Popular seafood species in sharp decline around the world
news.ubc.ca
news.ubc.ca
My favorite version of the guide is the printable version that you can fold up and put in your wallet: https://www.seafoodwatch.org/seafood-recommendations/consume...
Here's the main site where you can search for a fish by name: https://www.seafoodwatch.org/
This is geared towards the USA but I think the guides are at least somewhat useful in other countries.
https://www.mcsuk.org/goodfishguide/search
The app page has links to Android and iOS apps, and a PDF (although the latter is dense and highly coloured, not ideal to print).
This being for the UK, they also have a fish finger guide.
Of those, haddock is the only one that's really okay (scores 2-4): https://www.mcsuk.org/goodfishguide/search?name=Haddock
Cod is okay if it's from the far north, but most of the time you have no way of knowing (scores 1-5): https://www.mcsuk.org/goodfishguide/search?name=Cod%2C+Atlan...
Plaice is okay if it's from the east coast, but even then, the fishing methods are damaging (scores 2-5): https://www.mcsuk.org/goodfishguide/search?name=Plaice
Rock salmon is critically endangered (scores 5): https://www.mcsuk.org/goodfishguide/search?name=Spurdog%2C+S...
Skate is endangered and illegal to fish (scores 5): https://www.mcsuk.org/goodfishguide/search?name=Skate
Now, given that rock and skate are endangered, i have to admit i'm a bit confused about how they end up on menus. Are they being imported from other parts of the world where they're legal to fish? Or are they actually other, similar and legal, fish being sold under incorrect but familiar names?
Breaded plaice is my favourite, although often chip shops don't seem to have any
I have spearfished for over 30 years and it is astonishing how much the fish population has declined even in my lifetime.
I personally enjoy calamari, but it definitely doesn't hit the spot for bony fish / shell fish cravings. And it is missing the omega-3's of oily fish. :(
That was a great time, thanks for coming with us!
Yes, fisheries in decline means that, voluntarily or not, we will lose our cedar plank salmon and our sushi-grade tuna. We will instead talk up the pleasures of the sardine, its ennobling humility and its clean taste, but it will be self-delusion covering up an obvious sense of loss, just as celebrating a birthday on Zoom is a pathetic loss no matter how much we try to put a happy face on it.
We are all getting a taste of what it feels to lose things, maybe lose them for good. This is the experience of our parents and grandparents, survivors of war, refugees, people thrown into sudden poverty. It's a common experience around the world, but many of us have forgotten it. It's time to get reacquainted. Families who lose everything in stock market crashes and hurricanes look at the wreckage of their lives and ask, "Is this satire?"
In 40 years, I fully expect to be an out-of-touch antebellum grandma, talking of lost pleasures to people who've never tasted coffee or traveled across the Atlantic, the same way I have never ridden in a phaeton or tasted ortolan.
The bird is roasted for eight minutes and then plucked. The consumer then places the bird feet first into their mouth while holding onto the bird's head. The ortolan is then eaten whole, with or without the head, and the consumer spits out the larger bones.
this is awful!
read parent again she is right.
It's a painless way for vested interests to defuse the issue, diverting the energies of people who care about it- away from regulation.
Not just for checking on the fish you are already eating, but for trying out new seafood. I like to think of it as a very well curated recommendation list.
For instance, Barramundi is a very tasty fish that I discovered via this tool. We eat it regularly now. It also gives you the other names that the fish/seafood is known as, so you can shop around or know what your order is like.
In his case I think this is because the seafood he produces isn't on the guides at all. It's not obscure, just not covered, but he's noticed in using the guides, people tend to avoid products they can't verify as "good". In other cases (in his mind) the guide hurts people working in markets to change the means of production to become more sustainable.
His position is that there's basically no substitute for understanding where your food is coming from. I think he sees the core problem is then disconnect between consumers and production, in that the global production chain has become so financially efficient that sources are completely obscured from purchasers.
I'm not sure I agree with him on everything regarding the guide. The global seafood market is insanely complex, and the guide helps navigate it in at least a simplified way. But I think he's right in a sense that real changes are going to require something more substantial in terms of consumer changes and /or real international regulation and enforcement. There's too much fraud and detachment from actual supply. I don't think fishing is unusual in this regard in the food supply but I do think it's different in that a lot (not all) of it involves wild as opposed to farmed resources.
"Anthropogenic nutrient enrichment is often associated with coral reef decline. Consequently, there is a large consent that increased nutrient influxes in reef waters have negative longterm consequences for corals" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187734351...
"Increased loadings of nitrogen (N) from fertilizers, top soil, sewage, and atmospheric deposition are important drivers of eutrophication in coastal waters globally. Monitoring seawater and macroalgae can reveal long-term changes in N and phosphorus (P) availability and N:P stoichiometry that are critical to understanding the global crisis of coral reef decline" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00227-019-3538-9
No. Nitrogen pollution has local effects and is an enormous problem in some important fish spawning grounds, but it cannot explain what happened to the Great Barrier Reef in 2018 and again in 2019.
The effects of temperature on corals are getting to be quite well understood now. Globally, marine heat waves are a major problem, alongside pollution and direct reef destruction.
Likewise, ocean acidification is happening as part of "climate change" (carbon pollution) and is another stress for corals.
I agree with your point about N runoff. We need to stop growing maize for biofuels and animal feed and implement megascale riparian planting programmes to limit the damage done by floods. For starters.
These things are not either-or. Overfishing and destructive fishing practices, "development", various kinds of pollution and oxygen depletion ... we're doing it all, and it all affects reefs.
While I wish organically growing food and conservation was the answer, its unfortunately not. Society just wont change to support it. A science fiction style solution is going to be the only way to feed the world.
[1] https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/how-much-arabl...
The reality is that we are not very efficient at agriculture in all of the places where agriculture is practiced. Most carrying capacity models make the assumption that we are at or near peak agricultural output, but this simply isn't true, so the models' predictive powers fall apart.
For an example from another industry, where people have been similarly predicting capacity-related doom since the 80s, look at oil. In the 80s, people thought we were going to run out of oil, because "proven accessible reserves" were dwindling. Between the innovations of low-cost fracking and more effective "proving" tools, this problem evaporated.
The moral of the story is that, where demand is high, capitalistic pressures means that, given enough time, we will always finds a way to open up more supply.
All this to say, be very critical of the assumptions made by whatever models you find, or doomsday claims you may come across. If agriculturalists are not concerned about this, the burden of evidence for us to be concerned should be rather high.
It's not that agriculture isn't hyper-efficient in certain locales. It's that it could be more efficient, if its operators cared to invest in making it so. Until demand rises relative to supply (from supply shortages), there isn't a price pressure to innovate on efficiency. This doesn't stop the "big farms" from innovating, because "big farm crops" are a race-to-the-bottom commodity business. That's why we get more corn, soy beans, whatever every year.
This is all without mentioning the places where agriculture is rather undeveloped, compared to the places you mention (many locales in Africa, central Asia, even the United States and Canada).
And at first glance it seems obvious that eating less meat, globally, is going to increase available calories/area; the fact that some areas are viable for livestock but not vegetables notwithstanding. About half of the area used for agriculture is used for livestock, if I read [2] correctly.
If we eventually manage to produce most of our meat demand from lab-grown meat this will likely free up enormous amounts of agriculture capacity.
Even if the lab process takes more energy, as long as producing the growth medium takes up less farmland that is a win towards the goal of having enough farmland to feed the world.
[1] https://www.greenbiz.com/article/how-mini-farms-can-yield-fo...
That's demonstrably untrue. Many organic methods use no pesticides at all because they use things like row covers or greenhouses which replaces them, or crop-timing to avoid source pests. Look at any farm inspired by Eliot Coleman methods, which can produce crops cost-competitively with conventional agriculture.
