This is false. Per capita, aside from Africa and South America, who both eat roughly half the fish per person as the rest, majority of world per person eats same amount of fish. Sure, Asian has more people, but do you really think telling the majority of people they need to eat less fish while everyone else is not told that is going to go over well?
Source:
- https://goodseedventures.com/worldwide-food-consumption-per-...
Besides the claim Asian countries not eating as much seafood is false. Per capita, China, South Korea, Japan are easily the top consumers, if you exclude small island nations and low population countries. [1] Vietnam and Myanmar would also be in the list, but their consumption is based more on fresh water fisheries and not ocean based.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fish-and-seafood-consumpt...
What does this mean? If Japan split into 5 countries, each eating the same amount of fish per capita as now, would that somehow be more responsible?
If by "irresponsibly" you mean they failed to execute sufficiently draconian population control, it's hard to imagine anything more extreme than China's longstanding former One Child Policy - an exemplar of what you'd describe as responsible environmental behavior, right?
Who's more irresponsible? A Chinese family buying fish for 2 children or a Westerner buying twice as much food for themselves as they need?
And this is how fishing legally is done: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/seafood-commerce-tra....
The only way you can have some sort of international agreement on things in general(outside of fishing) is if its fair to everyone. It's absurd to assume that Europe and the US can just consume as they want and "the rest" need to fish more responsibly. It also disregards that a lot of fish is actually imported from those countries.
This is akin to when in the UK Boris Johnson went to have Covid parties while telling everyone to lock down. Or when Gavin Newsom went to the French Laundry during the height of the pandemic while telling everyone to stay at home.
You lose all credibility and nobody wants to listen to you. There's a reason why "Rules for thee and not for me" is a saying.
You could see a country with a low population and a large amount of land as "greedily taking more land than necessary". Kind of akin to NIMBYism.
I'm not sure either is correct. I've heard statistics that living more densely is better for the environment.
Please wiki: (1) Mercantilism, (2) Colonialism, (3) Nazism to understand why your plan for equality leads to massive, inhuman levels of suffering. (Let's throw in Malthusianism just as a pivot to draw a circle around).
It's not about "rights", it's about actually making things happen. Telling China to consume less fish with the justification "you do the most damage because you have more people" isn't going to cause them to actually regulate it or do anything to curve consumption. It's childish playground behavior, but if the children have nukes, you won't get them to do something they don't agree to.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-35815444
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/30/china-beijing-fishing-a...
Edit: Force should be used against antagonistic nation states when required, otherwise words are meaningless.
EDIT: You've edited your response a bunch of times from "hell yeah, I'm ready to die in a war" to whatever it is now. So here you go Internet Tough Guy(tm). Have fun, I guess https://www.goarmy.com/how-to-join.html
Am I missing something?
People aren't "irresponsible" for being alive, and nation-states aren't individuals who can exercise the kind of moral responsibility you're alluding to. You seem to be implying that countries like China should have gone even farther than measures like the inhumane and authoritarian One Child Policy.
The interesting thing here is that there is a lot of tension between on the one hand a graying population that would like to be supported by the next ones and a massive wall in the form of the number of people that we can sustainably support long term. If we don't find a way to support the existing population without a huge push for more people then eventually we'll hit that wall. And that won't be pretty.
As for populations being irresponsible, please feel free to explain your reasoning behind this claim, since unless I am missing something, it’s missing from your comment.
Again, if it’s so easy to not do X then getting even small countries that are democratic should be easy; obviously not, in fact, this has nothing to do with countries and everything to do with cultural norms, or the lack there of.
The perverse incentives it creates for regimes to increase population and reduce living standards are ridiculous.
I strongly disagree on this. I believe instead that per-capita arguments are helpful because they make environmental hypocrisy painfully obvious.
> The perverse incentives it creates for regimes to increase population and reduce living standards are ridiculous.
My current belief is that this is a complete non-issue, for two reasons:
1) Meaningful population control is hard, expensive, unpopular and comes with a myriad of (problematic) side effects
2) Nations care *very little* about per-capita pollution in the first place
The very idea that e.g. EU/US would ever even entertain the notion of boosting their population for the purpose of improving per-capita CO2 emission numbers seems absolutely ridiculous to me.
What do you think about "world leaders" flying jets to meet at conferences and events to agree that commoners have to reduce emissions, when they could have used a telephone and video camera? In any case, the environment doesn't care who emits what ton of CO2 or what humans might be hypocrites about it.
> 1) Meaningful population control is hard, expensive, unpopular and comes with a myriad of (problematic) side effects
It's hard because of perverse incentives.
> 2) Nations care very little about per-capita pollution in the first place
They care very much about it when arguing why they should be allowed to pollute more.
> The very idea that e.g. EU/US would ever even entertain the notion of boosting their population for the purpose of improving per-capita CO2 emission numbers seems absolutely ridiculous to me.
They're absolutely trying to boost population numbers, they explicitly out and say it.
I believe we don't require complete elimination of air traffic to hit climate goals and would be restricting it LAST for government use anyway.
So this might be an indicator of too few incentives against air traffic at the very most.
> In any case, the environment doesn't care who emits what ton of CO2 or what humans might be hypocrites about it.
The environment does not care about where the CO2 is emitted, but WE need to if we want to reduce it effectively.
It is VERY obviously MUCH easier and viable to save 1 ton of CO2 per year for a single American (with a baseline of ~15tons/year) than it is to save 200kg each for 5 Indian rice farmers with a baseline of 2 tons/capita. Because for the rice farmer, that might be "no heating during winter", while for the rich westerner it means "a smaller second car for children/wife instead of another SUV".
As long as EU/US emissions are higher per capita they have absolutely ZERO moral standing to argue for harsher regulations in developing nations, and this is pretty much already clear to everyone involved.
> They're absolutely trying to boost population numbers, they explicitly out and say it.
Pretty much every "western nation" has close to zero or negative population growth pre-immigration. This makes the governments job harder because they have to deal with demographic change (=> pensions) and second order effects (like cultural rifts from compensating immigration). That is already more than enough motivation to keep population growth somewhat up, CO2/capita considerations never even enter the picture.
It is also EXTREMELY doubtful that boosting the population in EU/US would help with CO2/capita numbers in any significant way in the first place, because CO2 emissions mostly correlate with WEALTH much more strongly than population density or somesuch, which governments are typically not in favor of decreasing for highly obvious reasons :P
So you excuse the hypocrisy because teleconferences would have worked just fine. Interesting.
> As long as EU/US emissions are higher per capita
China has more CO2 per capita than EU, and yet they get concessions in those aforementioned hypocritical accords.
> Pretty much every "western nation" has close to zero or negative population growth pre-immigration. This makes the governments job harder because they have to deal with demographic change (=> pensions) and second order effects (like cultural rifts from compensating immigration). That is already more than enough motivation to keep population growth somewhat up, CO2/capita considerations never even enter the picture.
I don't know what you mean. Boosting population in the highest CO2 emitting societies in the world is not a good thing. They do it because of "the economy", because per-capita does obviously enter the picture. If they were actually interested in the environment, they would let population naturally reduce. It's the easiest thing in the world to reduce consumption by reducing population. You need zero new technology, and no changes to lifestyle, and you can achieve large reductions.
Not only in CO2 emissions but in all other environmental footprint. CO2 might have the limelight now, but there are many other catastrophic environmental problems and resource depletion that our massive global consumption causes which have no real solutions.
What do you think an international accord is?
There is only one ocean on planet earth and we all need to do our part to protect its ecosystem.
At this point, we should be sustainably farming seafood instead of pillaging nature.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment...
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fish-and-seafood-consumpt...