The rich, everywhere in the world, will continue to seek wild-caught though. (While they publicly rail against the poor eating wild-caught. Such is how the wheels turn.).
Societal expectations were very different back then. Should we also slam those trying to end modern slavery by mentioning slavers of the past?
It’s all a spectrum. One nation cannot leapfrog the rest in its advancements then demand the rest follow its new norms, unless they’re willing to put their money where their mouth is.
Is the rest of the world supposed to stay poor and desperate forever? Especially considering that rich countries still suck massive amounts of resources (and turn a blind eye to local corruption), and provide popular emigration destination for talented people who leave their homeland instead of helping develop it?
All energy on earth derives from 1) the sun or 2) geothermal
Energy is lost as you move further from those sources. Plants converting sunlight directly to usable energy are more efficient than a higher order animal eating another animal that ate another animal that ate a plant.
Now nature normally balances this hierarchy in a myriad of ways that you can go read about yourself.
The problem is humans have rapidly expanded and want to consume more than nature can provide and restock. We have exceeded the capacity for people surviving off animal products.
Attempts to produce more animal products is one of the major drivers of climate change, alongside things like concrete.
https://news.mongabay.com/2020/10/new-evidence-suggests-chin...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-19/how-china-is-plunderi...
https://time.com/6328528/investigation-chinese-fishing-fleet...
But no, the West has often been imperfect, no doubt about that, which is why these sort of restrictions and limitations were set up: to prevent repeating the mistakes of the past which hurt everyone. And yes, we probably should recognise more that the West got ahead partly in ways that harmed everyone. But none of that justifies what China is doing.
It’s bad for the salmon (in terms of animal welfare) and it’s wrecking the local ecosystems. It’s not any sort of panacea.
We need to stop destroying ocean ecosystems, not just shift the damage around. Overfishing of wild stock, habitat destruction through bottom-trawling and intensive fish farming all need to be properly looked at.
Most of the ocean is practically a desert. The only productive places are near land, where deep water up wells and returns sunken nutrients back to the surface.
I'm sure we could study and engineer some sort of nutrient dumping and cycling scheme. I bet you could make vastly more food while leaving a lot of ocean alone.
There are places famous for it, and there are other places like French Polynesia where they use existing atols as places to do it.
It's not easy, but it can be very productive.
You criticise, yet don't provide any suitable recommendations or alternatives.
People like to eat fish and have done so since the beginning of our species.
Onshore fish-farming is being developed. I don’t know enough about it to have any idea whether it can be made compatible with animal welfare or environmental responsibility.
But it also doesn’t matter. Sometimes you’re just going to need to stop wrecking the place.
There was a story [0] that ran in the New Yorker a year ago that detailed how North Koreans are sent to Chinese seafood plants in forced labor.
While China dominates the fisheries, Japan is still whaling. The oceanic deserts are getting worse every day.
Can clearly see from empty perimeter in the heat map PRC fishing largely stays clear of SKR, JP EEZ. Reason DC thinktank "report" try to play up 12m hours in SKR is likely that hotspot just south of SKR peninsula, aka disputed Socotra rock EEZ. And I surmise majority of JP 1.5m "hours" are over disputed Senkaku EEZ. 4.5m TW hours, obviously PRC considers TW waters part of her territorial/EEZ waters. About another 1m hours from SCS EEZ disputes. AKA 18/21m hours are basically DC think tank doing customary China bad funny stats from disputed maritime delimitations. Incidentally using said delimitations to extrapolate 3000k PRC distant fishing fleet into 30k+ in 5 years... somehow.
PRC has largest absolute DWF fleet size, but per capita she's underfishing, especially relative to TW, SKR, JP, who're at only 30-50% aquaculture. Spain and Russia also up there. Also fraction of SKR/TW subsidies per capita, about on par with JP. Of course you don't see DC thinktanks hitpieces telling these actors to kill their DWF fishing industries. For PRC's DWF fleet to match other top DWF fleet's capita fishing efforts, she would have to fish something like 3-9x+ more. Unless one thinks PRC fishermen and citizens shouldn't have the same opportunities or access to seafood. Ecuador & Peru, two countries with ~1/30th population of China, together captures about about ~1/2 of China, who also has 1/2 the EEZ of these countries, which incidentally means China has to fish more in international waters.