This is not really true, I think the problem is every country has a different definition and standards, sometimes multiple.
Considering the fact that so much of the farmlands are devoted to producing animal feed -- how about we as a species start eating less meats ? Make meats more expensive all around the world by imposing ... dare I say it .. caps on Carbon emission.
India and China are not going just stop using coal in the middle of their economic expansion. People are just not going to stop eating meat, especially as many 3rd world nations are just reaching the point they can afford it.
Only way we can come out ahead on this is scientifically devised cheaper and better alternatives.
I say that as someone who cut down on 95-99% of meat consumption to reduce my carbon footprint and because I feel terrible for the animals
Why not ? Both these countries need foreign investments and free trade with the industrialize world. Could the OECD countries not coerce them into capping carbon emissions ? As long as Carbon emission caps are fair -- that means accounting for the fact that the bulk of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere came from the OECD countries.
However, Carbon taxes is a four letter word in North America. Sometime back , I saw a pickup modified to emit black soot -- here in Ontario Canada of all the places.
https://thinkingagriculture.io/what-silicon-valley-doesnt-un...
But just because we are using all of it doesn't mean we need all of it or else starve. Vast quantities of crops are used to produce biofuel, or feed for livestock, or raw materials for other non-food products.
I get what you are saying, I just want to clarify: we can feed everybody now, but mostly with vegetables. But yes, shared resources like ocean fish are under too much pressure right now. I feel as though it will take a major worldwide collapse of the fishing industry before there is better enforcement and treaties.
E.g. I would expect shrimp, mussels, clams to not be fed processed wild catch, unlike salmon.
https://phys.org/news/2012-02-tiny-shrimp-giant-carbon-footp...
The farms are inefficient, producing just one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of shrimp for 13.4 square kilometers (five square miles) of mangrove
But Asian shrimp farms produce over a million tons of shrimp per year:
http://www.shrimpnews.com/FreeReportsFolder/NewsReportsFolde...
If it takes 13.4 square kilometers of mangrove per kilogram of shrimp, Asian shrimp farms would occupy more than
13.4 * 1000 * 1000000 = 13,400,000,000
(13.4 billion) square kilometers of mangrove. That's about 26 times the surface area of Earth.
In a happy coincidence, some of the healthiest fish are also some of the most sustainable fish.
This is a cherry picked argument, at least in the US, where "factory farms raise 99.9 percent of chickens for meat, 97 percent of laying hens, 99 percent of turkeys, 95 percent of pigs, and 78 percent of cattle" [1].
Besides, even in this ideal farm where the farmer treats the animals perfectly and lets them live long, fulfilling lives, they're still killing the animal at the end of the day. Hard to see how that is "treating [it] well".
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-end-factory-f_b_1...
If you believe that it is unethical to raise livestock with fulfilling lives and then kill them for meat, by all means do not eat meat. I disagree, but I accept that as a valid, reasonable position to hold. I think most people are more concerned with animal cruelty specifically, and also have a lot of difficulty switching to vegetarianism.
I've always thought less-than-ethical food products should be taxed more heavily, and the money should be used to subsidize the more ethical, healthier alternatives. Outright bans on certain product classes can be tremendously distortionary and have unintended side effects, but it's hard to imagine little pigouvian nudges being anything but beneficial to society.
Doesn't necessarily solve our problem here, but it might help the larger situation and with potentially bipartisan support (economic right positions rely on the consumer being able to make educated choices).
I absolutely agree with a carbon tax and a land tax to push the prices in the right direction. From what I recall, American meat is subsidized by the government, making it cheaper than anywhere else. I expect removing those subsidies would also have the support of anyone not bribed by the meat industry.
All too often, controversial opinions dominate the conversation because they get people talking. I think there's a lot we can do to improve things by working together across political lines.
Optimizing diet for land efficiency probably does not produce healthy diets. You can find strong evidence for this trade-off in the changes of average human health at the advent of agriculture.
Not even close. Did you forget to consider the inputs into meat?
If you want to check against someone else's math, here's a paper that claims we can increase global calorie availability by 70% by shifting crops grown for animal feed (40% of crops in USA btw) to crops grown for human consumption: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034...
This paper is about shifting animal corn to human corn, not about shifting animal corn to broccoli. Corn produces about 6 times as many calories per hectare as broccoli.
I chose broccoli because it is my favorite vegetable and I eat quite a lot of it.
[Citation needed]
I'll assume you're arguing in good faith, but this argument is a common straw man made by people who are against plant-based diets. In fact, the only case where you have a point is that the worst case for chocolate produces more emissions than the best case for beef [1]. Odds are that if you're eating beef in North America it comes from a factory farm [2], while people who advocate for plant-based diets are often for more sustainable farming practices too, and will try to buy chocolate/coffee/avocados/whatever in sustainable ways.
Finally, the most important point is that it's not an either/or proposition - you can be _both_ for eating less meat, and producing plant products in more sustainable ways.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46459714
[2] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-end-factory-f_b_1...
The vast majority of beef is grazed on lands incapable of supporting at a sustainable price point more value dense forms of agriculture. If those ranchers could sell you boutique sustainable tomatoes they would do so in a heartbeat (or as fast as they can given the fact that it's basically a career switch).
You get crops like soybeans and corn where the land will support that and less value dense crops (like beef and timber) in places it won't. You can grow other products on cattle grazing land but you won't be price competitive with the farmers on better land. The fact that this land is used for beef instead of some other crop is a reflection of how efficiently we use the better land. As vegetable product fillers make their way into lower and lower end beef products (as price, technology and consumer preference allows) the land used to farm beef will likely shrink from the least viable areas (the areas least suited for beef) with demand and/or be pushed out of the most viable areas (the areas most easily suited to other crops) by more value dense plant crops. Obviously there's some serious switching friction otherwise you'd see this play out with every little change in commodities prices.
And it wouldn't be the same 5% that we see with "almost vegans" today who argue "less but better" to only eat premium cuts while proudly announcing that they avoid all grinder meat. If you want to eat the steak, don't scoff at the sausage.
Back to grazing marginal lands, yeah, I'd also hate to see the animal species that have accompanied us throughout human history go extinct. But we're very far from that.
pvaldes, 2020
Some facts are so well stablished in human knowledge that there is not need to cite it. For example: "Some crops are more productive than other. Point".
We, humans know it since 10.000 years ago. Anybody can see it with their eyes. Not need to repeat what Aristotle would say about it.
Primary and secondary production, is a big fat chapter in any Ecology handbook. Any Plant physiology handbook will explain the differences between CAM and C4 plants
If nobody is trying to produce a natural sized cow sculpture made of vanille beans, there must be a reason.
So, your statement is true because you say that it's common knowledge that it's true?
> Primary and secondary production, is a big fat chapter in any Ecology handbook
OK, then kindly provide one of these ecology handbooks that proves your point
> If nobody is trying to produce a natural sized cow sculpture made of vanille beans, there must be a reason
What do you even mean by this?
Not, my statement is true BECAUSE is has been proven extensively and is common knowledge that it's true. There is a difference. There are extensive databases, plots and tables about how many food you can expect to produce from each organism by unit of time and area. Is the basis of a main branch of ecology: Trophic chains and energy.
To say than growing Soy is more efficient than to breed Polar bears is a repeated lie, trying to make simple things that aren't simple. Not. It depends on the ecosystem, context, temperature range, soil, and climate. And is the same with breeding cattle.
Maybe this is just me, but I would happily change my diet to be around 50% Soylent or other meal replacement if the cost was cheaper. Currently I eat around 2400 calories a day, with Soylent that costs me $20 a day. I can get Chipotle for ~$15 per day, and between the two Chipotle clearly wins on taste.
