China Dominates 44% of Visible Fishing Activity Worldwide

Tasmania produces a lot of caged salmon.

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.

> 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.

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.

Sometimes things need to be addressed whether there’s an alternative or not, because they are damaging.

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.

> You criticise, yet don't provide any suitable recommendations or alternatives.

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.

The solution to overfishing, over consumption of fossil fuels, over consumption of beef etc is all the same in the current system. Impose appropriate taxes that adequately capture the impact of the negative externalities.

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.

The solution for both preservation of ecosystems _and_ fisheries is creating marine reserves like Papahānaumokuākea.

When should the tax stop being raised? The solution is not to make it so only the rich can eat fish, beef, etc. This idea is only ever proposed by people who think they will always be able to afford it or people who think no one should be able to enjoy animal meat.

You give the tax back to people so they're no worse off on average, and are better off if they don't overly engage in destroying the commons.

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.

When it has reached the cost of renewing the resource.

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.

Just eat the fish that's available in your waters.

Unless you're landlocked and your rivers have gone to shit too.

The solution to fossil fuels was not make gas cost 20 dollars a gallon (or an imagined unbounded amount) so only people who really need to drive can afford it. It was serious research into many different forms of energy. There are many old people who have their lively hoods tied to the fact that we ignore the science, but we do have solutions.

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.

Actually in a lot of places the attempted solution was to put steadily escalating taxes on 'gas', to try to make people drive less. That plus put restrictions on vehicle efficiency to drive down fuel use, which can also be argued to push up car prices.

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?

I take a lifecycle view. Early on, public subsidy of research is necessary. US President Carter and the Germans did a good job with that for solar. When you have a mature product 50 years later, that's when tax policy and/or industrial policy becomes more impactful. Industry itself is doing most of the innovating at this late stage, so you want policy to nudge existing consumers towards the preferred substitute. None of these policies are competing with one another, they are complementary. You can even use the tax revenue to fund the early-stage research of other moonshot technologies.

A pigovian tax is not mutually exclusive with those options— in fact it incentivizes them. No need to do market planning for “lab grown meat” or whatever is the central planner’s fancy du jour: set a price and let the market figure it out.

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.

> People like to eat fish and have done so since the beginning of our species.

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?

Taxes isn't the right approach, in Brazil is taxes over taxes and the poor people is the real affected by them. They cannot eat fish frequently or only through processed food, which in turn, is mixed with many other things which are bad for their healthy too.

That is the whole point. The taxes are there to reduce consumption, and the people who reduce their consumption first are the poor.

The reality is that people are going to eat salmon. If you say all the ways of growing salmon are unacceptable people will just ignore you and go for the cheapest one. If you convince the government to tax salmon consumption the government will be removed. People really, really do not like to decrease consumption.

This argument isnt convincing anyone. People are going to eat salmon. If you dont provide an ethical source they will go for unethical sources. The only option for getting people to stop consuming things that are bad is to provide better alternatives.

Humans have historically done many things that we now find distasteful or unthinkable.

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.

If an alternative isn’t found, then people are going to eat less fish one way or another.

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.

The reality is also that keeping on doing that and other activities like bottom-trawling is going to continue to wreck ecosystems.

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?

Humanity isn’t going to make the decision we want it to here. That’s why it’s so important to find ethical alternatives, it’s the only way to prevent bottom trawling. Nature shows and heartfelt appeals are not enough.

They are starting to work, in some countries, where it has been realised that these things are incompatible with sustainable fisheries.

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.

> My annoyance is that sometimes things are necessary regardless of their being an alternative

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.