The Ocean is Broken (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The Ocean is Broken (2013)

theherald.com.au

284 pointsdrone239 comments

I just spent three weeks at sea in the Andaman, and... it's grim out there. The sea is virtually lifeless. Small pockets of sea-life survive on reefs in national parks, but as you look up from the water, you see trawlers scattered across the horizon - soundly within the nautical boundaries of the national parks. They operate day and night, as the article says, and the size and brightness of the arrays of floodlights they deploy to attract squid and other nocturnal creatures is astounding.

The crew I was with have been sailing all over the planet for the past several decades, and unanimously reported that they'd seen a steep decline in the variety, quantity and quality of all sea life, particularly in the past five years. Places which once thrived with dolphins are now devoid of them, others which were rich with seals and birds are barren rocks at the same time of year, and propspeed (anti-marine-growth coating for propellers) is increasingly pointless with the amount of near-surface debris. In addition, they noted that sea temperatures were way out of whack, weather was "odd" everywhere they've been in the last few years (pretty much everywhere on the planet), and worryingly, that even recent charts and depth soundings were often significantly wrong, due to the seabed shifting in storms.

All of this is common talk among the yachting crowd, and they're worried - people are selling boats and moving back ashore after decades of "marine life", and brand new marinas are rotting absent of tenants. It's not the economic crisis that's forcing these folks out, as they mostly either subsist or are independently wealthy, and they're all pretty clear about it being due to their fears for the future viability of faring the oceans.

do you know of any online resources where i can read more about this yacht talk? i scuba dive quite a bit, and as a human, this is relevant to my interests.

I went to the barrier reef in 2001, and already saw damage there. I thought, "This is a hobby for part of my lifetime, but probably not for any meaningful part of my kids"

If we can get our act together, life in the ocean will respond. I'm just not sure we can do that.

I ordinarily avoid "me too" posts, but I'd really like to emphasize joeguilmette's request: do you have specific pointers to any sources for discussions among yachters of concern over the state of the oceans, and of their abandoning boats, marinas, etc.?

Not really, I'm afraid to say, as a) I'm not part of their community, more of a passerby and b) this was all face-to-face conversations over shared meals/tasks/adventures etc.

It's all hearsay/anecdotal evidence, but I'm inclined to respect the opinions and views of folks who've spent more than half their lives on the water. It's unbelievably sad... it really feels like "last chance to see" for the seas.

I appreciate the response.

Where was this, if you don't mind? I've got a few docks I can walk myself. And yes, I've seen changes to the sea as well over the past few years.

Andaman sea - Thailand, Similans, Surins, Andaman & Nicobar isles.

One thing I forgot to mention are the jellies. Driving everyone mad, as a) they clog pumps and filters like you wouldn't believe and b) stinger suits are boring.

Exactly.

Not a cruiser, coastal sailor so far, but never heard about these issues. In most places there are yearly queues to get into a marina.

If you believe your own claptrap you shouldn't you be killing as many humans as possible?

What kind of flippant, useless comment is that? You dismiss his entire experience as "claptrap" and then sarcastically suggest he go on a killing spree? Get the hell out of here.

This article was posted before and debunked. Believe it if you like.

You weren't commenting about the article, though. Keep digging that hole deeper.

That's true, also I was too harsh.

Fortunately, you discredited your own sentiment with your harshness and poor sentence construction. In addition, you presented a false argument, implying that somebody with my concerns would see murder as the only answer, perhaps revealing more about your own psyche than you'd like.

Sorry. You did not deserve that and I wish I had not posted that comment.

Relax, in a way my own response was too harsh; you needn't feel bad. For the record, murder is not the answer!

It's his standard MO. Like most commenters of this type, he usually gets away with it, too. I'm not sure why he didn't this time, but probably the part about killing as many humans as possible was a bit too much even for the people who normally cheer on comments like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7143682

I sometimes wonder if shopping for groceries is as frustrating for most people. I like Nutella, but when I see Palm Oil as the second ingredient I picture dead orangutans. I like beef, but I sympathize for a fellow mammal and think of the enormous amounts of diverted water and fertilizer runoff that goes in to producing feed. I enjoy fish, but thinking of this makes me sick to my stomach. I enjoy many beverages that come in plastic bottles, but that plastic, even if recycled, comes at substantial cost. Even veggies are largely wrapped in plastic anymore. Even though it's a small thing compared to everything else in life Keurig machines fill me with rage. And yet, I am guilty too. I love to travel, and this generally means flying since I live on an island. Therefore I contribute to ocean acidification, climate change, and of course the industrial processes that go into making planes.

When people ask why I prefer not to buy fish and I say it's because of concern over the world's fisheries (I'd rather not dive in a global jellyfish swarm) they look at me like I'm from another planet. Who gives a crap, after all? One person's actions will not stop the destruction of our only planet.

sigh

It won't make you feel better, but sadly the extinction of species is as much a part of nature as the death of an individual organism, with nearly all species that have ever existed having gone extinct. Given that, I think the small kindnesses you are showing towards your fellow biosphere inhabitants are about all you can do. IMHO.

Yes species have gone extinct, but they're also been replaced. We're not seeing the replacements these days, only the extinctions. Eventually the biosphere can redevelop from a very small core of survivors, but we'll be long-gone by then.

In fact the day will inevitably come when we've 'reformatted' the entire ecosphere. Why settle for whatever random collection of life-forms were here when we came to sentience as a race? That's all we really have; a snapshot of life on our planet, different from what came before and certainly different from what will come once we've had our way with it, for better or for worse.

I'm describing the situation, not making a judgement. We, as a species, appear rather better at making other species extinct than in preserving them. Our pitiful attempts at preservation will not suffice to preserve current species, I reckon.

We're not seeing the replacements these days, only the extinctions.

Replacement can take a long time--millions of years.

As someone already said, we should not worry about our planet, for it is going to be here, long long after we are finished. We should be worried about ourselves. We rely on our planet for our existence and the current state of our planet hangs on a fine balance of its constituent elements.

If we were to change the balance, the planet would not die, it would only enter into a new different state. But we would surely die or at least most of us would.

Some of us think that sooner or later, humans would be able to colonize other places in Universe and then our survival would not wholly rely on Earth. That is certainly possible. But how far into the future would that be possible and whether we would be able to survive another hundred years of drastic pollution of Earth is anyone's guess.

"As someone already said, we should not worry about our planet, for it is going to be here, long long after we are finished. We should be worried about ourselves."

See, this is something I don't get about most people. Does nobody else feel sympathy for individual animals? We're inflicting immeasurable amounts of suffering and death and nothing will ever make that less of a tragedy.

That's a particular kind of scope insensitivity on your part, though: although we're inflicting suffering and death... so is the rest of nature, greater in most cases by enough signifiant figures that our effect gets lost in the noise. For every individual animal suffering at the hands of a human, millions die of starvation and disease in exactly their "adaptive habitat"--when they're not slowly chewed to death by predators, or hijacked by parasites to live horrible zombie lives.

Perhaps we like to imagine that animal populations are, on average, as healthy as we are when left to their own devices... but we have society, and medicine. Life as a wild animal sucks.

If you want to imagine a utopia, first imagine a world where both the lion and the gazelle somehow survive, without one dying to feed the other. This will probably take you a long time to picture, unless you've really given thought to problems like Friendly AI before.

Not that I am an animal whisperer but I think most animals would prefer to be in the wild for 5-6 years and then die a gruesome death compared to being locked in a tiny, literally shitty, cell as part of a CFO for 1-2 years and then dying a slightly less gruesome death.

He's not disagreeing with that statement!

Sure, but again, that's a failure to do the math. Humans put one animal in a cage; nature infects ten-thousand with worms and rips off the limbs of ten-thousand more. Our impact, however horrible per-animal, is lost in the noise when multiplied by the number of animals affected.

I'm not sure that affects the morality of it though.

Some good points, but let's look at the context: millions of fish and other sea animals die as bycatch every day. This is a huge amount of death and suffering that can be avoided and serves no purpose whatsoever.

Plus, we're humans, we have the power to manipulate and control (to a certain extent) nature, so saying "we're doing no worse than nature" is not good enough, IMHO. It's within our power to do less damage, and we should do what we can.

Doing "better" or "worse" than nature in human activities is a social more that sounds nice to humans, not a sound consequentialist policy for making animal lives better. Looking at the relative scale, you have to realize that cutting back on things humans do would have a lot less of an impact on a "global species-neutral utilitarian metaethics" than changing the things animals themselves do to one-another.

Here's an analogous situation: residential garbage accounts for about 1% of total garbage. The real way to "reduce, reuse, recycle" is to lobby industry to do those things. But instead, we see constant attempts to get people to put things in blue bins instead of green bins. Why? Because residential recycling is a mechanism for signalling pro-social values, and people can do it conspicuously to prove they're "better than you." So it gets emphasized, and the real problem--industrial waste--gets de-emphasized.

I think my point has gotten lost somewhere. My point is that we can and therefore should do less damage, not for the sake of the human race's karma or to "fix the planet", but for the sake of individual animals. Not because it's right in the philosophical sense, but because thinking about animals not suffering makes me happy.

Sorry if I am misunderstanding you, but all your replies seem to be about the big picture, while that is exactly what I was saying I "don't get about most people".

> Not because it's right in the philosophical sense, but because thinking about animals not suffering makes me happy.

Right, and that's exactly what I'm responding to: "following your happiness" in helping animals is, on the whole, actually pretty shitty for the average, randomly-selected animal (where any randomly-selected animal will tend to live in the wild, not near any humans) compared to other things you could do, like introducing invasive plants with known anti-parasitic properties to foraging ranges.

If you actually care about animals suffering less, rather than the fuzzy feeling you get by seeing an animal near you suffering less, then you should do things that maximize global animal welfare, not urban animal welfare.

Read http://lesswrong.com/lw/6z/purchase_fuzzies_and_utilons_sepa....

I have no idea why you think I'm talking about animal welfare.