From what I can tell meal replacements are often far more environmentally friendly, there might be an environmental win here if the price drops.
You think we have an obesity crisis now? Wait until it's near mandatory to only eat things like cheap-edition soylent.
You can get the add-water-only version for much cheaper. In fact, you can get a day's worth of calories for about $10 even with better quality formulation competing products such as Huel 3.0 or Plenny Active. You literally scoop the powder into the provided bottle with the provided scoop they give you, fill it with water, shake it up for 30 seconds, and it's ready to drink.
A bit more of a fair comparison just in case anyone reading this is curious on the development of this space.
Soylent is too expensive. It's a very attractive solution for me but the price point is higher than real food. Soylent needs to be like $1 a meal, with super duper high protein, if it wants to compete with home cooking.
I can make a fine French dining quality 4-6 egg omelette, with a reheated beans and vegetables on the side, for like $2 a plate. A big plate, too.
A basic rice, beans, and green veg meal comes out to less than $0.50, and that's including some pork sausage to flavor the beans. I do gumbo occasionally and it's at about the same price.
If you have the time/space/ability to cook, you can eat quite well shockingly cheap, even in places with relatively high cost of living.
For me the key was to just ban myself from takeout, period, for about a year. It worked. My cooking is good enough now I prefer it to takeout, whereas when I was in my 20s I was a pretty typical tech bro that ate out every single meal.
I don't expect normal people to make their own puff pastry or cronuts by hand but I really do think everyone should try to bake their own bread at least once a year. Most people don't want to make their own kneaded bread because you have like 15-30 mins active labour plus about four hours waiting time (mixing, kneading, bulk fermentation, proofing, baking, cooling). But you can make three loaves at once, and freeze them. The time and labour involved in making three loaves is very close to making one. But most people would turn their nose up at freezing bread, as though it completely destroys the crumb and ruins it. But most people's instincts are wrong, once again. Bread freezes extremely well.
I was thinking that we really need to teach children how to be poor. Poor people need to cook and be smart about buying and storing their own food, but most people do not know how to do this. We spend so much time teaching children how to find a job in the most shallow way (how to write a resume, etc) but kids need help with knowing what to do when the economy is bad or they just can't find a good job, even if they are trying to. This sort of thing is political suicide because of national pride and this unshakable notion in the mainstream that people are poor because they are lazy or on drugs, their fault basically.
Anyways, I agree with you on all counts. It is shocking when I realized that eating well is actually pretty cheap. If only I learned that at a younger age.
But the other big thing for me is convenience. It takes maybe 10-15 minutes for me to prep say 5 lbs of meat this way, depending how elaborate my marinade/base is. Then you just put it in the sous and ignore it for a couple hours. I can use the sous to thaw a frozen portion very fast with no worries about food safety or overshooting and overcooking. Past that making a plate is just getting the rice cooker going and then again maybe 10 minutes of active time to bring it all together with some fresh produce.
The convenience of all this is what really clinched it for me. At this point it'd take more active time for me to go get takeout.
I've tried bread a couple times, but so far all I've learned is I'm not a great baker. I intend to make another stab at it though.
You kind of have to embrace the random factor in bread making and develop a feel for it. A cake recipe is a far more mechanical process, just follow the instructions and it will work. Bread is more chaotic for sure (like, maybe it's a very humid day and your flour is heavier with water than usual) but it's not like pulling a slot machine.
My first few loaves were mediocre, some were bad, but after about 5-10 it came together. And now, like I wrote earlier, I make money baking. Anyone can do it, just treat it like a weird little hobby with no pressure at first.
I have the Ken Forkish book. I'm not his biggest fan based on personal interactions, though I'm honest enough to admit he makes amazing bread. But I pretty clearly need to start with something a little more low key.
The thought of educated people eating crap like Soylent and paying for it, when they could be eating really good food, which completely uneducated people all over the world manage to cook easily, is quite upsetting to me.
Eat rice, beans, potato, tomato, cereals. That will be an order of magnitude cheaper while tastier.
One-size fits all meal approaches need to keep in mind that individuals have different needs and restrictions.
At the moment I have 54938 calories of food on hand (not counting tomatoes, lettuce, and onions that I do not track because I only use them as sandwich toppings or for small salads where they contribute negligible calories).
This cost $171.44. That works out to $7.49 for 2400 calories.
Most of this is heat and serve stuff. E.g., there are some mini deep dish pizzas, some frozen breakfast sandwiches (think Sausage McMuffin clones), Hormel "Compleats" entrees, instant rice cups, add water and nuke mashed potatoes, canned soup, and such. Another big group is things for sandwiches: bread, sliced meats, condiments. An assortment of things that don't require any cooking or prep, such as protein bars and potato chips. Finally, ham steaks, liquid egg substitute, and frozen mixed vegetables.
It turns out I'm spending somewhere between 1/2 to 1/3 of what I spent on food pre-COVID. The interesting thing is that it is not a hassle. I always knew I could eat a lot cheaper if I cooked at home, but that also took a lot more time. But for most of what I'm keeping now, cooking is really just putting it in the microwave or in a frying pan for a while. That doesn't really take much time at all.
When COVID is done I will go back to getting take out--but only now and then for variety. I don't think it will ever go back to being my main food source.
I will probably gradually add more things made at home from lower level ingredients, which should bring the cost down some more, and can probably be done without adding much more time.
I feel already bad when i order food twice a month.
It even never occurred to me to do takeout all the time. I have already feel guilty when i see all the packaging for take out and regret it at the moment.
I always cook more than I need and always have leftovers. This is a great way to cut down on the amount of time spent in the kitchen (I care more about the time lost than the money saved). You don't have to immediately eat the leftovers, you can freeze most of it and rotate what you made a week or two ago to keep some variety.
Similar international agreements have worked relatively well to cut down on things like chemical weapons and anti-personnel mines.
We go through this whole process and the result is half as much fish as we started with, and it's worse for you.
Salmon farming, for example, can be incredibly efficient - Norwegian salmon farms typically get 1 kg of fish for every 1.15-1.2kg of feed. That's an amazing conversion factor.
That said, there are serious welfare concerns with fish farming. Even in Norway, which has some of the highest standards in the world, sea lice are a huge problem, and the mechanical and chemical treatments used are horrible. Another issue is the welfare of "cleaner fish", which are places in cages to eat lice from salmon - AFAIK there are still no regulations around their welfare, and mortality rates are shocking[0]
https://sciencenorway.no/animal-welfare-fish-farming-salmon-...
Anchovies, sardines and other palm-sized, schooling fish are caught in the ocean and processed into fishmeal and oil to feed to other fishes and crustaceans that are raised in aquatic farms around the world.
https://www.washington.edu/news/2018/06/14/key-ocean-fish-ca...
Every year, millions of tons of wild fish, like sardines and anchovies, are caught and processed into fishmeal and fish oil, which is used to make feed for farm-raised species.
https://www.seafoodwatch.org/ocean-issues/aquaculture/wild-f...
What about plant-based diets? That doesn't seem too SF to me
The easiest way to reduce meat/fish consumption is to make the cost reflect all the externalities.
Now that is SF
But once they have seen movies like "we feed the world" they do care at least a bit.
Facts don't really change anything when they're easy to ignore.
Anecdotally the worst gastrointestinal problems I have ever had was on whatever version of the standard American diet I was served when visiting the states as a 20-something year old. I couldn't shit for 10 days...
I recently had a lengthy discussion with some friends about their support of a solidary organic farm, where you pay a flat fee per month and get a box of whatever they have in that week. It's really hard for most people to understand that things like these are not sustainable and that it's purely a luxury product. Terms like "organic", "no GMO", "local" sound sustainable as you imagine going back to "the good old days", but it's just impossible to feed the world. Even after I quoted some facts about the needed land usage for organic, it was not really possible to convince them, that it's not sustainable.