The only reason PRC IUU fishing got media play / propaganda push in the last few years is US wanted to beef up influence of pacific nations playing up PRC IUU fishing so they can drive the issue to forward deploy coast guard and build influence. It's geopolitical lawfare, and it's unlikely to do anything substantive because any agreement by PRC on curtailing distant fishing would be on per capita basis which would first involve everyone else (JP,SKR,TW etc) to essentially kill their entire DWF industry before PRC would even need to make any cuts.
Again, let's stress how absolutely batshit stupid these new numbers are:
SKR, ~500-700 DWF fleet, 300-400k metric tons per year.
JP ~1200-1500 DWF fleet, 600-900k metric tons per year.
TW ~1000 DWF fleet, 400-600k metric tons per year.
AVG 400-800 tons per ship.
PRC... 32000 DWF fleet, 3000k metric tons per year.
AVG 90 tons per ship.
Or... avg 400-800 tons per ship
PRC ~3750-7500 DWF fleet
PRC official report is like ~2700 in ~2020, add 25% for 25% by 2025 increase catch and you get ~3400. It's underestimation (and while PRC wanted to cap to 3000 in last 5 year plan), but it's underestimate by 100s, not over estimation by 10000s. Like tag on highest maritime militia estimates of ~10k, and it's still almost ~20k over.
E: or just look at estimates of global seafood market growth... ~5% CAGR, ~+50B over past 5 years. Like 35B of that from PRC aquaculture growth. What's the 29000 new DWF doing? Global DWF size for major fishing nations is like 6000... so PRC adds... 500% that and somehow global fishing market grows by... 30%. US thinktank innumeracy.
I have always hated this take in any context I've seen it. Refusing to even acknowledge a problem as a problem unless presented with a solution is such an infuriating way to be dismissed.
Anyway, she was yet another casualty of MAGA! She was forced out on Trump's first day because of DEI, presumably because she was the first woman to run a service. For now, the program still survives, both funding and personnel-wise (modulo a few hull-days spent running around the southern border and the... uh, gulf of ~america~ mexico?), but man.
To learn more, I'd listen to war on the rocks! They have great guests.
should be obv.
also, ever heard of the asian concept of "face"?
it exists at country level too, not just individual level.
And relative to other DWF / wild catch, PRC catches less per capita... so they're poluting less. See approaching 80% agraculture share. PRC basically the most sustainable seafood producer with more than 10m people. Scale it per capita, PRC isn't even in the same level as US partners who don't get the annual smear campaign.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2017/08/how-data-can-heal-ou...
Regulation. Chinese boats fish in ways we block our own boats from. Those exports thus represent a regulatory workaround, victim the oceans, and a tool with which buyers can demand reciprocal regulation.
I worry that I live in a time when commercial fishing is not sufficiently regulated so that rather than being outlawed, it will simply become infeasible, with the attendant knock-on affects of countries which depend on the oceans for a significant portion of their protein.
There are now a greater tonnage of ships in the ocean than bony fish:
What will be the next marker to be dropped?
Makes one wish that we could manage something like to Hal Clement's "Raindrop":
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/939760.Music_of_Many_Sph...
Living in unsustainable ways is ... well not sustainable.
If people have liked to eat fish since the start, then maybe we should leave some for the next generations.
They will approach a protected ecosystem, which is thriving with fish like that of the galapagos islands, for example. They will hang out right at the limit of the maritime nautical border with the native country.
Then they will shut down naval GPS transponders (disabling of AIS - Automatic Identification System) and during the night, all at the same time, cross into the country's maritime space and quickly get out before its caught by the local patrols. [1][2]
This happens a lot with smaller countries which cannot fight back.
There are other techniques that haven't been yet discussed, like, altering vessel measurements (Changing draft and length to obscure activity, e.g., during transshipment or EEZ entry) , and meeting with refrigerated cargo ships to transfer catch which is likely illegal.
These are the only ways they can sustain a 44% of fishing worldwide. If they did this in their home turf, their waters would be empty of life
[1] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/democraciaabierta/pesca-ile...
[2] https://usa.oceana.org/press-releases/oceana-analysis-shows-...
ignore the marble sclupture, it's only a few of them deployed for attraction and attention.