Let me rephrase my original post: People often say "the planet will recover once we're gone", which to me sounds like something intended to make us feel better about the direction the world is heading in because the human race can't "truly destroy the planet". I disagree because in the process we'll be destroying billions of individual animals, which I think will be a tragedy in itself.

This is all I've been talking about since the beginning.

"like introducing invasive plants with known anti-parasitic properties to foraging ranges"

Completely off-topic now, but what about suffering of parasites themselves in presence of those plants? Why do people care about cute animals and not about and often at the expense of less cute ones? (that's a rhetorical question, because they are cute duh)

We can't make things better for some living organisms without destroying others. Since there is no objective way to weight outcome of an intervention, we can't "maximize global animal welfare". Most of the time it will benefit one fluffy thing at the expense of another, usually less fluffy.

Undoing results of our own actions is a defensible thing though. As is maximizing some kind of utility to us, for example working to increase or maintain biodiversity to avoid being next extinct species on the list. But biodiversity just means shitty life for more kinds of animals as far as maximizing animal welfare goes.

A lion doesn't know any better than to eat a gazelle.

You do.

What possible difference does that make to the gazelle?

Depends on our choice then, doesn't it?

Every difference, if you choose not to eat it.

What is "knowing better"? How can there be any intrinsic moral compunction to eat or to not eat the gazelle?

While I do indeed feel sympathy, mother nature does not. The animal kingdom is brutal at best. To think we are the only ones inflicting suffering and death is kind of ignoring the larger picture. Nature itself inflicts immeasurable amounts of suffering and death.

Our capacity for empathy is one of the things that supposedly separates us from those we dominate over. I think there's some worth in cultivating the thing that makes us different, and it shouldn't necessarily stop at human-human interaction.

In some ways, empathy's extension to non-humans is the only social tool we have to start caring and prioritizing the maintenance of the living systems around us. Because it's sure as heck not going to be a pragmatic decision like "we need to keep these animals/plants around because they keep us alive" :) People don't respond to that shit.

imho we must create a societal narrative that /cares/ about other living things, or else we're honestly kinda fucked. If nothing else, think of cultivating our ability to empathize with animals as socially hacking our own brains so as not to succumb to the the J-curve crash that is expected of every other species on our trajectory.

Nature itself inflicts immeasurable amounts of suffering and death.

There's a view that says that there's a balance and grand scheme in nature -- the Gaia hypothesis. I don't subscribe to this, and have been seeing a few fairly persuasive arguments that it's fairly wishful thinking.

Which isn't to say that the biosphere won't exact its own vengeance on humans if we continue down our present path.

What distinguishes humans from other life forms, that we're aware of, is, well, that we're aware. We can form models of understanding about the world and Universe we inhabit, and we've done a fairly impressive job of this over the past 300 years or so: Newton, Darwin, Mengel, Einstein, et al.

And one of the things we've been aware of ... for a fairly long time ... is that the very things which have given us an advanced industrial civilization cannot continue unabated forever. William Stanley Jevons wrote of this in The Coal Question in 1865, and referenced works back to 1789 (John Williams, "The Limited Quantity of Coal in Britain"). The alarm's been pulled repeatedly since (CO2 induced global warming: 1932, peak oil: 1945, 1956, 1972, 1998, ..., pollution and environmental impacts: 1962, 1972, ..., population: 1798, 1972, ...).

While moral arguments do get invoked quite a bit, I prefer a more empirical basis for argument. Joshua Greene (http://www.merrimack.edu/live/news/1124-joshua-greene-phd-re...) has some very interesting things to say on moral decisionmaking with which I find myself in generally strong agreement.

Life exists to find and exploit entropic gradients in stocks and flows. Humans have done a bang-up job of finding and exploiting one particularly copious class of stocks (fossil fuels). The end of that stock is well within sight, and with our job done, we may well find ourselves unemployed, biologically speaking.

I'd prefer to avoid that unemployment if possible. And I think that's the question at hand.

In the words of the immortal George Carlin:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c

http://www.nutellausa.com/faqs.htm

Nutella is "a member of the RSPO (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil), Ferrero only uses palm oil which is extracted from controlled plantations in Malaysia."

So you can enjoy your Nutella guilt free.

If one also ignores the fact that it's mainly sugar frosting.

Well, that's the primary motivation for the purchase, is it not?

See if Justin's Hazelnut Butter spread is available. Much less sugar, and less palm oil (more actual nuts) and Justin's also a member of RSPO.

It will cost you about an arm and a leg, but it's oh, so good.

http://www.justins.com/products.php

Sadly, I don't there's a way to directly link to the product description, which is really silly, but allows you to explore some other things they have. Their Vanilla Almond Butter tastes like cookie dough. In a good way.

(I am also not "Justin", of "Justin's"

The subject was that palm oil involves dead orangutans. Does sugar frosting do that too, or are we changing the subject to how sugar is bad? If you overeat sugar frosting, it's your diabetes, not a negative externality.

Diabetes in a modern technological society with socialized healthcare (and all modern healthcare systems are to some extent socialized) does impose negative externalities.

As do many other diseases. TDR-TB is one of my, um, favorites in this regard: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wc86m/the_nast...

No palm oil is sustainable. I have lived in Malaysia and can tell you that most the five hour drive from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore is spent looking at palm oil plantations. Malaysia is in fact with Indonesia by far the worst offender when it comes to deforestation. Also both countries are highly corrupt. Land grabbing is the norm and politicians and businessmen gain from the losses of the people in villages and the animals in the jungles that once were there.

So please don't say guilt free.

Depends on what you mean by "sustainable". I agree that Johor has already been turned into one giant palm oil plantation, but as far as I know the current plantations can keep operating pretty much indefinitely, and peninsular Malaysia is not stripmining its national parks and remaining virgin jungle the way Indonesia is. (The Borneo side is a bit of a different story.)

I can't think of anything at the grocery store that doesn't have some sort of negative implication. Heck, just driving to the grocery store burns fuel and supports the automotive industry. Biking to the grocery store burns food (of which all food has negative implications) and supports the bicycle industry.

You can work yourself into knots over it; there is no way in which you can eat food and not have some negative impact. So, IMO, you either give up the battle entirely, or you can stop killing yourself over it but still make intelligent choices. For example, I eat fish because I believe fish farming could be a better choice for the future than cattle farming, and I eat chicken because the feed-to-meat ratio is better than beef.

As not only animals but meat-eating animals, it's just a fact of life that our/your existence costs something, means some sort of sacrifice for another organisim. You can try to reduce your impact, but you can't not have an impact.

Also, a little bit of my personal philosophy here- one way we could reduce our impact is by doing as little as possible, never moving about and burning more calories than absolutely necessary. Never performing strenuous activity that results in regenerative & anabolic processes, which require extra nutrients. But the way I see it, just existing costs the world "100 externality". If living to the fullest costs "110 externality", I feel like I am doing a disservice if I chose the first option, saving so little "externality" and spending my life miserable. For have I not then utterly wasted the costs I imposed on the world?

That's patent nonsense.

The problem is not consumption/destruction per se, but the fact that we destroy more than what the planet can build out of solar energy. We're burning the reserves and the means of production.

What, precisely, is nonsense about my comment? Brushing something off as nonsense and saying vanishingly little else is not exactly a compelling argument.

Also, did you read my parent? Parent was not talking about sustainability and burn rate vs. incoming solar energy or production rate. Parent was talking about mental anguish brought about by the costs his existence poses on the planet- at least, that's what I heard.

The anguish of the parent comes from the fact that the common industrialized lifestyle is not sustainable (he refers to ocean acidification aka net carbon dioxide surplus). If our lifestyle was sustainable, I don't think he'd feel any anguish, but you'll have to ask him to be sure.

re. nonsense, paragraph per paragraph:

1) biking is more energetically efficient than walking.

2) eating any kind of meat daily is not sustainable in the long run, and thus not intelligent (which does not prevent me from eating some, from time to time).

3) You ignore the notion of sustainability. Having some impact does not matter, as long as you stay beneath the sustainability threshold.

4) Your 100 / 110 ratio seems to come out of nowhere. Do you have any data to support it?

Riding a bicycle is very energy efficient, but it still has externalities. Which was part of my point, everything does, even the most efficient choices.

I presumed my parent was not primarily concerned with sustainability due to bits like dead orangutans and I like beef, but I sympathize for a fellow mammal. Sympathy and orangutans are not really part of the sustainability picture, which is a separate and large issue I don't intend to dive into right now.

Eating meat can be sustainable. I'm pretty confident if we all ate crickets, there would be practically no sustainability concerns, and we can't all eat quinoa as our protein source anyway. Chile is not able to grow enough quinoa to feed the world (quinoa is a picky plant)

The 100 / 110 is purely invented as a thought experiment, but I consider it to be representative. Your daily BMR is ~2000 Calories. Engaging in activity, sports, games, or mental exercises do increase your caloric consumption for the day, but your body adjusts quickly and your additional caloric consumption for the activity falls quickly into the hundreds of calories for all but the most strenuous activities. Plus, the more strenuous (calorie-expensive) the activity, the more likely you are to take rest days, which lowers your average daily caloric consumption.

I'm having a hard time trying to imagine how financially-incentivized systematic removal of the habitats of species after species after species can be considered anything but unsustainable.

People who are concerned about sustainability decry the collapse of fisheries & fish stocks, or the environmental impact of industrialized chicken farming. People who are concerned about ethics decry the destruction of pandas, orangutans, tigers, and gorillas.

None of these are good, but we don't eat pandas, so which examples of habitat destruction are used is informative.

Species extinction speaks to fundamental underlying changes to the ecosystems in which those species live.

Yes, telegenic megafauna capture hearts, but really, as apex predators or other apex species, they're the canaries in the coal mine, so to speak (and my isn't that an unsustainable metaphor...). But the waste being laid to oceans: 80% depletion of fish stocks, mass strandings of numerous cetaceans, algae and jellyfish blooms, starfish wasting diseases, and the sudden disappearances of birds, seals, and sea lions, all suggest something is going very, very wrong.

