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Comment by cwkoss | Hacker News Reader

I think a (dis)info campaign touting the toxins and pollutants in fish could be a major environmental win. Humans have destroyed huge amounts of ocean life, and with fish populations already devastated, climate change is going to push many species over the brink to extinct.

I feel like - even if requires pseudoscientific explanations or bald-faced lies - it would be a net good for the world if people thought there is a chance eating fish could kill them. Alarmism over heavy metal accumulation happening at increasing rates, fish absorbing pesticides and poisoning people, stuff like that. Idk if it's happening, but I feel like it would be good for the environment if people believed that.

(disclaimer: i don't enjoy the flavor of fish anyways, so my cost-benefit of this is different than most peoples.)

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No disinformation campaigns are necessary.

Fish do indeed often contain heavy metals (mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic, copper), PCBs, dioxins, and furans, as well as microplastics.

Young dolphins are dying because the mother's milk may be poisonous for the same reason.

https://phys.org/news/2018-12-toxins-mother-young-european-d...

Banned toxins passed from mother to young in European dolphins

https://www.poisoningchildren.com/blog/2014/02/05/bioaccumul...

Bioaccumulation and Dead Baby Dolphins

"Because female dolphins off-load most of their toxic exposure to their first-born calf, their levels after sexual maturity are lower than males; but a very high percentage of first-borns die"

"It is not astonishing that native women in the Arctic Circle, who eat high levels of marine mammals, pass these chemicals on to their babies with dire effects"

"Childbirth and breastfeeding are some of the few ways the body can rid itself of persistent chemicals. It is usually still best to breastfeed, but children who are breastfed continue to inherit the mother’s exposures, as shown in a study of testicular cancer in Denmark and Finland"

Btw, human and cow milk has similar problems.

Ah, so just needs an awareness campaign! Even more of a clear moral win then if it doesn't require deception.

(also, yikes and tragic)

> Ah, so just needs an awareness campaign!

and machine gun

At that point it would be better to supply the demand for fish with fish farms where they are bred to be eaten rather than pulling fish from the ocean. You could (truthfully) advertise as environmentally friendly, you would probably turn a profit, you actually would have fewer toxins than ocean fish, and ocean fish would be proportionally fished less. Much more straightforward of a process than conspiring/bribing countless people to spread disinformation and giving credit to conspiracy theorists.

Still few problems with this.

- intensive fish farming can lead to environmental issues, such as water pollution from fish waste, excessive use of antibiotics and chemicals, and the depletion of wild fish stocks used for fish feed

- some farmed fish species require a substantial amount of wild-caught fish to produce a relatively small amount of farmed fish

- the conversion of natural habitats like mangroves and wetlands into fish farms can lead to habitat destruction and loss of critical ecosystems that support various species

- in densely packed fish farms, diseases spread rapidly among fish populations, leading to mass mortality events. The use of antibiotics to control diseases can also contribute to antibiotic resistance, posing risks to human health

- introducing non-native or genetically modified fish into local ecosystems can disrupt the balance of the ecosystem and lead to unintended consequences

We have to switch to plant based diets.

It seems to me that nothing else will stop the environmental destruction, in this case overfishing, which alone threatens us with empty oceans in 2040's.

And it would solve the problem with warming oceans too.

Rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, together with a switch to a plant-based diet, would free up a land area the size of Africa. When reforested, this area would store so much carbon that we'd be able to store our entire 1.5C carbon budget in those forests and initiate a new "little ice age."

> We have to switch to plant based diets.

> It seems to me that nothing else will stop the environmental destruction, in this case overfishing, which alone threatens us with empty oceans in 2040's.

There are two things I can say about this:

1) We won't (unless/until forced to).

2) There are other sources of destruction that will continue even if most people switched to a plant-based diet.

1. just remove the subsidies, the market will take care of the rest

2. what other industry is more destructive than animal ag?

how does shipping and air travel compare? I think they dwarf animal ag

Animal ag is not just emissions, though ... it's much bigger beast. Also deforestation, biodiversity loss, eutrophication, soil erosion, water overconsumption, zoonotic diseases, overfishing, reforestation potential of pastures ...

Estimates of just emissions from animal ag are somewhere between 14.5-26%.

All transport is 16.2% (road 11.9%, aviation 1.9%, shipping 1.7%, rail 0.4%).

https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36980531

>We have to switch to plant based diets.

INCORRECT. We're on the cusp of a revolution in lab-grown fish and meat. It will be healthier, more humane, and better tasting, than the current system.

No. All meat in labs is grown in 1.5 L plastic bottles now, and they have like 5 of them in the whole lab.

It may take decades until it's ready to replace meat on the scale and price needed.

We (and the environment) unfortunately don't have that much time.

that and fusion - any day now#

All of these issues you listed could be mitigated with government regulations and a set of to be defined practices for sustainable fish farming. I am not sure why these issues lead to the conclusion that we have to switch to a plant-based diet.

See Seaspiracy and Cowspiracy

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