If anybody has some good articles / studies about sustainable farming for the future, I would love to read them.
There's "sustains the land," which is food that can be grown this way indefinitely, which is what most people mean when they say "sustainable agriculture." To be more specific, "meeting society's present food and textile needs, without compromising the ability for current or future generations to meet their needs."
You're saying sustainable as in "can sustain the future diets of 10 billion people."
They don't map 1:1.
TBH I think you're right. "Sustainable agriculture" isn't scalable to 2050 populations.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-good-l...
They are successful but are not capable of replacing 100% of the grocery needs. And vegetables only appear in the summer and can be subject to infestations or random die offs... although there is significant canning that takes place throughout the summer for the winter months. Growing a diverse amount vegetables to support 25-50 people is surprisingly more complex than raising livestock (unless you just want to eat lots of zucchini and squash ;-).
However, there are many well documented small co-ops in Portland that I can refer you to if you want to ask them questions. These are very small farms, and in many cases people buy their shares of well in advance, and some have even become store-fronts rather than pickups.
Here are examples of places within a 15 minute drive of where I live:
When I used to eat meat I would buy half a cow with some friends friends. You could go visit the cow throughout the year:
https://www.foodbevg.com/US/Scappoose/393417489771/All-Natur...
This place exploded in popularity in the past 7 years. It used to be two guys and you would order chickens months in advance and pick them up a day after the slaughter, now I can just walk into their store and they have a growing staff:
https://www.marionacres.com/order
Similarly:
https://www.kookoolanfarms.com/
This dairy was a kickstarter, and I get milk, cream, and eggs from them year round, its fantastic.
Lastly, Sauvie Island just outside portland has an enormous farm community where half of the year one can purchase all manner of fruits vegetables through multiple farmers market stands.
Again though: it is only for part of the year, year round veggies are damn hard without large industrial apparatus. Unless you like pickled things.
It can be done, but it takes a village. Seriously.
Based on my travels to other countries, local farmers markets are simply called "markets" and there is nothing unusual about them. In the USA, small local markets and co-ops are a fringe thing because we are fed almost entirely by industrial farming through vast supply chains that terminate at enormous multi-purpose grocery stores.
I may have a few facts wrong, but this consolidation started after WWII, and local food co-ops were considered liberal operations because it was "liberal hippies" who were opposed to the industrialization of food.
Seeing extremely far right subsets embracing what has generally been considered far left behavior is just amusing.
Hope this clarifies!
Surprising to me that year-round veggies is so hard even with modern methods/greenhouses.
You are correct: it is not so hard with modern methods, but none of the small communities I know of (15-50 people) have invested in a greenhouse of sufficient size. And even the local farms here don't have greenhouses, not that I am aware of. That seems odd to me, perhaps I am missing something because that seems unlikely now that I think about it...
Fortunately, these two tend to cancel out. As a country gets wealthier, its birthrate tends to decline. Some of the most developed countries have shrinking populations.
Those 11 billion people won't use the minimum amount of resources needed to sustain themselves (which is a very low quality of life), but use double or even triple than that.
More supply solves nothing.
In 1950 there were 2.5 billion humans, today there are 7.7 billion, but by the end of the century there will only be ~11 billion.
And at that point, most humans alive will be working age or older (approximately ~3.5 working age adults for every U15).
A lack of human population growth will be one of the defining economic issues this century, with a chance at unfortunately solving the issue of rising incomes at the same time.
Should have left out the income quip at the end in hindsight!
I've tried to go on vegetarian diets before, but I just can't do it. I always feel weak and just generally "not right". I don't eat a ton of meat, but I find it really difficult to abstain 100%.
An Impossible Burger, however, completely satisfies my cravings for meat. It's not just that it tastes like meat, but I feel sated after eating an Impossible or Beyond Burger in a way I just don't feel eating a normal veggie burger.
But everything the governments do right now incentivizes overpopulation.
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/environment-90-per...
https://www.businessinsider.com/great-barrier-reef-could-dis...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2020/02/24/70-90-per...
The effect of this is that 500 million pacific islanders will be forced to flee to Southeast Asia as their primary food source dies, which will lead to widespread political instability and possibly war. Not to mention that since 25% of sea life depends on reefs, their death will have catastrophic ripple effects throughout the ocean.
All due to runaway global warming acidifying the ocean with CO2. This was well-understood and warned about decades ago (I learned about it as a kid in the 1980s).
I sure wish a tech billionaire would do something about this. Their inaction on countless fronts, in fact their complacency in undermining progress on environmental causes in global politics, is one of the thousand reasons I got out of tech.
I would expect ocean acidification would actually get worse, since the effects would mimic the 'Year without a Summer' so people would be releasing more carbon to heat their homes.
How the heck did you come up with this number? The entire population of Oceania excluding Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea is 3 million.
Also, they're quite developed countries and to the relatively small extent their food consumption is fish, it comes from trade and commercial fishing, not subsistence fishing, so their food supply will be no more impacted than any other asian country. And even that impact will look more like more seafood coming from fish farms as commercial fishing becomes less viable, as we've seen in China.
There are people, predominantly in the pacific islands proper, who rely on subsistence fishing and the decline of fish stocks will be hugely disruptive for them. It's still a big tragedy, but the number is more like a couple hundred thousand. I don't think it helps the debate to exaggerate by three orders of magnitude.
"...will be forced to flee Southeast asia"
OP says it right there in the same sentence you quoted...
There are significant conflicts over water (https://reliefweb.int/report/world/editor-s-pick-10-violent-...). I'd expect those to extend to food too, and be acute in some regions.
I couldn't reply to the other poster (nogabebop23) that was making the point that they don't depend on reefs, but their point is moot because this is a global issue with different impacts at each latitude.
The term Pacific Islander [1] seems to not include the Philippines and Indonesia, as these islands are generally considered to be part of South East Asia [2]. One logical connection is that the Philippines and Indonesia are tectonically on the Asian crust [3], while the islands to the east are on the oceanic crust.
Thus the original statement of 500 million people fleeing to southeast asia makes geographically no sense, but I guess the intent of the people of Indonesia, Philippines etc. being cut off of seafood remains clear.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Islander
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asia
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Ocean#/media/File:Paci...
I was trying to make the point that the influx of refugees from Pacific island nations will destabilize regions like Korea and Vietnam which have already seen such terrible conflict. India's going to be underwater, so there's going to be a northward migration of something like 500 million people from there and elsewhere.
The endgame is that those countries will likely be communist and a mix of non-christian religions. So the US seems to be positioning itself as pro-Russia and anti-China in a divide-and-conquer strategy. I think that's shortsighted, because the 21st century won't have 20th century politics. I'd rather see our attention turn towards not screwing over the developing countries that provide our goods and services. We could like, trade with them rather than bomb them. Admittedly, I'm probably misreading this, and also don't want to detract from environmental discussion.
I've noticed in tech that a common hope that people in tech hold is that "the billionaires", in their infinite wisdom and generosity, will pull magical solutions out of their hats and save us all. Like you mention later, yeah, right.
> one of the thousand reasons I got out of tech
Not an option I've considered much, but it's almost tempting.
I think its more that they have the means. Cant get anything done on a large scale without lots of moolah
You can, but it requires collective action. But in order to have collective action, you need to win the propaganda war. I'm not sure that lots of moolah at this point can win the propaganda war against climate denialism.
If we take all the wealth of the top 100 billionaries and put it towards the US annual budget, it wouldn't fund it for more than a year or two also and then you'd soon be out of billionaires as you go down the list.