And those systems are crucial for life on Earth -- human and otherwise.

Jesus Christ, I KNOW. But which environmental issue a person chooses to talk about gives us clues to what they are thinking about. My parent's choice of orangutans suggested he was not currently worrying about long-term sustainability of ocean fisheries.

I KNOW. But, difficult as it may be to believe, sustainability still isn't what I was talking about. And, no, that doesn't mean I believe it isn't a problem.

Well, in fairness one can be concerned about the implications for the planet's health of collapsing fisheries, and also wonder by what moral authority we deprive another species that appears able to feel pain and joy of their home so we can have a diet with large amounts of concentrated vegetable oil.

it still has externalities

Some levels of externalities are sustainable. Some are not. The larger problem with humans is the combination of total population and average per-capita resource consumption (to say nothing of the vastly higher consumption in industrialized nations).

The steel and rubber in a bike are probably the biggest concerns (as well as the paving in roads), but in comparison with an automobile, it's vastly lower, and in comparison with the ranges and cargo capacity of walking, they're hugely higher. I've travelled 200 miles in a day by bike, and commuted over 40 miles daily for over a year at one point. One person on a bike can move a payload of many hundreds of pounds, possibly a ton or more (across level ground).

Food production at present is manifestly unsustainable. Every one calorie of food you eat in the US takes 10 in fossil-fuel energy to produce (in Europe it's about 5). Other inputs, particularly nitrogen (from fossil fuels) and phosphorus (limited global supplies) are crucial limiting factors, as are topsoil and water.

Richard Manning's "The Oil We Eat" is a fascinating exploration of this aspect of human existence: http://www.wesjones.com/oilweeat.htm

Why does everyone think I'm talking about sustainability, even when I say "I'm not talking about sustainability"?

1. You're failing to articulate what you are talking about.

2. Sustainability is what matters.

Sustainability is an over hyped and misunderstood term.

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4005

Will there still be humans in 300,000,000 million years?

300 trillion? Unlikely.

Derp. My bad.

So what did you mean? And what are you getting at?

Advanced species lifespan seems to range from ~1 - 10 million years or so, plus or minus a lot, before genetic drift sets in.

I took a bit of umbrage at the idea that humans surviving longer than, say, the dinosaurs did is "over hyped and misunderstood". That comment was my attempt at an unhyped and easily understood definition of "sustainability".

Three hundred mega-years (what I meant) is a somewhat arbitrary milestone. (I think long-term but 10^15 years is a bit much for even me. But see Stapledon's "Star Maker"...)

(BTW, your thinking seems unusually clear on these matters.)

Sustainable is well defined (don't consume more than the earth can generate), but it is abused by marketers for green washing.

OK, here's my own definition:

Does this activity add to the likelihood that humanity will cease to enjoy a standard of living similar to the current average at some point before other natural processes (Sun going red giant, etc.) kill us all anyway?

So hey, if they sun's gonna kill us all next year, go hog wild. If what I'm doing now means that somebody 500 years from now will have a more impoverished existence, it's not.

What about the materials used in the solar panels, in addition to the process used to make them.

I was referring to photosynthesis, not solar panels.

Noting that parent was referring to net primary productivity (on which, Jeffrey Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine", is very strongly recommended: http://globalecology.stanford.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange...), the sustainability of various renewable energy technologies is an open question.

But here's the dilemma as I see it:

• Modern technological civilization is predicated on abundant cheap (high EROEI) energy sources. Technology follows from, rather than leads to, energy availability, and hence isn't an answer.

• For reasons of both depletion (peak oil / gas / coal) and pollution (greenhouse gasses, AGW, mercury and other emissions), continued use of fossil fuels isn't viable. We've already heat peak conventional liquids (oil), and global total peak oil production is likely within 5-15 years. Gas follows shortly after, coal likely by the late 21st / mid 22nd century assuming demand doesn't collapse entirely (which would generally indicate a collapse of civilization).

• If you want to continue a technological civilization of some sort, then you've got to find alternative high-grade forms of energy. Likely a mix of electrical generation (highly fungible) and limited liquid or solid fuels production (for transport and storage needs). Capacities to produce both are fairly constrained.

• The alternative is ... a non-technological level of civilization. Likely a collapse in both technological levels and population (from famine, disease, war, the usual). Which means that the future of humanity will be relying on solar power -- collected and stored by plants. And be living in a drastically depleted environment in which many ores and mineral resources, as well as water, topsoil, and ecosystems have been hugely depleted. "Rebooting" civilization would be at best very, very difficult.

• I like a technological civilization, don't get me wrong. But I don't see it as sustainable. And there's nothing in the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, or geology which say the Universe owes us our standard of living.

Answering your question about solar PV: the economics look difficult, and numerous people who are convinced of peak oil and climate change suggest that they may well not work, see Ted Trainer, John Michael Greer, Charles A.S. Hall, and Gail Tverberg among them:

"Renewable Energy: No Solution For Consumer Society" http://www.countercurrents.org/trainer240411.htm

But that doesn't exactly leave us with good alternatives, and my feeling is that PV or other high-grade solar technologies (solar thermal, Stirling or related engines) are worth pursuing with our remaining fossil fuel reserve (we really should have been pursuing these decades ago).

What's your alternative?

Enjoy your day.

What's your alternative?

Nuclear. I notice you don't mention this at all, unless you mean to include it in "electrical generation", in which case your statement that technological civilization is not sustainable strikes me as far too pessimistic. Even if you only consider nuclear to be a temporary energy source while we develop high-grade solar energy, it still can get us a lot further than our remaining fossil fuels.

Also, any evaluation of "sustainability" is fundamentally limited by our inability to predict how our society will change in the future. For example, a sustainability analysis done in the late 19th century, when horses were a primary mode of transportation, would have shown that that mode of transportation was not sustainable--we would have ended up, as the saying goes, knee deep in horses--t. Then the automobile came along.

In other words, there's a common confusion (as shown by many posts in this thread) between a specific way of doing things being unsustainable, and our society in general being unsustainable. It's far harder to show the latter than the former, because we can always change our way of doing things.

Keep in mind that uranium is also a limited resource. Might last us another thousand years,but it will run out eventually. Unless by nuclear you meant fusion power,but we are not quite there yet.

In a thousand years we'll have fusion power--in fact we'll probably have better sources of energy than fusion (like the ability to tap solar energy much more efficiently than we do now).

Nuclear

Great! Fission or fusion? What fuel cycle? What reactor design? Is it proven? Experimentally? Prototype? In production?

What's the fuel availability look like? How about issues with proliferation, waste disposal, plant accidents, and plant decommissioning?

I didn't spell out my alternatives in detail, but yes, nuclear is an option for electrical generation (I suppose you could also run a power loom or stamping gin off of one if you really wanted to). However of the options:

• Fusion's not there yet. Tokamak, NIF, or Polywell. Nothing but the shortest experimental possible ignitions yet. Nothing remotely commercializable. Several fuel cycles are fairly constrained.

• Uranium/plutonium LWR fission has a pretty critical fuel shortage. 80 years at present usage, 6 if we go 100% nuclear at present energy consumption rates. Scale in anticipated global energy growth rates and it's less than that. Waste, decommissioning, and accident issues are significant.

• Breeding uranium or plutonium might extend fuel supplies but creates significant weapons-grade material proliferation concerns.

• The TeraPower "nuclear candle" is a nice bridge technology ... if it works, but that only lasts until our existing nuclear waste is consumed (which raises the point: you don't want to be too good at disposal: the stuff might come in handy).

• Thorium has a vocal and occasionally demented lobby on the Intarwebs, but even the optimistic Chinese see MSR as 25 years out from commercialization.

And I see energy needs coming to a head Real Soon Now -- rather less than 25 years, at any rate.

And none of these technologies, nor wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, or tidal power give you liquid fuels, which is what planes, trains, automobiles, trucks, buses, boats, construction equipment, furnaces, generators, back-up power systems, and remote energy applications rely on. Sure, you've got Fischer-Tropsch, the Sabatier reaction, and other solid-to-liquid, gas-to-liquid, and fuel synthesis processes. All of which, scaled to the 100 million barrels of oil consumed daily globally would represent an absolutely massive investment of capital and energy.

Conventional crop biofuels, wastestream-to-energy, sewage-to-energy, and advanced algael biofuels all suffer from the challenge that your dealing with net captured flux of around 10 W/meter^2, maybe 100 W/meter^2 for algae, of photosynthetic efficiency. And you've got to capture that on land that's not already producing food you're planning on eating, or ecosystems you're planning on sustaining, you know, the rest of the Earth's biosystems.

The 100 quadrillion BTUs the USofA consumes annually corresponds to 29,307 TWh of energy, which at 10W/m^2 and 8 hours of effective insolation (a typical 30% duty cycle) means you're looking at 1,115,186 km^2 ... or a square 1056 km on a side (430,576 square miles, or 656 miles on a side, for the non-metric).

Sure, NYC of 1894 had 200,000 horses pumping out, literally, 5 million pounds of horseshit daily (https://ffbsccn.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/superfreakonomics-a...). And the straight estimates were accurate: keep that up and you'd be buried in the stuff (you already were knee deep in places).

Thing is: it's possible for things to get that bad. Ever been to India? Or just seen the opening sequence of Slumdog Millionaire? Because that's how a lot of people live: combing through trash heaps and swimming in shit (not equine, either).

And the reason NYC didn't drown in brown is because of this one-time lottery winnings of uncomposted Carboninferous lignan-laced pulp and algae decay which we've been talking about here (if decomposers had evolved slightly faster, we'd be discussing this in a small agrarian village somewhere). Technology, as I said, followed that windfall, it didn't create it (Colonel Drake's oil rig: borrowed from the Chinese who'd been drilling 1000 feet for salt since the year 1000). That rabbit's already been pulled from the hat, and we've been looking for a long time, pretty thoroughly, without finding many more rabbits for, oh, 40 years or so. The automobile didn't "come along", it was pumped from an oil well that's now running dry despite fracking fluids leaking into your water supply.