Another recent discovery is that although we've damaged our fisheries significantly, oceanic ecosystems apparently recover much faster than terrestrial ecosystems if left untouched, within several years.
People bitching about PRC fishing is like people bitching about PRC coal, i.e. most of coal use has stablized, with renewable making up new energy production. PRC DWF has also mostly stablized with seafood increase via aquaculture.
Except with coal as % of energy mix is way higher than PRC DWF as % of fisheries. AKA it's a made up problem, it so much as PRC is unique bad behaviour.
As for the actual tax rate, I will defer to the economic literature on this subject, but the answer will invariably be a pragmatic one.
Taxing externalities isn't about "guaranteeing everyone can have access to the resource": that's circular. Taxing externalities is about ensuring that those who profit from a public good, also pay the public for the value of that good.
Hypothetical: If tomorrow it turns out that eating beef is somehow the ultimate cause of environmental destruction, and every cow fart requires $1MM in cleanup fees or humanity goes extinct, then we should tax cows at $1MM per fart, full stop. "But not everyone will be able to eat beef!" is not an argument, unless you want to say "We would rather all eat beef than survive as a species."
Of course: in reality it's not so clear cut. But the principle remains.
Of course: once you've determined a price for the good and levied taxes, you can then either use that price to clean up / renew the resource, or just distribute the money directly to citizens (see canada's "carbon price") to effectively pay people not to consume the resource. Same difference.
Bad apples usually measured by AIS disabling events... in which case, pre US propaganda drive against PRC I think worst culprits (highest proportion of ships/time) was Spain, something like 15% of activity obscured, then US with high single digits, then TW, slightly higher than PRC, I think 5%. US gets a pass because it's mostly in North West Atlantic aka, US backyard... which well, US just has a big ass EEZ backyard vs PRC has essentially smallest EEZ relative to country size, so PRC _has_ to fish on commons/highseas/international waters (including near countries EEZs where the catch is). Not much info on JP or SKR except SKR is in all the places PRC/TW/SP is in, and have all the shady forced labour issues, so hard to believe they don't also have AIS misbehavior. IIRC some other interesting tidbits is AIS disabling behaviour also sorted by ship type... and the types of ships that have worst/longest AIS disabling are tuna longliner... implicating JP.
But the otherwise TLDR is ever since US thinktanks decided to hammer PRC IUU to the exclusin of everyone else (read US allies/partners), PRC DWF somehow grew 10x and AIS behavior exploded... but even then it's dumb shit like PRC is 80% of fleet off XYZ country EEZ but responsible for 90% of AIS anomolies, i.e. marginally worse.
Propose some kind of research into lab grown meat, extremely cheap feed, or some unthought of billion dollar idea solution.
Rich get to enjoy something that all of humanity has enjoyed for the entirety of human existence will never be a solution people take seriously.
And look where that rather gentle approach got us - we've had decades of people knowing there's a climate crisis coming and here we are still burning fossil fuels for power.
> Rich get to enjoy something that all of humanity has enjoyed for the entirety of human existence will never be a solution people take seriously.
So in your mind it is better to drive the seas to complete destruction than to limit catches and thereby push up the price?
You know this is self-limiting, right? In that if we kill everything in the seas, those people still won't get cheap fish, and the 'rich' will eat the last few at great expense?
Why have governments pick and choose “winning energy strategies” when you can let the market do it?
Literally how it works in practice with carbon credits today, your assertions to the contrary notwithstanding.
I'd quibble with the PRC being the most sustainable producer, there's more to ecology than just fishing vs no fishing, but it's not a major point. And my biggest concern is with absolute scale (44% of the overall fishing effort makes it an outsize impact no matter what! it's kinda like how the US Army ROE matter more than most country army ROE simply because we're engaged more. Hard to address a global problem without focusing on its largest driver.), although, as you probably feel, the solution for that is a new UNCLOS, not singling out the PRC.
The slaves are necessary to the economic welfare of the south and have been a corner of empire economies for millennia.
People like to drink wine sweetened with lead and have been doing so since we can remember.
How are we even going to get rain without the sacrifices?
