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Comment by garyclarke27 | Hacker News Reader

Countries like the UK should designate large sections of their sea territory as marine conservation areas - where trawling is completely and permanently banned - this would be far more effective than quotas in enabling fish stocks to recover.

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It's so tragic it's almost comical. The whole fishing industry is about £700 million industry and yet somehow is a huge dog whistle in politics.

Compare to the night time entertainment industry which is a £66 billion industry. When it was effectively shut down indefinitely by covid-19 the governments response was to tell them to go retrain as cyber experts.

As I understand it, fishing is a very important part of the UK & IE identity. I guess similarly to firearms in the US or labor protection in France (I'm French). It doesn't matter how small a part of the economy it represents, it's still a highly emotional topic. This explains why politicians go to great lengths to protect the fishing industry there.

This is what confuses me: before the brexit campaign, I don't think anyone here (brit checking in) cared about fishing. Naval battles maybe, but not fishermen. It was never a part of national identity for me at least...

There was that whole COD WAR thing which was pretty intense at the time, and fishing quotas have been a thing in The Sun for a while, but I agree it doesn't feel like a huge part of the general identity.

I feel like people trying to build a national identity around hating Europe are really keen on fishing. Though only as far as it's useful for that end, no one actually cares about fishermen etc. That's what's so confusing to me about all this (brexit etc): it's all a very thin "papering over the cracks". As soon as someone has to make a hard choice, they renege. How anyone still supports it baffles me.

/Rant

Pelagic fishing in Britain literally only employs about 10,000 people. Prawns, crabs, lobsters and fish farming employ more but they have all been thrown under the bus by the brexit deal that the halfwits in charge have negotiated. The industry is just waking up to the fact it has been conned.

Mon ami, please don’t equate us (IE) with the British.

What’s “night time entertainment “?

Pubs, clubs, theatres etc.

I think so too... but the political fallout from the job loses is too great. It reminds me of the oil industry in America. It's clearly harmful, it and clearly needs to be reduced going forward, but no one wants to be the one to do it, so the can just gets kicked further down the road.

No one wants to do it, because our entire society is dependent on oil industry. It’s not about job losses: society at large won’t care about job loss of some relatively small part of population. It hasn’t cared for loss of coal miner jobs, and it won’t care about oil either. What they do care about is their ability to get places, to heat their homes, to buy inexpensive food and consumer products etc. When they are able to do that in a way that doesn’t depend on oil, they won’t shed a single tear after the death of oil industry. However, as of now, killing oil industry would be exceedingly stupid, because the alternatives to it are not yet available to fully replace oil use cases. We are slowly getting there, though.

I don't think we can eliminate fossil fuels usage entirely, but we can dramatically reduce our usage. Consider that the carbon output per person in the USA is roughly double that in Europe. Europeans live pretty comfortable lives imo. And besides, something has to give eventually. It is much better to manage the change than have it forced upon you.

> I think so too... but the political fallout from the job loses is too great.

Folks should look at Canada and cod collapse:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...

At some point, you may not have a choice. Better to dial things down over years to prepare people.

It should literally remind you of the east coast cod fishery in Canada which was once the most productive fishery in the world and is now basically nothing.

It got wrecked by giant all in one factory trawlers out competing local boats, causing a feedback effect where to complete you needed trawlers as well helped along by a corrupt government that was willfully ignorant of the situation until (almost literally) one day there just weren't any fish left.

That destroyed an entire region's economy (a region I happen to be from), and has led to generational depression, joblessness and frankly hopelessness.

That’s not quite what happened, Canada banned foreign fishing well before the collapse. Unfortunately, they simply set the allowed catch vastly to large, ignoring internal recommendations to half it, and caused a near total collapse almost a decade later.

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