Technology doesn't create entropic gradients, it taps them. And we've got a pretty good idea of what provides useful energy: Moving stuff, falling stuff, blowing stuff, bright light, chemical bonds, and nuclear bonds. And it's mostly the bright light and chemicals that seem to work well for us, higher up it's not sufficiently dense or reliable, lower down and it's too complex. I don't see gradients (flows or stocks) we can tap with the ease and usefulness we have for the past 250 years.

We have plenty of existing nuclear plants that can provide cleaner energy than we get from fossil fuels. Per unit of energy consumed, even the existing nuclear plants are much safer than fossil fuels even when you count the harm from Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Uranium/plutonium LWR fission has a pretty critical fuel shortage.

These numbers are way too pessimistic; they are produced by the same sort of calculations that said we would run out of oil by the turn of the millennium, because they didn't take into account the continuing discovery of new reserves. They also don't take into account breeders; if there are concerns about weapons-grade material being created, you guard the plant (the material doesn't need to be transported, it just stays at the reactor until it's used).

With nuclear fission there's an additional consideration as well: the cost of the fuel is only a percent or so of the total cost per kW-hr, whereas for fossil fuels it's something like 1/3 to 1/2 of the total cost per kW-hr. So it doesn't take a lot of increase in the price of oil to make fossil fuel electricity much more expensive; but even a large increase in the price of uranium doesn't increase the price of nuclear-generated electricity very much. And there's a lot of uranium that could be extracted at, say, 10 times the current unit cost; by some estimates we can extract uranium from seawater at that cost, which increases the time horizon to thousands of years if not more.

I see energy needs coming to a head Real Soon Now -- rather less than 25 years, at any rate.

Same comment as above: I think this is way too pessimistic.

none of these technologies, nor wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, or tidal power give you liquid fuels

Two comments here: first, improved battery technology; second, algae fuel.

that's how a lot of people live: combing through trash heaps and swimming in shit

We already have the technology to fix this; the reasons so many people don't (yet) benefit from that are political, not technical.

I don't see gradients (flows or stocks) we can tap with the ease and usefulness we have for the past 250 years.

Again, way too pessimistic. It's not that I don't see obstacles, but once again, the main ones I see are political, not technical.

Uranium ... These numbers are way too pessimistic

Then cite your sources. The Wikipedia article I linked cites this MIT study for ~100 years supply at present rates of consumption: http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/pdf/nuclearpower-update2009....

I think this is way too pessimistic.

For liquid fuels I'd strongly suggest you check recent trends: BP's annual statistical review, CapEx spends and yields from Shell, BP, and Exxon, and projections from the EIA and IEA -- this isn't the Peaker fringe, by a long shot.

algae fuel

Tell me how much algae fuel you want and what conversion pathways (biodiesel, ethanol, synthesis, solids) you're referring to. Then give me acreages and water estimates. Oh, and how you're going to fertilize all that goop and keep pests out of it.

You've done some hand waves but I've seen no sources. Who or what do you rely on for information, estimates, models, or whatever else serves as the foundation for your optimism?

this MIT study for ~100 years supply at present rates of consumption

P. 12 of that study says "most commentators conclude that a half century of unimpeded growth is possible", and the study appears to agree with that assessment. "Unimpeded growth" means a large increase in consumption rate over the present.

Also, that assessment is based on a once-through fuel cycle and mining as the only uranium source. Over a half century to a century time scale the first assumption is almost certainly invalid (breeder technology is advancing) and the second may be shaky as well. (Note, btw, that a key reason why the MIT study assumed a once-through fuel cycle was not that breeders were not available, but that they were uneconomic at current uranium prices; but obviously if uranium gets scarcer, uranium prices go up and breeders become economically viable.)

Finally, a half century is not 25 years. If we have a half century to a century of nuclear power even with a once-through fuel cycle, we have an obvious alternative to fossil fuels for that time frame. Your claim that we will hit an energy crisis in 25 years assumes that there is no such alternative.

All of which are issues that are going to be solved, if they're not solved already, probably well within your 25 years, certainly within a half century. Google turns up plenty of hits on "algae fuel" or "algae fuel study" that show plenty of progress in this area.

the foundation for your optimism

Human ingenuity plus profit motive plus an obvious market for cleaner forms of energy. What I noted above with regard to the assessment of breeders being viable is true more generally: a key limitation of most assessments of available energy resources is that they only look at what's economical given current prices, not what's possible. But the economics will change.

That's not to say that there are no obstacles; but as I said before, the main obstacles I see are political, not technical.

Um. No. First, the term isn't defined or clarified, so you're simply applying an interpretation convenient to you. On page 3 you'll find growth assumptions clearly stated:

[T]he study explicitly assessed the challenges of a scenario in which nuclear power capacity expands from approximately 100 GWe in the United States in 2000 to 300 GWe at mid-century (from 340 to 1000 GWe globally), thereby enabling an increase in nuclear power's approximately 20% share of U.S. electricity generation to about 30% (from 16% to 20% globally).

That is the growth which can occur unimpeded for up to 50 years.

You've also conveniently failed acknowledge the first half of that sentence, given in full here with the pargraph it occurs in:

Table 2 shows Red Book identified resources, undiscovered resources, and the number of reactor years of fuel provided by those resources. Based on the total projected Red Book resources recoverable at a cost less than $130/kg (2006$) of about 13 million metric tons (hence about an 80 year supply for 800 reactors), most commentators conclude that a half century of unimpeded growth is possible, especially since resources costing several hundred dollars per kilogram (not estimated in the Red Book) would also be economically usable.

We're still left with 80 years supply for 800 1 GWe reactors. Better than the near-term critical situation for liquid fuels, but hardly copiously abundant.

On Algae:

All of which are issues that are going to be solved

Yeah. So, Boeing's just released "the biggest breakthrough that there is out there" in biofuels, those are its director of sustainable aviation fuels, Darrin Morgan's words, not mine. Halophyte (pickleweed) farming integrated with aquaculture for aviation fuel production at ~75 gallons/acre-year. Aviation fuel is around 5% of total US oil consumption (15,998 million gallons in 2013, RITA), roughly 1 million of the 20 million barrels of oil consumed daily in the US.

Supplying just 5% of US oil consumption from pickleweed would require 21.3 million acres under cultivation. That's about 330,000 mile^2, or a region 577 miles on a side. You could start in Shreveport, LA, and drive all the way around Oklahoma and Kansas without ever entering them. Boeing's article mentions having "thousands and thousands of hectares* under cultivation. How about millions and millions?

http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wo2hl/boeings_...

Algae are, typically, about 10x more productive than plants, but present their own host of challenges (infrastructure and capital requirements, disease, water, fertilizer, waste removal, plumbing issues). Since the above calculations are for a 5% replacement of petroleum, you could take the same acreage and say instead you're getting 50% of present oil usage. Realize that those 21.3 million acres _now all have to be constructed_ with pumps, drainage, etc. And somehow supplied with water. And placed somewhere that they don't interfere with existing food, habitation, and essential ecosystems.

Good luck with that.

Human ingenuity

Can you demonstrate a single case in which human ingenuity has created a new entropic gradient to exploit, rather than found an existing one? What existing gradients can you point to that we can tap? We've covered nuclear and biofuels here. I see solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and tide/wave left.

That is the growth which can occur unimpeded for up to 50 years.

I'm not sure those two quotes are talking about the same thing. I notice that different numbers are quoted in different statements in the document; for example, on p. 12 there is this statement:

This reinforces the observation in the 2003 MIT study that “We believe that the world-wide supply of uranium ore is sufficient to fuel the deployment of 1000 reactors over the next half century.”

Which is different from the "80 years for 800 reactors" statement.

But more importantly, you're ignoring additional information that's given in the same sentence we've been quoting and the one immediately following it. You expanded the quote to give the first half of the sentence, but you conveniently ignored the last part of the sentence, which I'll repeat: especially since resources costing several hundred dollars per kilogram (not estimated in the Red Book) would also be economically usable. I.e., the "80 years for 800 reactors" figure (and by implication the "1000 reactors over the next half century" figure) does not include all estimated resources. The very next sentence is:

Using a probabilistic resources versus cost model to extend Red Book data, we estimate an order of magnitude larger resources at a tolerable doubling of prices.

I.e., at twice the current uranium price (which, as I noted before, would mean only a small increase in the price of nuclear electricity to the end user, unlike fossil fuels where fuel cost is a major factor in end user price), we have 10 times as much available, meaning 80 years for 8000 reactors, or 10,000 reactors over the next half century. That's a big difference. And since uranium prices will certainly go up if it becomes scarcer, there will be natural economic forces driving people to tap the 10 times as much uranium that's available at higher prices. So you are conveniently failing to acknowledge information that's in the document you linked to. (And that's still leaving out breeders, which as I noted before, were left out of the MIT study for economic reasons, not technical reasons, and as uranium prices go up the economics change.)

those 21.3 million acres

Or about 23 percent of the area currently under cultivation in the U.S. (922 million acres according to Wikipedia). But we're talking about 25 to 50 years, not right now. There's no reason why algae acres have to displace current farm acres on that time scale. That 21.3 million acres is about 9 percent of the land area of the U.S, which is significant but doable. Or, if we wanted to get creative, we could put the algae farms on platforms offshore and out of the way (and with easy access to fresh water using desalinization rigs--or even using salt-water tolerant algae).

Good luck with that.

In the next 25 to 50 years, the items you list are easily doable. That's not to say they'll actually be done; but once again, the main obstacles I see are political, not technical. I notice you haven't commented on that at all.

Can you demonstrate a single case in which human ingenuity has created a new entropic gradient to exploit, rather than found an existing one?

Of course not; that would violate the second law of thermodynamics.

