110 billion, warns that “we’re running out completely of potassium (potash) and phosphorus (phosphates), both essential in food production, and eroding our soils.” Worse, Grantham’s research indicates they “cannot be manufactured and cannot be substituted for.” Total depletion will make it impossible to feed the 10 billion people predicted on the planet by 2050.

4. There’s no world food problem. We just need more genetically modified crops and better distribution to get food where needed

Diamond says “this argument misses in two ways: That First World countries do or can produce more food than their citizens consume. And surplus First World food could be exported to the Third World.” And that will “alleviate starvation.” Bad assumptions: Rich nations have large poverty too. Plus we know China and the Saudis are already buying and hoarding millions of acres of land in poor countries. Distribution is not a problem, greed and the politics of inequality is.

5. Improvements in life span, health and per capita wealth prove life on Earth has been getting better for decades

Yes, “for affluent First World citizens,” says Diamond. Plus public health advances have “increased life spans in the Third World. But life span is not a sufficient indicator: billions of Third World citizens, about 80% of the world’s population” still survive on a few dollars a day. And as Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz, author of “The Price of Inequality,” put it: “There is less equality of opportunity in the United States today than in almost any advanced industrial country.” The inequality gap’s widening, the top 1% captured 93% of the income growth since 2008.

6. Earlier dark predictions by fear-mongering environmentalists proved wrong

Yes some predictions by environmentalists proved incorrect. But it’s “misleading to look selectively for environmentalist predictions that proved right, or anti-environmentalist predictions that proved wrong.” The world is headed for an increasing frequency and intensity of climate disasters. The recent 166 mph supertyphoon in the Philippines was the largest ever recorded, leaving 1.5 million homeless.

7. The population crisis is solving itself

Critics dismiss overpopulation by arguing that “the rate of increase of the world’s population is decreasing,” meaning that “world population will level off at less than double its present level.” But Diamond warns that “even if it does, the world’s present population is already living at a nonsustainable level ... the bigger danger is the increase in human ‘impact’ as the Third World achieves First World living standards.” Why? Developed nations consume 32 times more resources, dump 32 times more waste than undeveloped nations.

8. Planet Earth can easily handle infinite population growth

This one is dumb and dumber: Assumes population growth will continue forever. Diamond says it “can’t be taken seriously.” This perpetual-growth myth is sustained by our misguided economics profession as the justification for the excesses of capitalism. Today the economy is choking on this myth that’s being challenged by critics, contrarians, environmentalists, ecologists and, now, billionaires and power-players like Tom Steyer, Hank Paulson and Michael Bloomberg.

9. Climate change concerns are the luxury of affluent First World citizens who have no business lecturing desperate Third World citizens

As an anthropologist, Diamond has travelled to many Third World countries and documented their damaging environmental problems. What he’s discovered is that the Third World is quite well aware of global warming, climate change and the impact of environmental disasters on their world. They know very well how they are being harmed by population growth, deforestation, overfishing, and other problems. And how globalism and giant corporations like Exxon Mobil are too often the culprits.

10. If environmental problems get desperate, so what, it’ll happen after I die, so I can’t take them seriously today

Big Oil is narcissistic, focused on quarterly earnings. Meanwhile, Diamond’s focused on 2050, the next generation: “Most or all of these environmental problems will become acute within the lifetime of young adults now alive. Our goal [should be] helping the next generation enjoy good lives 50 years from now. It makes no sense for us to help our own children while simultaneously doing things undermining the world in which our children will be living 50 years from now.”

Bottom line: We need to shock Big Oil and today’s generation out of their denial, help guys like Steyer, whose goal is to “persuade investors, policy makers and the public that the consequences of unchecked carbon emissions would eventually blow away whatever short-term costs are involved in curbing the pollution

 

again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again,!

I'll eat what I want.
At the moment, you are free to decide what you will eat.
That may not always be an option.
Someday soon, you may be faced with eating meat, of suspicious origins, or starving to death.
I'd wager you'll eat and lick the gravy from your fingers.
Since I'm omnivorous, less squeamish, and skilled at hunting and fishing and foraging, I'll ALWAYS have more dietary options than you do.