IMO wildcatch:aquaculture ratio most sensible/proper incentive for future. Napkin math is if PRC aquaculture goes 80%->95% from 60m to 70m aquaculture, and drops 66% of wild catch from 15m to 5m metric tons. But that also means JP/SKR/TW... basically eliminate their DWF industry by 75-90+%. You'll know US is serious about IUU, not not weaponizing it when US media screams at partners to hit those quotas... well after US ratifies UNCLOS. Regardless, half the world poorer than (3 billion people / 2 Chinas), the less poor they are, the more fish they'll want to eat, and we want to incentivize more aquaculture seafood considering fish has less feed conversion ratio, it's better people eat fish than check/pigs/cattle when they can afford meat. Obviously less/no meat better, but humans will meat.
One massive problem with data collection on fishing, is that the world is absolutely littered with outright fake AIS data, where the vast majority are registered as Chinese vessels. Anyone can purchase a AIS transmitter, and spoof the data. Some areas are much more affected - especially out in the middle of the pacific ocean, and the Indian sea. Some areas there can have almost 100% spoofed AIS data. So a lot of work goes toward filtering these out.
When working on this kind of analysis, you have a bunch of data sources: AIS, VMS, LRIT, which are either land or satellite borne. Other than these, you have SAR, Optical, NRD (navigation radar detectors), and some other - but with these, you obviously need to have some classification and correlation system. AIS is by far the most common source, and it is also the one that is easiest to manipulate.
Vessels can simply turn off their AIS transponders, while out at sea. And it can easily be spoofed. But a lot of the garbage AIS data is really just that, random garbage. Just some random MMSI attached to a Chinese flag, and a completely random sailing pattern. These are relatively easy to filter out, but often times they share the MMSI with actual vessels - many which are indeed Chinese vessels.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40913385
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36118309
Search some of the keywords in those comments if you are interested in knowing more.
https://science.thewire.in/environment/big-oil-hijack-carbon...
It may be in the future that fishing joins that list.
Abolition is the only alternative to immoral and unethical actions, but in terms of nutrition, there are plenty of ways to get the same nutrients, and ways to use seaweed to replicate some of the flavors.
We can do this for, say, all the airfields in Russia, today. But the world is a much bigger place.
As laser communications equipment becomes more standardized and the LEO comms and LEO remote sensing constellations continue to grow, this will slowly expand in scope. But tracking and deconfliction of moving objects is just an inherently difficult thing to do with any confidence; It wouldn't be feasible at all without various AI algorithms. There are far lower hanging fruit as yet unpicked.
I’m suggesting we do that through conservation rather than decimation. But you feel free to throw your hands up and watch the seas die because “people are going to eat salmon”.
Perhaps those who are so insistent that behaviour cannot change could come up with a solution, instead of helpless capitulation to a future of dead oceans.
Both of these things can be true.
You don’t get to push away the environmental damage these things cause because you like a fish fillet and won’t hear otherwise.
All I’m saying (and what conservationists are saying) is that if we carry on down this path we’re going to destroy the ocean ecosystems, and if we don’t want that we should stop. You seem to be replying indignantly that we are going to carry on regardless. OK, well that’s the choice humanity faces, isn’t it?
Fish is a major part of the diet there. People love it. They're not going to stop eating it. Fish is also good for you, and might be part of the reason why people in East Asia have some of the longest lifespans in the world.
Alternatives are definitely good, and yes, it will be easier to move people away from destructive practices with them in place.
My annoyance is that sometimes things are necessary regardless of their being an alternative, and saying "Herp derp unless you have a solution then shut up" isn't very helpful (I'm not accusing you of this).
It's not wrong to state "we have a serious problem, if we don't change course things are going to get bad" without having all the answers to changing that course.
Sometimes things that are necessary arent done.
> "Herp derp unless you have a solution then shut up" isn't very helpful
Saying something is necessary when it wont be done without a replacement isnt very helpful either.
> They are starting to work, in some countries, where it has been realised that these things are incompatible with sustainable fisheries.
My understanding is that China is by far the biggest culprit when it comes to bottom trawling and they will not stop without an alternative way to feed 1.4 billion people seafood.
Of course its right to point out the problem but I think it is also necessary to go beyond that. The problem will not be fixed without a solution, and eat less seafood unfortunately is not on the table.