What existing gradients can you point to that we can tap?

Here on Earth, for the near future, you've covered all the significant ones I'm aware of (assuming solar includes solar thermal as well as photovoltaic; I haven't seen a lot lately on solar thermal, but it seems like an obvious alternative worth pursuing).

There is enough uranium in Australia to last us a few ten thousands years. Sure, fossil fuels are cheaper to harness right now, but they are nowhere near what is possible and feasible.

Not according to any analysis I've seen, most of which project about 80 years' supply at present usage rates. Six if we lean on nuclear for 100% of energy needs.

Mind: the minimum feasible grade for extracting energy-positive uranium is around 0.02% grade (http://www.stormsmith.nl/i05.html)

Generally: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium

The Wiki article you link lists a variety of predictions on global peak uranium. The pessimistic ones, which are a minority, mostly predict that it has already happened (1980, or so). There appear to be 3 predictions that average around 80 years, and one predicts with a 6-fold increase in consumption it would last 12 years.

Meanwhile there are just as many optimistic predictions that it will last for thousands of years, if not longer. What makes you so sure it's only 80/6?

The problem with your reasoning is that you neglect the fact, as do almost all humans in technological societies, that easily 90% of the energy we consume is wasted. You are not to blame; when you have no firsthand experience of a thing, it is normal for one to be oblivious to its existence.

I have lived for many years within the energy budget provided by photovoltaics and the wind. It is possible to live well under such circumstances, and to be as technological as a city dweller, but first you have to eliminate the waste.

Take, for example, your houses and apartment buildings. They are so poorly constructed that the planet would be considerably better off, despite the waste, if we tore down every single last one of them and rebuilt them for longevity and energy efficiency.

A few buildings (maybe three in a city of 5 million people) are constructed well. They use (at the moment) ICF techniques and they are so well insulated that, even in the coldest days of January, the heating system can fail completely for over three days BEFORE ANYONE NOTICES that it is broken. They can use geothermal heating exclusively both winter and summer and provide complete comfort for 10% of the normal cost.

But you do not build your stuctures like this because energy efficiency is not a priority; money is the priority. The scumbag builders build shit buildings to maximize their profits; the scumbag realtors sell units to the ignorant masses for a fortune, and nothing changes.

What is wrong with humanity is that we are just too fucking stupid and far too much in love with ourselves to do the reasonable thing. We are crazy for money and it has become the arbiter of all success. Instead of killing off 90% of the species, we could begin by simply eliminating the 90% of our activity that is wilfully wasted and continue to live well, so long as the reduction in resource usage was not simply an excuse to increase our already ridiculous numbers.

So that is my alternative: stop being monsters. Otherwise I cast my vote for us all to die of a virus incubated in the backstreets of Shenzhen, and good riddance.

You make it sound like your decadences cost little ("10 percent externality") and give you lots of happiness, when it's the other way around -- things like eating cattle, fish -- things like driving -- have huge environmental costs and probably don't make you that much happier or better off.

1) I'm not talking about decadence, I'm talking about burning a little extra calories to engage in sports and games and such. Or choosing foods that are not the very best in terms of externalities, but still OK and also good for your health. You could live on nothing but rice, but it would totally ruin your health, and then have you not wasted all that rice?

2) Engaging in sports do not increase your average daily caloric consumption much. Once your body normalizes to your activity level, your BMR is something like 75%-90% of your total calorie consumption for the day. So the incremental cost is indeed low.

3) Fish can be a very economical meat. Feed conversion ratio is fantastic. To my knowledge most environmental damage comes from irresponsible fishers/farmers, not from inherent problems with fish. Crickets (one of the few even more efficient meats) are simply not available.

there is no way in which you can eat food and not have some negative impact.

Actually, no, there are, collectively.

Humans have existed, give or take, for a couple million years. In modern form for about 80,000, and with present levels of cognition, for around 10,000.

For most of that time, humans most certainly did affect local ecosystems (and sometimes in significant fashion), but had relatively little impact on the global environment as a whole.

That ended with the Industrial Revolution, and it's only been picking up pace since, with global impacts becoming more evident since the 20th century. Global warming was first postulated in 1932 (by the US Naval Research Lab: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1woc0v/carbon_d...)

The simple truth is that we've got too many people, consuming too many resources, to be sustainable. As with software (fast, cheap, good, pick two), you've got three options from which you can choose two alternatives: big (populations), rich (in resource consumption), or long (in sustainability). Pick two.

Humans can support a large population with high per-capita resource consumption ... for a brief time. Or a high population for a long time ... at very low per-capita resource consumption (and there's no guarantee that present rates are in fact sustainable at low p-c rates). Or a high per-capita resource consumption (high personal wealth) for a long time ... with a low population.

Technology skews this a bit, but in the long term, I suspect, acts largely as an accelerator of resource depletion.

So, yes, your "lots of people doing little" is one option, but what's desperately required is to reduce total population levels. By a lot. The historical record shows that ~500 million - 2 billion might be a sustainable range. I tend to suspect the lower bound of that range.

I was talking about the anguish of simply having an impact, as I judged that to be what my parent was really thinking about. Of killing an animal for food, or even a plant. Of cutting down a tree to build a house, or trapping and killing a rat in that house. Of lumbering forests, because it's not right, not fair to the forest and its inhabitants (not because it's unsustainable)

It doesn't matter if it's sustainable or not, that does not fix this question. What does sustainability matter to the cow you just ate? To the tree you just felled? Why do you get to live, while the plant/animal must die?

It's a question I struggled with for a while in the past.

I was talking about the anguish of simply having an impact ... What does sustainability matter to the cow you just ate?

You've made a number of posts emphasizing that you're not addressing sustainability. In which case: I don't think you're focusing on a particularly relevant part of the discussion.

I see the construction of "having an impact" as a largely irrelevant distraction.

Death is part of the cycle of life. We know that.

Yes, species go extinct. We know that. However the rates vary considerably, and we're at a long-term peak.

As I just wrote in another comment: While moral arguments do get invoked quite a bit, I prefer a more empirical basis for argument. Joshua Greene (http://www.merrimack.edu/live/news/1124-joshua-greene-phd-re...) has some very interesting things to say on moral decisionmaking with which I find myself in generally strong agreement.

For various reasons (and Greene's a neuroscientist who looks as the psychology of moral decisionmaking), we do put an emphasis on people and things who are close to us, both physically and in resemblance (it's easy to feel affection for a tiger or panda than a blobfish or blue-green algae). But in terms of individual choice and having an impact: there's fairly little individuals can do on their own to affect the aggregate outcome.

What you can do -- and some transition / collapse people believe this strongly -- is to take steps to help assure your own individual or tribal (immediate family / community) survival by seeking out viably sustainable areas and lifestyles. The dilemma of personal choice, impact, and action is, I suspect, fairly nonproductive. It imposes a high level of guilt and anxiety without providing much in the way of actual useful productive output. If there's a viable collective outcome it's very likely going to come from some form of collective (or imposed) action.

On the choice thing, I'm finding the RSA Animate presentation I've just been watching "RSA Animate - The Paradox of Choice", by Renata Salecl (http://fixyt.com/watch?v=1bqMY82xzWo) to be illuminating. Choice is, in many ways, oversold. Literally.

I don't think you're focusing on a particularly relevant part of the discussion.

No, you're just trying to have a different discussion than I was. I've learned about and talked about sustainability ad nauseam. I studied some of our impacts on the ocean in college, even. But not every discussion even tangentially related to sustainability need be converted into a discussion about sustainability. Especially when, to my eyes, the comment I was replying to wasn't contemplating sustainability! I realize you would have jumped in to my parent with, "sustainability is all that matters, forget about this sympathizing with mammals crap", but while I agree sustainability is VERY important, not everyone agrees it is really the only thing that matters.

Death is part of the cycle of life. We know that.

Yes, but is it senseless to consider the rhetorical question, "why must this creature die for me"? I see it like many other fundamental philosophical questions, like questions about free will. There may not be a clear or good answer, and chances are nothing will change, but it is interesting and even humbling to think about.

I'm not arguing that we're having different discussion, though the person who seems to be trying to control the direction is you.

"Interesting to think about" and "productive" are distinct. I'm focused more on the latter.

You ultimately can't control what other people are going to do, say, or think. You're the one here expressing frustration with the discussion (and others interpretations of what you're saying). You can engage or not. I try to express myself clearly and cogently, and, if it's clear that there's not going to be some meeting of minds (which can be great, useful, and productive where it occurs), at least try to gain an understanding of where the other person's coming from. Though often that too fails.

"Choice is, in many ways, oversold. Literally."

This is briliant!!!

what's desperately required is to reduce total population levels. By a lot.

Got any ideas on how to do that?

Quickly become a class 2 civilization and fully leverage the resources of our solar system. Or reach singularity where inefficient human forms become obsolete. Or both...

its nice to know that human being environmental impact still trails that of insects...most notably ants.

This counts as reducing human environmental impact (on Earth, at least), but I was asking specifically about ideas for reducing human population levels by a lot.

The answer is we don't, at least willingly. We should be optimistic rather than pessimistic.

The other answer is to get rich, which lowers birthrates faster than anything else. Beats a modest proposal.

Just to be clear, I agree with being optimistic rather than pessimistic. I was just wondering if the poster I responded to would be willing to be explicit about how he thinks the reduction of population he claims is needed would be accomplished.

Only Pub talking. But since I consider all of you friends there is no harm in it.

It's simple.

People will die. In Billions. By famine, diseases and war.

I think this is a inevitable future for our race.

Nature made us too god at modifying it for it's own sake. The planet will survive. Maybe not with us but life will.

We are just to stupid and "NOW aligned" to do anything else as a species. That's my opinion anyway.

- China has a plan that seems to work..

- Giving women the chance to use contraceptives and making sure their kids survive (else: shotgun approach to procreation) has some impact as well.

- It also seems that population growth goes down with wealth (though then individuals use more ressources).