Governments are the real 'wealthy' organizations out there.
I'm not saying that governments don't need to act, just pointing out that the motivations of the wealthy may not be what you expect.
At the extreme of wealth, an appropriately diversified portfolio takes both options into account. If you have $1 Billion and think there's a .1% chance that society will collapse soon and make your money worthless, you're perfectly justified in spending up to $1million to protect against that contingency.
With today's rampant lobbying and propaganda driven news, that's a bit of a moot point. When critical questions are asked of those in power, they're dismissed as asking nasty questions and saying it's fake news. The propaganda is also created to keep citizens fighting against themselves rather than those in power. It's a losing position from a citizens point of view. Either the politicians have to willfully change things themselves, or you need to play the waiting game until the country deteriorates enough until it sparks revolts like in Belarus.
Unfortunately, the US has endured a multi-decade war against the bureaucracies that sparked the Interstate Highway system, the Internet, and countless other achievements.
Doesn't an increase in water temperature release CO2 from the water, because warm water binds less CO2 than warm water? I remember this as one of the many serious effects of accerlating global warming (more CO2 in the atmosphere heats up global temperatures, thereby heats up ocean water, which releases even more CO2).
As CO2 acidifies water shouldn't global warming thus basify the oceans?
Wikipedia about CO2 [1] states that ocean absorbed CO2 from burned fossil fuels. While CO2 from fossil fules is a driver of global warming, the act of global warming itself should actually counteract the acidification of the oceans.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonic_acid#Role_of_carbonic...
- Which industries (and organizations) are you still in at this point?
Right now I am working with a guy in the solar industry, doing handyman work around his house until we come out of quarantine. It's hard work physically, but I find my mental health has recovered and my motivation and work capacity have never been higher.
I'm basically living the ending of the movie Office Space and searching for spiritual meaning. I donate plasma to make rent, and am looking into apps like Bacon (Uber for hourly jobs) as a way to transition out of obligation-based employment. Work should be a straight-up time-for-money exchange. Taking advantage of our work ethic and patriotism, saddling us to someone else's vision of meaningful work, is one of the great travesties undermining the American Dream. I learned this the hard way moving furniture for 3 years in my early 20s to support my web business because "someone has to do it". No, someone doesn't have to do it. Stand up for yourself and leave if your job stinks. Let the free market adjust wages to what they should be, double or quadruple what they are now. Don't get suckered into indentured servitude.
You are very much dependent.
Whats the difference between me, working in tech, having a good job, great money and being able to put everything i earn in my own land and become independent with something between 40 and 50 versus you? Stoped working, doing small jobs barely making it, not having any money for any sustainable development on your own?
If you are not doing it, everyone else will do.
Either you understand and accept that the world is going to look different in 50 years and you are ready for it with the minimum footprint you need or you go more extreme to try to change something.
And even if you do know that you might not change the world, if you would sacrifice for the society, the money you would earn in tech would allow you, as a single person, to funnel the money from the economy where you want to. You would do more good then tthe other person who is now doing your job and who is just spending and consuming it somehow.
And just to clarify another thing: In tech you are able to go to your boss and work half time and even then you would have more possibilities then in any other job.
I do regret not following my instincts and going all-in on the stock market and Bitcoin, etc though. I had $20,000 in the bank after a lucrative contract when Bitcoin was $10. I've been following AAPL since it was $12 per share after the dot bomb. Conservatively, I'd have at least a bazillion dollars had I simply not listened to everyone who talked me out of investing.
For anyone reading this, if you want to change the world, it's time to pull your money out of your investments and make large anonymous donations to groups with a good track record on the environment (or human rights, or whatever floats your boat). This pump and dump scam that the global elite are doing to inflate the stock market is about to pop. Don't give them your winnings. Pull out now and do something positive with your money.
I started this by talking to people, changing my lifestyle etc. just to get more and more depressed about this topic.
Politics are not fast enough, there are enough people who really don't care and it doesn't feel anyone is starting it.
Im jumping between "saving the planet together" vs. "buying a small plot of land, building a small house on it, putting solar panels and solar thermy on the roof, buying/building a water reserva, building a storehouse and doing indoor farming and living my life until i'm dead".
My mental image of 'men eat meat' has changed the last 10 years for eating less etc. but then you talk to someone else and its the same simple/stupid talk as usual.
I sure wish VOTERS would "do something" about this, where "something" = vote for the party/parties that actually champion or at least acknowledge the importance of dealing with AGW/CO2 increasing vs actively denying and supporting continuing the current anti-free market policies destroying so much future beauty and potential. This should have been so straightforward, we want net neutral CO2 ASAP and then net negative as soon as feasible, so all that's needed is to legislate that emitting a ton of CO2 (or equivalent) is priced at the cost of rapid industrial removal of a ton of CO2+margin. We could just make all our energy usage net neutral in a matter of months/years by finally establishing a Free Market there and then let humanity sort out the best way to reduce the cost of that. But instead it's a mixture of full denial or, even more frustrating, so-called "greens" bitching about other people's luxury energy usage and engaging in worthless moralizing bullshit about $Cause_Of_The_Day (like Ebil Big Tech) rather then just working to deal with the problem as efficiently as possible and focusing moral arguments purely on the harm of AGW.
>Their inaction on countless fronts, in fact their complacency in undermining progress on environmental causes in global politics, is one of the thousand reasons I got out of tech.
I'd say the inaction on countless fronts of people like you who just shove all responsibility off onto nameless godkings rather then actually internalize that democracy means we're responsible as well has been a far bigger threat. Tech has been relatively green, and far more active at green efforts then most industries. It's ludicrous to see you pinning so much on "tech billionaires" vs, say, oil/coal billionaires.
It's probably how a lot of democrats think in red states.
One thing I'd tell your wife is that down ticket races are very important, particularly state legislatures. I know my district will be carried by a dem, but that doesn't mean there aren't distinctions between which dem I want.
You really think that making business tens or hundreds of times more expensive to take part in will just solve the problem, rather than businesses going under and simply not being able to exist anymore? You don't think any other country will capitalize on this, emit all they want, and sell the products we can't make? You think we'll be able to tariff that enough that it makes up for it?
> the cost of rapid industrial removal of a ton of CO2+margin.
It's not like this is actually being done at scale yet. Do we really think gigantic fans and energy-intensive machinery for CO2 capture are going to work? Shouldn't that energy be being used to replace coal / gas / fossil fuel electricity production first and foremost, and battery (/battery-like technologies, like pumping water behind a dam and other potential-energy schemes) rather than burning the energy off?
Doesn't it make more sense to look at ways of improving the reefs, like making artificial reefs with geo-engineering projects, iron fertilization, etc? Don't plants do a better job of capturing carbon? Maybe we should embrace rapidly-growing invasive alpha species like Japanese Knotweed, Kudzu, etc. and just mow it on down and let it regrow? Shouldn't we spend more money on massive-scale tree planting, soil redistribution, and anti-desertification efforts that we actually know how to do at scale, rather than some pie-in-the-sky unproven carbon capture mechanisms that can somehow only be fueled by strangling everyone's productivity to an unreasonable extent?
Point is, voting relies heavily on educated populace. I am not certain we have it now. Maybe we need to reconsider kings ( today's billionaires ) and hope they are not into torture..
Putting the power into few hands is extremely dangerous. I think the ideal situation is pretty close to what we've got now - trust most people to choose the smartest people in the room, then ignore most people and listen to those people. We just need to work on flushing out decades of corruption that seeped into the system.
One big problem is, if you are on top, life can be relatively great even in utter catastrophe, at least when looked through optic of usual sociopath/psychopath that usually end up on top. It can actually help if your goals are perverted enough. No real motivation to fight for the environment.