Survival of the most adaptable and fittest.

Most ridiculous claims by doomers?
Let's enforce universal global poverty, want, hunger, and misery now, so everybody gets accustomed to what the future holds in store.
Misery loves company.
Goodluck with your collective egalitarian suffering zombie utopia.

I'll remain aloof and free!

I'll work, fight, struggle, and fend for me and mine, as I have always done, as a capable, resourceful, and FREE individual.

 

Oh, really? 'Twas socialism that killed the Aral Sea. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea

 

ZING! 7pts Hoyt! Touchdown and the kick is good!

Can't give you more rep yet, gotta spread it around.
Does negative rep count as "spreading around"?
Maybe I should try doling out some negs and see.

Does anybody have any remaining doubts, that AGW is a socialist "control the world" political scheme?
Read Myark's posts, and you will no longer be confused as to who is behind it, and intends, expects to benefit from AGW.
Watermelons.

 

Large areas of seabed in the Mediterranean and North Sea now resemble a desert – the seas have been expunged of fish using increasingly efficient methods such as bottom trawling. And now, these heavily subsidised industrial fleets are cleaning up tropical oceans too. One-quarter of the EU catch is now made outside European waters, much of it in previously rich West African seas, where each trawler can scoop up hundreds of thousands of kilos of fish in a day. All West African fisheries are now over-exploited, coastal fisheries have declined 50% in the past 30 years, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Catches in the tropics are expected to decline a further 40% by 2050, and yet some 400 million people in Africa and Southeast Asia rely on fish caught (mainly through artisanal fishing) to provide their protein and minerals. With climate change expected to impact agricultural production, people are going to rely more than ever on fish for their nutritional needs.

The policy of subsidising vast fishing fleets to catch ever-diminishing stocks is unsustainable. In Spain, for example, one in three fish landed is paid for by subsidy. Governments, concerned with keeping jobs alive in the fishing industry in the short-term, are essentially paying people to extinguish their own long-term job prospects – not to mention the effect on the next generation of fishermen. Artisanal fishing catches half the world’s fish, yet it provides 90% of the sector’s jobs.

Humanity is not limiting its impacts to fish most commonly found on menus. Exotic sea creatures from turtles to manta ray to marine mammals are being hunted to extinction.

 

Hey, Myark.
Got a secret for you. Shhh! "Overfishing is occurring!" Now don't tell anybody, because there just may be 2 or 3 people left in the world that don't know this and we don't want EVERYBODY to know it, so leave a few ignorant. Shhhh!

Want to know another secret? Nobody will DO anything to stop it, because of self interest. Shhhh!

But it will stop, when they can't catch enough to afford the trawler factory ships leaving the dock. Then, they'll (trawlers) rust away and fish will repopulate.
They aren't likely to catch the very last fish, or last million fish, are they?.
Anyway, hope you're growing your own vegetables. because veggies are probably going to be prohibitively expensive when EVERYBODY but me becomes a vegan.
There are many books and internet blogs on wild edible plants in north America.
I know most by sight and have eaten most of them. Not what I'd consider the tastiest of vegetable dishes, but nourishing still the same, and some, a few, are really enjoyable. Burdock and dandelion greens and young cattails to mention just three wild delicacies.
Has anybody written about foraging wild edibles in Thailand?

The following maps show the many extensive state and national forests and parks and wildlife preserves in green where hunting is prohibited.
In the USA, we set aside extensive wilderness areas in each state.
Hunting is also very popular in the US and fishing MORE popular. foraging less popular, less known.
The other map showing best productive Florida counties for legal deer hunting in brown.
If government collapsed, who's to prevent me from hunting in those green areas too?
Lot's of deer and fish and forage in Florida. Where deer live, wild plants also flourish!


