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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

> just because a country irresponsibly has a larger population

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?

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Your analogies don't wash! Westerners fish legally! How about telling China to fish legally? Here is list of just a few territories, "just" eighty of them, where they have illegally fished: https://www.tibetrightscollective.in/news/new-report-shows-c....

And this is how fishing legally is done: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/seafood-commerce-tra....

China fishing more aggressively than a lot of other countries - and yes sometimes illegally so - doesn't make his comment wrong.

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.

In regards to Boris Johnson and Gavin Newsom, IMO that is a straw man argument. You talking hypocrisy and now not about illegal fishing. This is about protecting ocean resources and there is de facto evidence China is not. If the United States and the EU buying illegally caught fish. please post a link so it can be investigated and prevented. As for China, they have overfished their waters and there is de facto evidence that China is depleting populations of over 90 other countries: https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2022/08/03/chinas-efforts-to-r....

I wasn't trying to defend the US laundering their fishing through third world countries. At all. That's the height of hypocrisy. I was angry that the other poster considered it immoral for one country to have more people in it than another country. When obviously that's not something they can control, and shouldn't be blamed for. Per person, this all works out to the fact that humanity is wildly overfishing the oceans. I'm more on your side that the wealthy countries - per person - bear more responsibility for fixing it. But I don't believe it's helpful to blame poorer countries for having too many children.

If the US is importing illegally-caught fish, and then those illegally fishing countries stop illegally fishing, the price of fish will go up. This will reduce consumption in the US. So the US won't continue to consume as they want.

We could attempt to define the "fair" population of a country based on its land area and some other factors. Splitting up a country into parts then wouldn't grant it a larger fair population, since you would split up the area as well. The necessity of doing this is that otherwise, when one country decides to expand its population, every other country has to accept a lower allocation of the world's resources. The difficulty of doing this is that you are inflicting on the residents of a country a lower allocation of those resources on the basis of something they had no control over, namely the country of their birth.

You could see a country with a high population and small amount of land as having an "unfairly high population level".

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.

well then, I guess the only fair thing would be to distribute people randomly in equal proportion to every square meter of dry land /s

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).

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