All of these approaches need at least a generation though. I cannot see an ethical way to change that.

Fish farms are some of the worst pollutants in the ocean. Remote stretches of Patagonia are becoming cess pools of salmon shit as a result of salmon farming.

Don't get me wrong, there are sustainable ways to farm fish and other seafood, but most are a complete ecological disaster. Even something as seemingly harmless as mussel farming has detrimental impacts on the local ocean ecology, as surprise, surprise mussels produce waste and accumulating it in one place is not a good thing.

On a recent flight from Punta Arenas to Puerto Montt saw an awful lot of huge Salmon farms from the air.

Yup. To elaborate more fully, I buy wild-caught fish because of how unsustainably many fish farms are run right now. I buy particular varieties of fish based on what species are most sustainably fished. I buy fish to support the fish industry ("vote with your wallet") in hopes that people will see the demand and continue to pursue & improve fish farming in the future.

As well as all the antibiotics that are pumped into the feed to keep the fish "healthy"

> just existing costs the world "100 externality". If living to the fullest costs "110 externality"...

110, OK, here your point makes some sense. But what about when living to the fullest costs "850+ externality"? (e.g. compare mean oil consumption per capita US vs China).

If we're going to use this argument, at least let's be honest about it: we are not at 110, and our motility is not the problem.

I agree with your sentiment about those Keurig machines. What a vile invention.

Even the inventor has come out as saying that they're a bad idea and that he wouldn't do it now; he designed it as a boutique/niche product, never anticipating the problem of waste at scale. I've had several people offer them to me as gifts in the last few years and although they do make a delicious cup of coffee and I love coffee, I just can't stomach the waste involved. Not just the cups and so on - reusable containers are becoming available - but all the hardware and energy devoted to producing single small servings. Just maddening. There was an excellent article on the subject published last year: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/waste-the-dark-side-of...

Yeah.. the weird thing is somehow this process is considered odd, or something fit for a "dirty hippie"

1) Grab a jar with a lid. 2) Get the store down the street to measure the weight of the empty jar 3) Fill the jar with roasted coffee beans, note the new weight, and pay for the difference 4) grind the beans and make some coffee in a French press.

Is this so crazy? Of course, the coffee is hopefully shade grown (most isn't) so there's that, but even so. Why is something as simple as "using a glass jar or bottle more than once" so crazy? Why is it if I go to Latin America soda bottles are collected, washed, and reused, but in the US and elsewhere they make a brand new plastic bottle every time, at best downcycling the plastic?

>Why is something as simple as "using a glass jar or bottle more than once" so crazy?

Most people don't realize:

"Reduce, Reuse, Recycle"

That is actually the order they are supposed to go in!! First you try to reduce. Then, you try to REUSE what you have. When you can't THEN you recycle. People tend to skip the first two steps or don't realize there is an order to them.

There are no sins to atone for, stop feeling guilty.

Live life, mother nature isn't going to flood the earth and destroy everything if you don't accept the saviour into your heart.

Far be it from me to tell anyone else what their conscience should be but to me it's not that we can be zero impact. Nothing living on this planet is zero impact. Sharks eat fish that eat krill that eat etc... The key is to be as sustainable as possible. We can eat fish but need to work to educate the uneducated about only supporting the responsible fishermen. When you quit and walk away from buying fish all together you lose your voice into the industry. People listen to the money and refusing to spend money will just leave the industry listening to those who do buy fish but don't care how it's caught. If you like fish but hate this kind of behavior then we need to make an effort to only buy sustainably caught/farmed fish. A very good resource is: http://www.seafoodwatch.org/cr/seafoodwatch.aspx

You sound like you already have done some reading about this, if so I wasn't trying to be condescending, I just try and get the info out as much as possible.

Leave me alone! I'm just an ordinary man / who loves strawberries / I love to grab the green fuzziness / in my gathered fingertips / and dip the seedy point in sour cream / and brown sugar / and into my waiting lips.

Mmmm, that's a sweet kiss worth / repeating all night, / just an ordinary man / loving his strawberries. / And I don't want to have to think / who picked them with / what brown illegal alien fingers, / back bent under the California sun / that used to belong to his forefathers anyway.

I don't want know that the price of cream is American decadence / that the rest of the world would never dream of spending. / Or that sugar is giving me an insulin rush, / or that strawberries are sprayed with EDB / causing me cancer.

I don't want to know these things, so don't bother me. / I'm just an ordinary man who loves strawberries / that come to me past striking cashiers at Safeway / that come to me in green plastic baskets / that will not decompose / but fill the air with toxic fumes as they're incinerated at the city dump / polluting Hawaii's air and ocean.

Plastic containers, a petroleum biproduct / that the Arabs are processing / to enable the rich to buy the homes of movie stars in Beverly Hills / to buy whole hotels in Miami, or LA, or New York / while the rest of their people / in poverty pray / bowing their heads to the ancient ground.

While all of the oil flows out of the deserts / to America / to grease the great machine / that grows the strawberries that I love / sent by diesel trucks to the coast / and by jet to Hawaii / where I can sit in my bed / and enjoy the pleasures of an ordinary man / kissing that sweet kiss / all night long / without a care in the world.

- Eric Chock / http://www.bambooridge.com/bluesun.aspx?bid=259

Hand transcribed, so there's a bit of error in there.

Edit -- Formatting.

I can't tell if this is supposed to be sarcastic or not.

It is not.

The answer to the question of what to eat: Soylent.

I was thinking precisely this...

Soylent contains fish oil. not good... Source: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/drink-soylent-and-youll-nev...

The problem is too many people, not the stuff the people consume.

Too many people living like they do now.

There was an "What If"[0] on xkcd about the ocean and ships' weight. The question itself was innocuous, but inside a parenthesis was this sentence:

  (Marine fish biomass dropped by 80% over the last century,
  which—taking into consideration the growth rate of the
  world’s shipping fleet—leads to an odd conclusion:
  Sometime in the last few years, we reached a point where
  there are, by weight, more ships in the ocean than fish.)

I'm afraid of the future. Very, very afraid.

[0]: http://what-if.xkcd.com/33/

And yet, are you still eating meat? Fish? What are you doing for your part?

And probably driving a personal car, too.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/oct/03/ocean-aci...

I don't buy fish and don't own a car.

Edit: not that this is the extent of my actions, or even that I agree with this line of questioning.

Considering that every single thing we could eat would have an impact on the environment (typically negatively), it's not as simple as abstaining from eating a particular substance.

A fair point.

Meat contributes far more of a negative impact on the environment than plants though. Consider the fact that it takes 8 lbs of grain to produce 1 lb of beef[1]. That's absurdly wasteful in the quantities of beef that most American's eat weekly.

[1]: http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?articl...

That's true, but on the other hand you get a much bigger nutritional boost out of eating the beef - it's rich in protein and other things that we need to live, which can't simply be replaced with more carbs. I'm not a big consumer of beef and I agree with your general point, but it's not the 1:1 equivalence which would mean 7/8ths of the beef someone consumes is a waste.

I do not eat meat and I do not have to eat more food than I did when I did eat meat. You've made a statement of fact, but it's at best highly ambiguous, but probably just outright false. You're confusing a bunch of nutritional concepts and coming to a non-sequitur conclusion.

That's not what I meant at all - there are plenty of other non-meat sources of protein, from cheese to nuts, depending on how vegan you are. Once again, what I'm taking issue with is the notion that because 8 units of grain are needed to provide 1 unit of beef, the units are nutritionally identical. Making weight for weight comparisons as above is what's a non-sequitur.

Getting such comparisons fully correct is certainly hard, but I don't think it goes the way you think it does in this case... looking at a few different specific possibilities for "beef" and "grain", the "grain" looks to usually be nearly twice the calories of the "beef" per pound. Humans do not actually need huge amounts of protein and there is rarely a (medical) need to go out of your way to get protein no matter what your diet is.

A good portion of that excess weight is caused by parts of the plant that we, as humans, can not digest either (cell walls, exceptionally long carbohydrate chains, etc). So while inefficient, us humans wouldn't get much more nutrition out of those 8 lbs of grains.

Also, it's worth remembering that we get a lot more than just meat out of your average cow. We get medicines, leather, meat, fertilizer, gelatin, and pet feed. In fact, the ~40% of the cow which is left after butchering is rendered down into a streams of protein and fat for secondary uses, resulting in zero waste of the animal.

There are simply a lot of things you use day to day which come from those cows and those 8 lbs of grain...

You aren't looking at the whole picture.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/15/we-could-be-...

>It takes 100 times more water (up to 2,500 gallons) to produce a pound of grain-fed beef than it does to produce a pound of wheat. We’re also running out of land: somewhere around 45 percent of the world’s land is either directly or indirectly involved in livestock production

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-greenhouse-ham...

>the meat [in our diets] cause more greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, nitrous oxide, and the like to spew into the atmosphere than either transportation or industry.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/weekinreview/27bittman.htm...

>Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.

>Just this week, the president of Brazil announced emergency measures to halt the burning and cutting of the country’s rain forests for crop and grazing land. In the last five months alone, the government says, 1,250 square miles were lost.

> it's not as simple as abstaining from eating a particular substance.

Not eating fish is a pretty simple way to help prevent unsustainable fish depopulation. I'm a bit incredulous that anyone would argue this point. Anyone other than individuals who want to rationalize their current destructive habits.

Have you worked out how much time of species existence, statistically, a single person not eating fish can save? Would you expect it to be more than a fraction of a second?

I'm not sure I understand what your argument is. All I can do is change my behavior. I can't change the behavior of hundreds of other people as much as I would want to. If your argument is that individual effort isn't worth the benefit, I'm not sure what to tell you other than this again seems nothing more than an apologist rationalization to defend existing destructive behavior.

It's easier to rationalize your existing behavior than it is to change it. But instead of changing it, maybe just make the cognitive effort to recognize the wrongness. This requires no behavioral change, just an attitude change. If you do this, after enough time behavioral change comes easier. In other words detach reasoning about the ethics of the behavior from the work involved in optimizing your life.