How big is Thailand compared to Florida? Thailand is 3 times as big as Florida. http://mapfight.appspot.com/th-vs-us.fl/thailand-florida-us-size-comparison

Another thing, the paper companies have extensive pulpwood forests, millions of acres of trees in Florida.
These greedy paper companies plant pastures, feedlots for deer amongst the pulpwood stands, maintain access logging roads at company expense, and publish hunting permits in local newspapers giving hunters free permission to hunt on paper mill woodlands, just for tearing out the permit from the newspaper. Greedy capitalist industrialists aren't they? I don't exactly LOVE them but I'm grateful and I love eating the deer I harvest on their lands.

 

When I was growing up, dandelion was a regular part of my diet.

 

True they cant catch every last fish of a certain variety.
The population crashes and it takes a very long time to recover.
Meanwhile we dont get to eat them or have fun catching them.

 

It may appear I'm being cavalier, but that's NOT my intention.
Overfishing is a very serious problem without any solution.
Many efforts have been made to forge international treaties restricting and managing fishing. Countries highly dependent upon fishing, with centuries of fishing tradition, like Japan, the Scandinavian countries, Spain and Portugal, are not agreeable and won't sign treaties they consider economically hurtful and cause of starvation.
Can you blame them for being uncooperative?

I don't have a solution. Wish I did.

would you send warships to blow them out of the water, like they were despicable pirates?
Under what/whose authority?

 

I just hope they are not fishing the stocks down to nothing for dog and cat foods. Know what I mean?

I think one solution could be open ocean fish farming, giant pens where they raise fish.

 

I agree aquaculture is probably the best option. Posted that earlier.
No fishing zones are another possibility.
Violators subject to seizure of vessel, cargo, and imprisonment of crew.
But by whose authority?
At one period in history, Britannia ruled the waves, and was powerful enough to declare all slave ships, regardless of flag, subject to capture or being sunk. Powerful enough to not care about world opinion.
The US probably has the strongest navy today, but i can't imagine the world would tolerate such militant arrogance, even if they agreed overfishing needed stopping by whatever means.

There ARE NO simple solutions to complex problems.

I remember when territorial waters were 12 miles, then moved further offshore to 200 miles.
Should seacoast countries claim offshore 1000 miles of territorial sea and enforce fishing restrictions based on national law?

 

I eat four of these Florida wildlife.
Guess which four.
or guess the one I DON'T eat.
Then guess which is most dangerous game to hunt?

 

The Florida Panther is endangered. So is Florida black bear. (not pictured) So I don't eat those.
Doubt they'd taste good anyway.
Gator tail is good! Fried.
Wild boar is extremely dangerous, most dangerous of all Florida wildlife, especially when wounded.
Hunting and eating wild game such as wild boar, wild turkey, and deer, accomplishes what Myark suggests vegetarianism would accomplish.
Less demand for agribusiness produced beef, pork, and turkey. AND it helps keep the wildlife population under control.
And it's healthier food, not saturated with growth hormones and antibiotics.
I also hunt ducks, quail, rabbit, and squirrels, all substitutes for agribiz chicken.
And in case of societal collapse, MY meat store remains open.
http://myfwc.com/hunting/season-dates

After age 65, no hunting or fishing license required in Florida. It's FREE!

 

One of the most impactful things we can do as individuals to help save the oceans is to live vegan instead of consuming an animal-based diet.
Animal slaughter is a major threat to life on earth including being a leading contributor to climate change, species extinction, water pollution, wasting of water, and deforestation (including cutting down rain forests). It is also the leader in publicly funded wildlife killing and displacement of wild animals due to wilderness destruction.
Eating fewer animal products moves food production away from animal slaughter toward plant-based foods. Plant-based food production uses dramatically less land. It eliminates the need for deforestation, uses less water, emits less greenhouse gases, saves lives, and conserves the world’s resources for future generations
The reasons more and more people are choosing to live vegan are wide and varied. Some want to be kind to animals and refuse to take part in hurting or killing them. Some are environmentally conscious. Some care about human rights, food justice, and world hunger. Some are concerned about their own personal health. And for more and more people, ALL of these things matter.
There is something positive and wonderful about living vegan. For many, there is happiness and sense of completeness that comes with living our lives aligned with our values.