On other hand, wishing for corruption to be magically removed 'because it would be great and we really need it now' is so naive its painful. We're steadily heading in opposite direction, there is regulatory capture, US foreign policies are run by war equipment manufacturers, and current president is a topic on its own.
To sum it up, we're fucked, our kids are fucked so much more - this hurts pretty badly. Enlightened AI might be solution, but I would expect it wouldn't be done neutral, and anyway that's a pipe dream currently.
I'm not suggesting that we can wish corruption away - I'm not even trying to imply that doing it will be easy. I just think it's the only way to return to sane governance. There are some ways we could increase voter representation like IRV & abolishing the electoral college. Increased representation makes it harder for crooks to stay in power, but even getting that through is a struggle (otherwise we would've done if when we realized it was better than what we have now).
And, in the meantime, we need to work with what we've got.
One of the biggest problems is that the damage caused by reducing emissions falls disproportionately on the poor voters in developed countries. Look at what caused the yellow jacket protests in France -- a hike in diesel taxes. People are already in a mood to protest economic inequality in a general sense, and fighting climate change will make that inequality worse. It's not going to fly in the current political climate, not even in the EU where people are generally more sympathetic to the climate problem than elsewhere.
The outcome of social unrest caused by unpopular climate policy will be the reversal of that policy. Therefore any attempt to solve climate change that leads to social unrest will be unproductive.
I'm increasingly convinced that geoengineering is the only way to ameliorate the effects of climate change.
I agree with human psychology being a limiting factor here, but I think there are also ways we can work with it, by saying that life quality doesn't have to go down or can even improve, rather than the current all or nothing approach.
We will pay the money it takes to protect our cities from floods and cool our buildings and deal with the other impacts, and people in poor countries will be left to deal with the problem on their own. That's not what should happen, but that's what will happen.
That's weird, because it's the very rich and industrial processes that actually emit most of the greenhouse gasses.
That said, I have to disagree with you on where to place blame. The vast majority of us (6 billion at least) are just running the rat race to provide for our families. Let me be explicitly clear about this: a person's responsibility to change the world is at least proportional to the resources available to them.
I just looked, and each part per million of CO2 represents 7.82 gigaton of CO2. So if we conservatively say that the industrial revolution has taken us from 300 ppm to 400 ppm, then that extra 100 ppm represents 782 gigatons of CO2. There are talks of a global $50 carbon tax credit for each ton of CO2 sequestered. So that represents an externality cost on the environment and our health from existing CO2 levels of $39.1 trillion. That's twice the US GDP.
Now, there are pushes to get back to 350 ppm from groups like 350.org. So that would cost something like $20 trillion, roughly the US GDP, or our national debt. In fact, a real argument can be made that the $21 trillion in misplaced funding from the Pentagon audit, the US national debt and CO2 cost to our environment are all connected. We had that money, but the debt was created so that we couldn't put it towards goals like environmentalism. This was all planned, starting before 1980 when Ronald Reagan took office and symbolically got us to start looking backwards by doing things like removing the solar panels from the White House that Jimmy Carter had installed.
Now that we know all this, I don't think that we can settle for anything less than a tech billionaire opening the floodgates on carbon sequestration. We need real solar-powered devices that take excess energy and store it in things like calcium carbonate and graphite. It looks like it currently costs at least $100 to capture 1 ton of CO2 directly from the atmosphere. At 10 cents equivalent for solar power, that's 1000 kwh per ton. That's the amount of electricity a house uses in a month. I'm having trouble finding exact values for these numbers, but these are the orders of magnitude we should be thinking in terms of.
https://cleantechnica.com/2016/01/19/carbon-capture-expensiv...
https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2018/11/27/carbon-dioxide-remo...
These numbers are so staggering, that there's literally nothing we can do on a personal level to change them. We need powerful people to think beyond quarterly profits and start doing something tangible with their money.
Which is what I would do if I had won the internet lottery.
Edit: typos and I stumbled onto this, can someone in-the-know please update us on the state of carbon tax credits in the US: https://qz.com/1203803/donald-trump-signed-a-landmark-bill-t...
Edit 2: Yes I'm calling any tech billionaire who does nothing good with their money a poser.
I generally agree with you on a lot of points, but I felt that this unsubstantiated portion took a lot away from the other parts.
If we use Hanlon's razor and attribute the rich and powerful's incompetence on this issue to stupidity instead of malice, then forgive me if I don't find that comforting.
Climate change and policy around it, due to its economic implications, is complex and hard to do without costing lots of middle class people their life styles.
We need to reduce our numbers, and sustain that. Or embrace Musk's ideas.
Many people and groups pushing for changes to combat climate change want to change much more about society than just how much carbon dioxide is emitted. They want to use the fear of climate catastrophe to push other political agendas that the majority of people in the US do not support. If the world had just focused on the fact that rising CO2 would cause ocean acidification, which is a very simple and easy to understand consequence of rising CO2 levels, I think the world could have come together to decide on an acceptable level and make a plan to get to that level. A similar global proposal was done with CFCs when ozone depletion became an issue. Making the issue more scary by saying the world is going to heat up and everyone is going to die, using very complicated climate models, is a lot harder to prove. Many people are not going to be convinced, as we have seen.
Given current costs (check the Lazard decks) and likely trends, it's pretty possible that nuclear would lose out to renewables + storage + CO2 capture even with a global carbon tax forcing CO2 neutrality.
I also don't think it helps our cause to cast all opposition to nuclear power as ignorant paranoia. While the impact was thankfully minimal, Fukushima should have never happened in the first place. I personally changed my views on how much we can trust governments to properly regulate this infrastructure as a result.
Basically it's left me hoping that some of the more novel new nuclear concepts work out. I'm definitely cheering for NuScale.
This is, of course, a long and complicated topic, not very amenable to forum discussion. Maybe it was a good idea that nuclear power was not developed, not because it was physically dangerous, but because giving the human race that much more access to power/energy at that point in history may have had a bad outcome. We may have needed slow down the industrial revolution's exponential advance for a bit.
So while I agree with you about how "new nuclear" could be dramatically safer, I still have concerns about how this stuff is regulated and operated. It's also why I'm in particular gung ho about small reactors, as there even if the risk estimates are messed up, the scale itself alievates many concerns.
Your final point/speculation is an interesting one. I've not heard this perspective before but it does seem plausible to me.
The only way a tech billionaire can stop it is to facilitate the development of low carbon energy sources and industrials.
This is literally part of Tesla's mission. There are huge numbers of investors pushing hard on CCS, battery, solar, wind, grid etc.
Biotech and ag-tech are pushing hard on technology to lower the carbon footprint of faming.
And industrials are looking hard are low carbon steel, aluminum and cement manufacturing (huge co2 footprint here).
The climate change freight train is in motion. Technology is the ONLY WAY OUT.
Err, what? My understanding is ocean acidification is a contributing factor, but that the primary cause of coral bleaching is the warming directly, not acidification [0].
I've argued this point before here but I don't believe that will happen by 2050 at all.
For several reasons, not the least of which is there are fossilized reefs from epochs with much much higher C02 levels (and temperatures) then we will see any time in the near future.
I was in Mexico last year. On the reefs. Diving. They were in good shape with lots of young corals and very little die off. Sunscreen and human activity are a threat.
Not getting into the whole debate on warming (I believe something is happening) but this coral die off claim I do not believe at all. Particularly the 30 years bit.
And while I'm glad you had fun in Mexico and what you saw there looked healthy, that doesn't somehow erase the bleaching we see on reefs globally. That the coral is dying, rapidly, is not under contention. It's a clearly known fact.