My argument is that you should examine what your intended outcome is. If your goal is (1) to feel better about yourself by not contributing to the extinction of fish, then by all means continue what you're doing. If, however, your goal is (2) to halt or significantly slow the extinction of fish, then simply not eating fish is completely insufficient, and you need to figure out how to do something that has a larger effect. I think you're arguing as though your goal is (1).

"All I can do is change my behavior. I can't change the behavior of hundreds of other people as much as I would want to."

Well, millions, I assume you mean.

"make the cognitive effort to recognize the wrongness."

I think you're assuming my conclusion. :)

Indignation and personal attacks aside, reasons you might want to still eat fish:

> Most experts say that DHA and EPA -- from fish and fish oil -- have better established health benefits than ALA. DHA and EPA are found together only in fatty fish and algae. DHA can also be found on its own in algae, while flaxseed and plant sources of omega-3s provide ALA -- a precursor to EPA and DHA, and a source of energy. [1]

Fish are healthy and good for us. One of the primary causes of overfishing is caused by our unhealthy fascination for tuna. There are many sustainable sources of fish which are available (such as trout); our society's desire for one that is so inefficient in bulking up does not mean you should give up on fish entirely as a result.

[1] http://www.webmd.com/healthy-aging/omega-3-fatty-acids-fact-...

Well, clearly we just need to eat people.

"What are you doing for your part" is equivalent to nothing, UNLESS you are perhaps paradoxically working in finance to become rich enough to have enough money and/or influence to someday have a real effect on these problems. Or maybe actively researching sustainable technologies, or part of a pro-environmental lobbyist group or something.

Don't kid yourself: if you want to stand on a high horse understand that your lack of eating meat makes absolutely no difference here. If you actually want to take the position that individual initiative is needed, then you have to be doing pretty crazy things to make a dent. Arguably its worse than doing nothing because you assuage your own guilt by convincing yourself that you are no longer part of the problem and disincentivizing yourself from being part of the actual solution.

I can't agree. Knowing the problem and how it is going to affect our children and grandchildren, it is immoral to do things that make the problem worse. Producing one pound of beef emits ~15 pounds of CO2, while one pound of chicken creates ~1 pound of CO2 [1]. Knowing this and having the choice between the two, I think it is immoral to eat beef.

To me, your argument is about the same as saying that it is okay to steal from Walmart. After all, what difference will it make to their bottom line? Essentially none. Does that make stealing (in small amounts) morally okay? (Maybe you see this as a completely different question, but from a Kantian ethics perspective, they're the same.)

[1] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/2009-...

I don't kid myself, you're kidding yourself if you do not think that individual behaviors cause considerable impact on a vast scale in aggregate. The "high-horse" line is just a personal attack that doesn't have any merit in the argument, and really I shouldn't have bothered to respond to you because of it.

Thank you for responding for everyone else's sake, that's what keeps me coming back to HN

This is classic "if everyone just ___" logic, which is a logical fallacy. You admit to as much yourself, these things only matter in the aggregate, and our individual behaviors are independent events that do not affect each other, and thus do not affect the "aggregate". That is to say, you're not eating meat does not cause others to not eat meat in any way that scales, which is the only possibly valid reasoning to it ever making a difference. If it did, if it had some sort of domino affect, it would be a valid criticism, but it isn't. You not eating meat has only the measurable affects on your life and margin of error effects on this problem. To further understand the absurdity of this thinking, apply it to anything else: let's say you don't want to go to the movies, and I say "but what if NO ONE goes, then the movie theaters will go bankrupt!" You would appropriately call me insane, but this is the exact same reasoning. I could respond in the exact same way: "leobelle, don't you understand that individual actions have considerable impact in the aggregate". Yes, they do, but that's besides the point because your individual action does not on its own affect the other individual actions making up "the aggregate".

The "high horse" comment, btw, is completely justified due to your clear moral judgement on OP for not "doing his part", which you then proceeded to give ineffectual advice regarding.

But individuals have a part to play. Individuals contribute to cultural changes, which are really important when it comes to fighting climate change and hunger.[1] Being vegan or vegetarian, full-time or not, doesn't mean that you're not still a part of the problem. But I think it's fair to argue that it's a step in the right direction.

I do think that veg*ns being judgmental of others' diet is worse than doing nothing, because it alienates a movement that could potentially be very good for our planet.

[1][http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jun/02/un-report...]

Comments like this are unhelpful; instead of answering the GPs argument, you're seeking to invalidating by painting the GP as a hypocrite, without any evidence or indeed relevance. This is particularly inappropriate considering that the OP was not castigating other people.

Note that it's not all bad news on the overfishing front. There are certainly bleak trends, but people, companies, organizations, and governments are responding to the incentives that are becoming increasingly apparent (though we should certainly encourage improved responses!) Ex. "U.S. seafood catch was at a 17-year high last year, thanks to policies to rebuild domestic fisheries."[0] Looks like the numbers dropped a bit off that high in 2012[1], and I'm not aware of 2013 data yet, but I'm interested to see what continues to happen.

[0]http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/09/23/c... [1]http://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/Assets/commercial/fus/fus12/FUS_...

The astounding decline of the ocean's fisheries is an incredibly important issue. But we all know that.

What we all don't know is the solution. What we've got is a classic tragedy of the commons. It's made more difficult due to the international nature of oceanic fisheries - those little guys like to swim around, paying no heed to national boundaries. Plus there's all of that international ocean to police. Who's going to ensure that 3rd world fishermen aren't catching too much tuna, inadvertently killing too many dolphins, etc etc? Is it reasonable to expect the US to police the entirety of the Pacific Ocean's fish stock?

We've seen this play before. And the only practical solution is not something which the leftists here are going to like.

We have to privatize the oceans fisheries. It is imperative. It has to happen now. It has to happen yesterday. Fish stocks are collapsing. Fish stocks have collapsed.

The fisheries have to be delineated by whatever means appropriate (species and/or location, depending upon the migratory/wandering patterns of each fish in question) and auctioned off to the highest bidder. The highest bidder will then have the right to determine how many fish each year/month are harvested, and by whom. The highest bidder can police the fish themselves. If they fail to police the fish, their ownership is revoked and the rights are re-auctioned.

This is simple stuff. It's been done before with other natural resources. We all need to get over our political differences and make it happen.

Countries can prevent markets from being utilized to off-load those fish. It's not entirely preventable, but it can be made difficult enough to not be profitable.

The sad, unfortunate, fact is that some countries' (Japan, China, for two examples, EDIT: but certainly some citizens from nearly all countries) citizens care far less about the sustainability of their fishing, and more about having what they desire, when they desire. Should the price go up due to under-population? They're OK with that too.

There are already systems in-place for tracking sustainable fish, and ensuring that each fish was sustainably harvested (my gulf wild is one such: http://mygulfwild.com/), but until the consumers in most markets demand them, they won't take off.

For our family, we have a simple rule: we don't buy fish (based on species) that aren't as a rule sustainably harvested. Dead-stop. We don't buy them at restaurants either. Dead-stop. We prefer fish we catch ourselves, over all other fish, and secondly fish that are harvested and sold through markets which monitor for illegal behavior, where we know the operators of the market.

I rarely eat fish from a restaurant where the chef doesn't know the chain from which that fish was supplied. Around here, there are enough good fish places and markets that a chef can't argue they couldn't know.

Unfortunately, the solution "everyone just needs to be more like me" rarely works.

And shortly thereafter, this will transform into a debate about the horrors of farm bred fish, and the wonders of free range salmon. How their tiny pens stop them from being fully self-actualized prior to entering our bellies, and the awful quantities of antibiotics, waste feed, and disease that destroy the purity of their rainbow-like scales. We'll have PETA slicing fishery nets, and then weeping before Pike's Place as they decry the mingling of escaped fishery specimens with wild game. And lord knows, we'll have the same people, crying in the aisle of their supermarket as they look upon man's greatest mistake, a can of farm raised tuna, and the crushing weight of the world's despair comes rolling over them.

My point is about privatizing the free range salmon and has nothing to do with fish farms :)

Of course, PETA would undoubtedly find that even more offensive.

> We have to privatize the oceans fisheries.

Somehow the world managed to bring many whales back from the brink of extension without throwing up their hands and claiming "tragedy of the commons" or privatizing the ocean.

It's not easy, but recognizing this as a global problem and doing the international consensus building needed to solve this problem should be a priority. The solution will probably need to be a mix of commercial work (properly certified fish farms perhaps), public relations/marketing (i.e. convince people this is important), and funded governmental work (i.e. ban importation of fish not collected in a sustainable fashion).

Governments have shown several successes (of various degrees) in the last 50 years with various endangered species and resources. From whales and ivory, to bald eagles to clean air. Throwing them out of the mix for solutions seems as short sited as not leveraging market dynamics to solve it.

Come again? North Atlantic Right Whales are already functionally extinct. Fin Whales are still on the endangered list as are Blue Whales.

No major whale population has been removed from the endangered list since being placed on it.

And yet fisherman still complain bitterly when they're asked to use sinking lines for their lobster pots to help avoid entanglement. Whales are not a great example to trot out of a healthy ocean.

Lobbyists will prevent that from happening. The corporations backing the fishing will have more cause, urgency and financing to run their own PR campaigns.

A few years ago, I spent a few days swimming off a boat around the South of Turkey. The ocean seemed pretty lifeless. Here in Australia, you will come across all sorts of fish in almost any sea situation. Over there, I think we only noticed 1-2 species and barely any of them even, and this was amongst bays and rocky areas that would be full of life here.

(The good part was swimming around without worrying about sharks though...)

> We have to privatize the oceans fisheries. It is imperative. It has to happen now. It has to happen yesterday. Fish stocks are collapsing. Fish stocks have collapsed.

How does that help non-crop fish? They don't have direct economic value to the private fishing company.

