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Comment by ransom1538 | Hacker News Reader

"catastrophe as the Australian coral die off,"

I went deep sea fishing in Florida a few months back. It took forever to get to a place where there were actual fish. I asked the captain why, basically, he knows where there are large shipping container wrecks and that is where all the sea life is.

Thing is, building coral and sea life is super simple [same with killing it]. You literally can just lay down wire grids and get things moving [1].

[1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-26/scientists-discover-ga...

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"Thing is, building coral and sea life is super simple [same with killing it]."

That is just simply not true. While it might be helpful to lay down structures for sea life, ocean acidification [1], algal blooms [2], and climate change are all contributing to mass death of sea life, and fast enough where we will see many species go extinct in our lifetime (bluefin tuna will be there soon [3]).

Even related to your own fishing story, check out the fish sizes and diversity in the 1950s compared to now. [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algal_bloom

[3] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/07/060724-blue...

[4] https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/b...

Woah, I was really surprised by the different sizes of the fish.

Important to note is that the biggest fish caught in the 50s and 60s seem to all be goliath groupers (also known as jewfish) and are now critically endangered and illegal to keep. I imagine they still catch some on these charter boats, but they are required to release them once they do.

The unfortunate thing is that no matter whether something is illegal or not, it can still be a victim of bycatch when fishing for legal species, and bycatch mortality is quite high. Bycatch is actually higher than actual catch by weight for some fisheries+methods.[1] It's not just what you eat, but where it came from.

[1] http://www.fao.org/docrep/003/t4890e/t4890e03.htm

Edit: A couple of extra spaces removed

And of course the word 'illegal' in the open sea, when you have huge nurse ships in international waters (that will not touch any port in the country) means nothing.

> building coral and sea life is super simple

No. First you need an unpolluted area of ocean with the right conditions. And even then, thinking like yours can create more problems than it solves. Just look how the Osborne artificial reef actually led to an environmental disaster and massive cleanup effort.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/22/florida-retr...

That story just keeps on giving.

> The tires, which were dumped before recycling was possible, will be trucked across the state to Florida’s west coast and burned for energy at a Wheelebrator Technologies renewable waste plant near Tampa, owned by private equity firm Energy Capital Partners.

We could recycle the tires, but fuck it, let’s burn them instead so this is an unmitigated disaster.

I believe there are "green" ways to burn tires if the conditions are properly controlled and emissions captured. I saw a YT vid about a cement plant in CA that burned them in a furnace for heat to dry the concrete powder.

Also, "recycling " tires isn't necessarily green because it takes enormous amounts of energy to shred them. While burning them releases energy.

I read about this thing in Florida a long time ago and got upset about it. When I was reminded about it that all rushed back.

Objectively, tires that have been underwater for decades probably are not a great raw ingredient for making bouncy surfaces for playgrounds or quiet asphalt.

But incinerating them even with emissions controls really only recovers a little bit of the embodied energy, and still makes me feel all table-flippy.

> renewable waste plant

I'm still trying to figure out what they mean by that. The plant is generating renewable waste? Or it's fed by a 'renewable' source of waste? I don't think tires are a renewable resource.

You got it, a renewable source of energy because people constantly generate waste. It's a term invented by a trash company to greenwash regular waste: http://www.wm.com/sustainability/renewable-energy.jsp

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