No need to single out one group of people. We vote for shitty politicians, we give money to shitty corporations, we form tribes of "us vs them", we put more children on this world condemning (putting a human on the planet is worst thing you can do to it in terms of pollution), we don't do our part "because corporations are the biggest polluters" and think that absolves us of any evil. We are inactive. We'd rather shift the blame than do anything. We are complacent. We are all complicit. We are all to blame.
If the world is full of non-evil people, then why aren't they keeping the evil people in check?
Game is typically much healthier as a food source than domesticated animals; this includes wild-caught fish vs. farm-raised fish.
Not in meaningful quantity. It would bet that the median time since a typical Westerner last had wild mammal could be measured in months if not years.
Enough wild meat to introduce a new Virus and pandemic though.
I expect the statement in born from the misconception that "game" meat as found in restaurants and for sale is from wild animals, when it is actually farmed.
If we assume that about the bison and venison I have had over the years, it has been at least over a decade for me. Not sure if we farm muskrats.
At least in germany.
My father is also a hunter.
Its looks like this: https://www.google.com/search?q=jaeger+deutschland&tbm=isch&...
How many species of fish will go extinct before we figure this out. Fish used to be very common(look at the stories of the colonists coming to North America). Also, people are still eating bluefin tuna, it's endangered.
Algae, which can be used for many things - human consumption, farmed animal/fish feed and even fuel - can also be farmed sustainably.
I think we urgently need global legislation and enforcement of rules, as well as satellite monitoring to stop overfishing. World leaders need to work together on this.
Marine ecosystems may not come back once collapsed and that would be a huge disaster. I hope there is some kind of self-limiting dynamic here where industrial fishing becomes unprofitable, but we avoid extinctions and total collapse of ecosystems - but I'm not sure that's the case.
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/consumers-eating-feces-taint...
That would require a world government. Not likely to happen and not something I would want to happen for the various potential negative side effects.
It is already very hard to control our national governments.
International treaties and boycotting and embargos of violaters, maybe yes, but currently the trend is into more confrontation and not collaboration.
Federal-level animal welfare standards are lacking. Welfare in the US standards are well below that of Europe. Pigs, for example, still often live their short life in stalls so small they can't even turn around - by comparison, the practice of using these "sow stalls" was banned in the UK before the turn of the century. Additionally, the use of antibiotics and hormones is very high.
I support both.
Arctic Char: http://seafood.edf.org/arctic-char
US Farmed Tilapia: http://seafood.edf.org/tilapia
US Farmed Catfish: http://seafood.edf.org/catfish
Basically, avoid any fish farmed in Asia, as there are no environmental regulations on those.
Of course this isn't true of all fish, tilapia being the prime example of a commonly eaten herbivorous fish. And shellfish, being filter feeders, are very easy to farm and actually tend to be beneficial for the surrounding ecosystem.
EDIT: interestingly, according to https://ourworldindata.org/seafood-production in terms of tonnage the amount of wild-caught fish has remained relatively steady since 1990 while the amount of farmed fish has steadily increased and is now more than 50% of our source of fish. There's actually some very interesting data in that link
* The feed used for norwegian salmon is about 70-80% plant based, so the fish is a net producer of marine protein. The majority is soy, and the industry is trying to transition to sustainable feed ingredients such as insects (see Protix) and micro algae for EPA/DHA (See veramaris)
* The farmed salmon does not contain any contaminents over allowed limits and they do frequent tests (see https://sjomatdata.hi.no/#/seafood/1577)
* The indsutry is beginning to transition from traditional net-pen farming to offshore, land-based and into cell-based and plant-based production, thus also getting production closer to market and spread over areas that may be less susceptible to pollution.
We take extreme care not to flush our own sewers into the sea, yet happily permit salmon farms with the equivalent fertilizing effect of a town of 25000 having all their toilets flush everything out on the shore.
One of the concepts is closed-containment farming, where the fish are kept in a sealed enclosure. The fish can be kept below the sea lice level, and all waste can be collected. The downsides are cost, failure modes, and welfare (the fish have less area than open-pen near-shore farms, and will never see sunlight, for example).
The last years they have hovered around 95% being very good or good. So statistically you are very wrong. But sure there are some localities that have bad conditions, and those should be closed and new localities should be opened for those farmers. Such as offshore localities when the technology is mature. Many smart people are trying to figure that out with strong scientific backing, but the report from havmerden is avaliable to read if you understand norwegian
In norway there are many environmental institutions following the state of the fjords, so I wouldn't be too concerned.
They are _still_ using hydrogen peroxide to combat lice for example, despite it's effect on shrimp and plankton.
I am all for farming fish, but on land in closed systems.
The feed conversion rates that Norway is achieving are, frankly, incredible. But the thing that troubles me the most is welfare. Sea lice remain a huge problem, and the mechanical and chemical treatments that are used hurt, damage and kill fish. There are also a shocking number of accidents that can kill millions if fish at a time - for example, chemical treatments gone wrong, or pens not deep enough so millions die from overheating. Then there is the welfare of cleaner fish, with reports of mortality rates over 40%.
Outside of Norway, I've seen some absolutely horrible cage conditions, with the netting completely fouled and the water thick with waste, and damaged, dead and malformed fish everywhere.
While there has been a lot of investment in offshore farming technology, the capex costs are huge, and it will still be some time before we see success at scale. It also comes with it's own risks - I think it was perhaps Havfarm that recently had an incident where the whole platform tipped to the side.
I also find the recent investments into land-based farming are troubling. For all the problems, at least with sea-based farming the fish live in part of their natural environment and have some semblance of space.
IIRC, for land-based farming to even be viable, they need something like 5x more biomass per cubic metre than sea-based farms. Thousands of fish are packed into a tiny area, and literally swim round in circles all day and night, never seeing anything other than the thousands of other fish that surround them, and if they're lucky the occasional glimpse of the side of the raceway.
How do you feel about welfare of farmed salmon, and in particular land-based farms?
First off, you are absolutely correct in fish welfare being a huge issue. I am in no way condoning the current practices that lead to an average of 20% mortalities in the sea phase in norway, and around 5-10% in regions such as tasmania not affected by sea lice.
Cleaner fish is also a worrying issue with very questionable fish health pactices. Fortunately there are stronger regulations being implemented, that will help remedy some of these issues. One trivial example is that farmers are now required to feed the cleaner fish, whereas they were not before.
I agree that you can absolutely see some horribel looking cages and fish with health issues. The industry explanation is that the percentage that is sick will most likely swim toward the surface and thus give the wrong impression. I say, increase the omega 3 from 1% to 3% and imrpove the quality of the smolt we will surely see benefits.
both offshore and land-based have their issues. net-pen is incredibly efficient and beautiful in its simplicity when it works and the locality is optimal. Salmon will be reared at maximum 25kg/m3, but on land they wanna do 50kg+/m3 to be profitable. They wont do more than 100, as you will see decreasing fish health. For comparison tilapia is known to be farmed at 600kg/m3 in some regions.
Land-based farming will be interesting for sure, and a compeltely new set of issues regarding pathogens and Co2, H2S, NH4 problems. I'm sure they will figure it out. Atlantic Sapphire sure has a lot riding on figuring fish health on land out. Not very promising with the big emergency slaughter the other week.
let me know if you wanna have a chat at some point, always intersting to look at the industry with different eyes.
And the rest of it.
A few month ago we were in a nice restaurant, my wife got a non meat dish and i got a meat dish (i also order non meat dishes it just happend that time)
The waiter told me exactly what meat i had and for my wife he said 'the vegetarian dish'. No its not the vegetarian dish. It has a name and its tasty.
"The orange roughy is notable for its extraordinary lifespan, attaining over 200 years."
"Orange roughy is fished almost exclusively by bottom trawling. This fishing method has been heavily criticized by environmentalists for its destructive nature."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027277141...
Fishery biomass trends of exploited fish populations in marine ecoregions, climatic zones and ocean basins
It's a journal called Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science.
It seems to me that we don't have a clear concept of sustainable commercial fishing looks like (with regards to wild capture). Thankfully, it seems Aquaculture is on the rise to offset increasing demand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishing_industry
According to the article, we know the optimal sustainable take down to the percent. The failure is in getting any nation to adhere to limits.
Only a market-driven solution will be viable. We need to find sustainable alternatives that are better than the foods they replace. Just like we need electric cars that are better than internal combustion engines.
https://thinkingagriculture.io/a-marketplace-for-carbon-and-...
That's already happening though. Meat eaters still don't seem to care. I'm a recent vegetarian and the food I eat now tastes better, is often more nutritious, and is easier to make.
The better alternatives are here. Oat milk! Wow! Have you tried it? I knocked vegan cheese forever because it sucked. But you know what? They are starting to make some that is better than some 'real' cheese. Indian food. Baked/BBQ tofu is amazing.
I've had veggie burgers in CA and WA that beat a 'regular' burger by a mile. Try Souley Vegan in Oakland for one. Wowza. Better than any meat burger I've ever had.
Not all vegetarian food is sustainable, I know. But it's better. I'm vegetarian for the taste more than anything really. It's not a sacrifice!
I think a lot meat eaters would be absolutely shocked at how delicious and healthy a lot of vegetarian food is now.
> Only a few will make personal sacrifice for the common good.
??? I didn't make a 'personal sacrifice' to become vegetarian. It's a literal animal sacrifice every meal the other way around! Vegetarian food isn't a sacrifice. What the world needs is to convert more to veggies is to squash the idea that becoming vegetarian means making a sacrifice.
Are you vegetarian? I chose to, only because I want mankind to live on this planet for a long time. That's not a sacrifice, that's a basic choice. I'm not sacrificing stuff when I chose to behave responsibly (e.g driving safely, not stealing my neighbors, paying taxes, etc). Do you think people only pay taxes because they fear the police? Or they don't kill each others only to avoid going to jail? Of course they are abuses on our systems (like any social situation), but if you think most people behave responsibly only to avoid a kind of punishment, then you have a very dark idea of society or you hang out with bad people (that can change).
Try explaining this to BILLIONS of people across India and China who are now for the first time in their family's generations being able to afford and access a diversity of protein-based and vegetarian cuisine (available all the time, in and out of what they used to know as the season of availability).
The point is it will take a regulated solution or some sort of new product that creates a serious incentive to adjust mass behavior.
1) Vegetables are better than meat foods in the minds of the hundreds of millions of vegetarians out there.
2) Vegetarians do not consider their diet to be a 'sacrifice'. Quite the opposite. There are many benefits.
Therefore, one could argue, more people need to be educated on the benefits of plant-based diets, and they will choose them.
Changing the world's mind on this is a losing strategy for sustainability.
An even better analogy is tobacco use. In the 1950s and 1960s America, you'd hear the same kind of things about cigarettes as you do these days about meat-eating: it's red-blooded, it's manly, it's good for you! Meanwhile the incredibly high impact to health of people and populations was becoming more clear all the time, just like the consumption on meat.
Attitudes, beliefs, and stupid behaviors can and do change over time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt_use_rates_in_the_Uni...
If everyone would just cut down on meat, even avoid it a few days of the week, it would make an enormous positive impact. Same goes for seafood.
From the perspective of someone who eats meat twice a week or so, it's absurd to hear people say they couldn't do it. Yeah, they could.
Of course, with governments subsidizing the hell out of the meat industry those $0.99 McDonalds specials will keep encouraging everyone to eat it 3x/day...
https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-chinas-expanding-fishing-...
I've cut back on buying them as much. I may quit after this.
There is a seasonality to them though, just like with most natural wild foods.
As far as wild-caught seafood goes Sardines are of least concern.
Making less humans seems to be morally taboo, no one wants to go there.
The train will eventually have arrived at that station while people continue to pretend it didn't.
Many fish and bird species have shear reprodutive ability as their only defense. In the case of Passenger Pigeons, they had very little defenses against predators, but migrated in huge flocks of hundreds of thousands at a time. No predator could really harm the flock as a whole.
Well, until Humans became too good at hunting anyway. (Also, USA used to be covered in forests. But we cut those trees down to make room for our cities)
As described in 1813 (From Wikipedia):
> The air was literally filled with (passenger) Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse; the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow, and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose.
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Once_and_Future_Wor...
But with that being said: I like Talapia. I like Salmon. I like various fish. They're all quite tasty, and I'd like to keep eating them throughout my life (and possibly let my children have a chance at it too).
For people who liked one food: the passenger pigeon, that opportunity is now gone, because the species has gone entirely extinct. And overhunting of that species is cited as a potential cause for extinction.
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It has nothing to do with naturalism or the state of things. Just from a purely selfish point of view: if you like a certain food source, you have to take care of it, lest it goes extinct and disappears forever.
The bigger risk extinction wise isn’t that we’ll fish a species to death, it’s that we’ll leave it in such a rough state that any number of random events might finish the species off.
I'm reminded of the jellyfish problem in Japan. Because of over-fishing, the jellyfish polyps aren't being eaten as they used to. So, enormous jellyfish swarms are being caught by these fisherman instead. I had to laugh at the frustration on their faces, cursing all of these jellyfish that they were catching. It was a problem of their own creation!
1) There are consequences (economic and social) beyond what goes on our plate to "fishermen will go out of business". In many places, especially in underdeveloped areas, fishing is subsistence and the consequences of fisherman having to find alternative livelihoods can be problematic.[1] But even in the developed world, overfishing can have serious economic impact.[2]
2) There is no automatic guarantee that fish populations will recover, or recover quickly enough. While complete extinction is rare[3], some species have come close (several species of whales and sharks, for example) and can take decades to recover. In addition, destructive fishing techniques like bottom trawling can destroy the environment needed for a recovery. There is also some evidence (not, as I understand, conclusive) that in the absence of native fish, especially if their population is depressed for a long time, could allow less desirable species to displace them.[4]
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319680762_When_Over...
[2] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/fact-shee...
[3] https://www.pnas.org/content/114/31/E6274
[4] https://www.sciencebuzz.com/jellyfish-apocalypse-problems-ca...
https://www.newsdeeply.com/oceans/articles/2017/10/13/boom-a...
Fishery collapse has happened in other areas as well. Here is an example that didn't follow a disaster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
In all the cases I have looked at recovery is decades long.
https://www.seafoodsource.com/news/foodservice-retail/whats-...
Not in a way I feel I can directly action. Not in a way that many children don't have bigger problems than saving the whales. Just sad.
I hope people share this feeling.
If you see this, you are seeing fish that could not reproduce. This is not sustainable.
Once I bought canned fish and saw 3 small fish instead of one regular fish inside.
There is no other path to success, as attempting cooperation with those who will fish relentlessly is futile. Preserve what's left today for a future with better humans.
> Human cells make up only 43% of the body's total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists.
Mighty bold of you to assume we're not on the Idiocracy timeline :)
But can't I pay a thousand dollars to a friend to catch the fish for me? I'm afraid of the sea.
> ... 87 populations were found to be in the “very bad” category, with biomass levels at less than 20 per cent of what is needed to maximize sustainable fishery catches
For further reading, I suggest folks check out Elinor Ostrom, an economist who spent time developing regulatory solutions for managing fish populations. She was even able to implement a few!
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2008/angus250808.html
That the oceans, a common resource, are not sufficiently regulated, suggests we need better global governance.
http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_tragedy_of_...
For some reasons, those who complain about population growth tend to consume the most.