What happens when the private fishery comes to the conclusion that it is a lost cause, so their best interest is to fish as fast as possible?

1) Non edible fish don't really apply to this specific discussion.

2) If they decide to fish as fast as possible, then at least it's at least identical to the status quo :)

First, do no harm

Both of those premises are wrong. Privatizing policy and enforcement means there wouldn't be any reason to try to work on policing non-edible/non-profitable fish. It's a half-measure the would ensure no further progress.

Secondly, blessing "fish as fast as possible" as being within the rules, makes it an acceptable practice. It's the same way the clean water act protects polluters as long as they are within the acceptable limits. It doesn't matter if the acceptable limits still cause damage -- they are protected.

Finally, I'm not sure how private industry could enforce their policies in their section of the sea. Property right enforcement is one activity that even most libertarians believe the gov't needs to carry out. Some people state that is the only thing gov't should provide.

I'm fairly left and I'm not opposed to privatization at all. But...

The highest bidder can police the fish themselves. If they fail to police the fish, their ownership is revoked and the rights are re-auctioned.

Nice in theory, but in practice the highest bidder often ends up as such a strong political lobby that it prevails on government to do the policing, fights tooth-and-nail against quotas, and rights are almost never revoked. Coming from Ireland I remember fishing lobbyists being only slightly less powerful and vocal than the farming lobby and I see no reason to think that privatization will change this - it's been the same in every other coastal region I've ever lived.

As for revocation, consider the case of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company. In 1972 the US Department of the Interior bought the land the oyster farm is on and agreed a 40 year lease for the oyster farm, after which the plan was to shut everything down and let it revert to nature. Another company bought the farm in 2004, knowing full well the terms of the lease. When the lease ran out on schedule in 2012 they ran around seeking extensions via Congress and then suing the government. After having their case rejected, they're now preparing to appeal the matter to the Supreme Court. See http://www.marinij.com/ci_24909002/court-denies-drakes-bay-o...

Now, this is the opposite of your privatization scenario on its face as the government bought the land with the intent of creating a nature reserve, but it is a good example of a private actor voluntarily entering into a straightforward contractual arrangement with the government, much like the purchase of a fisheries license. 40 years is a pretty long lease period - well over a generation, more than enough time to plan for the economic dislocation of the lease expiration. But the leaseholder is fighting this like the injustice of the century, claiming that he had an expectation for lease renewal, the government is screwing him etc. Now I have no opinion about the oyster fishery itself (which I believe is well-run), nor do I think the department of the interior is necessarily great to do business with - for all I know they could have given the business owner a completely mistaken impression about the prospects of lease renewal. But the fact remains that the contractual arrangement was spelled out very clearly a long time ago, and losing your lease on a commercial property is the sort of thing that happens in business.

If a clear-cut case like this can end up dragging through the Supreme Court, I have little hope of more ambiguous and hard-to-score cases involving offshore fisheries being any better. Privatization alone is not the answer, although it is certainly a valid part of the answer. It won't work without onerous regulatory power as well.

And after the lawsuits, you may see PR companies employed to make an issue out of this before a local/state election and pressure a government to makes changes suiting the 2004 buyer.

You're totally correct that private interests can and do influence the political process!

One of the wonderful side effects of fishery privatization is the creation of a new lobby which does battle against the existing fish lobbies. See, the ultimate goal is to get less fish pulled from the ocean - at least in the short term until fish populations recover. So the fish lobbies are going to go absolutely insane! Imagine all of the out of work fishermen - and not only in Ireland, but Nigeria, Brazil, the Philippines, Indonesia: These are people who literally depend upon the overfishing and plundering of the ocean for their livelihoods.

These organizations (the fishermen, loosely) are already influencing the political process. They are one of the reasons why the current regulations utterly fail. [Remember: It's not as if we just noticed this overfishing problem yesterday. Governments have been trying to 'solve' this issue for decades using traditional statist regulations - and of course failing, predictably.]

We already know that privatization of food sources works in practice. All we've got to do is apply what works so incredibly well on land to the oceans.

Edit: Oh, and if the fish lobby gets the government to help with policing? That'd be great! [even if not ideal] Isn't the whole goal here to force 3rd world trawlers from pulling out too many fish? You're going to need a lot of guns to do that!

Edit2: We are completely fine with the government protecting private farms on land. What's wrong, philosophically, with government protection of private fisheries in the ocean?

We already know that privatization of food sources works in practice.

Seems like you skipped a step there. It works with quite varying degrees of success, not unlike regulation.

Edit2: We are completely fine with the government protecting private farms on land. What's wrong, philosophically, with government protection of private fisheries in the ocean?

Nothing, except not all of them are any given government's to give away (because you can fish in international waters), and because the task and costs involved are significantly different.

I'm not opposed to your idea, but you're hand-waving it as a panacea without thinking about the real issues. People have been doing this since the 1970s but we've still got a lot of problems, so it's clearly not a magic bullet. See for example http://cironline.org/reports/system-turns-us-fishing-rights-... (and no, I don't especially care about the corporations v. cottage industry frame, there's just some good summary information in the article).

1) Privatization of food sources is by far the most successful form of food production. All alternatives have provided inferior results, some catastrophically so (Cambodia under Khmer Rouge, etc. Ironically, the current international fishery management regime is not entirely unlike the collective farm practices of the Khmer Rouge!).

2) Due to the international nature of fisheries, they would have to be sold by the UN or another ad hoc international body. (The current regional-international fishery management orgs could probably work)

3) Catch shares are not related to fishery privatization. Catch shares are simply the most efficient method of carrying out traditional regulatory limits. The goal of fishery privatization is to turn around the fish population collapse, not sustain the collapse (which is what traditional regulation does).

Khmer Rouge comparisons? GMAFB.

It's a parenthetical side note :) Not part of my argument/position.

> If they fail to police the fish, their ownership is revoked and the rights are re-auctioned.

This is not actually privatization; it is just outsourcing regulatory authority. Under real privatization, private parties are free to waste the resources they own.

The theory is that they won't, since it would harm their long-term ability to create value. The reality is that individual humans only need so much money, so decision-makers are often perfectly willing to sacrifice long-term value as long as they, themselves, collect enough personal money in the short term.

If you privatize in this case, you basically say "I only care about the short term". End of story.

Quite the opposite!

>Under real privatization, private parties are free to waste the resources they own.

Exactly!

And without privatization, private parties are free to waste the resources everyone else owns.

Tragedy of the commons is where the price paid for a resource is merely the extraction cost. The cost of replacing the resource or losing it entirely is ignored.

Private property creates an incentive to preserve the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Some things, like fishing rights, can work to preserve resources while still allowing their use. It doesn't work with everything.

Either way, we are going to have to pay more than just the extraction cost if we expect a resource to continue. We are going to have to pay more for fish. Privately owned fishing rights forces action to prevent collapse. Without something like it, the collapse of the resource will surely force a higher price. Just not now, when it actually could help prevent the collapse.

You have mischaracterized the tragedy of the commons. These premises form an intellectualized rationale for crony capitalism, but your suggestion doesn't solve the tragedy of the commons.

Suppose that you hand over Yellowstone to some big company (say, Wal-mart) for a song, because they are politically connected. Now Yellowstone is not part of the commons, so there is no tragedy of the commons, right? No, you have only obscured the problem, but the problem remains. Because Wal-mart has no special interest in preserving it as a common good. If it makes the most money for them to sell Yellowstone piece by piece to ranchers and fast food franchises, or install a lot of fake geysers as if it were the Bellagio, they will do that for their profit, but that doesn't eliminate the negative externalities. Starting with how the land was handed over to someone connected, which is how this kind of intervention you suggest is frequently corrupted.

Just because you own something doesn't mean that you won't spoil it, let alone that you won't spoil things for other people with a legitimate interest if it happens to profit you. More ownership is not a silver bullet.

I think stretchwithme is actually fairly accurate in his portrayal of the tragedy of the commons. The key is the externalities must be internalized.

The problem arises where "privatization" is floated as the answer to a resource overconsumption situation, but where the property boundaries of what is privatized don't encompass the entire set of externalities. You nail this in your criticism of the hypothetical WalMart sale of Yellowstone: "Wal-mart has no special interest in preserving it as a common good." If that's the case, then what was privatized isn't the full set of externalities. And that's where Hardin's tidy solution starts getting messy.

If you're familiar with his works, you'll also note that a second essay of his addresses another challenge: "lifeboat ethics". While privatizing a commons (properly) can address the economic inefficiencies of privatized gains and socialized costs (banking, anyone), what it cannot do is fundamentally increase the carrying capacity of a resource beyond its absolute limits. Yes, it's possibly that privatization might lead to technical optimization, but some limits remain. And ultimately, the ability to provide for people (and ecosystems) has bounds.

There's also the challenge of properly valuing a resource over time, and that's a place where any market solution seems fundamentally limited, at least as presently implemented.

The future value of a resource is reflected in its resale value. Most people don't destroy their homes because they hope to resell them.

Of course, some resources have value simply because they exist. And nobody pays for the privilege of knowing or looking at them. A body of water provides such value to everybody that can look out the window at it.

If we did have ways to "own" the view, better decisions could be made about conflicting potential uses.

Whats clear to me is that deciding these things politically doesn't work well a lot of the time, especially in a system where lobbyists have so much influence.

The future value of a resource is reflected in its resale value.

No: the market's present assessment of an asset's future value with relation to the present state of the market is what its (re)sale price shows.

There is a difference between "price" and "value", and it's a long, long discussion. Smith reflects on it at length in Wealth of Nations, particularly the distinction between the "natural" and "market" prices of commodities: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm#link2H...

The longer discussion involves much of what is now called economic discourse prior to Smith, see generally Backhouse, The Ordinary Business of Life http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780691116297-1

In particular, the market can grossly overvalue items (bubbles), and it can put premiums on present consumption during times of crisis (e.g., burning books or artworks for their heat value in wartime).

And there are goods of immense value for which no or limited markets exist: air and water, in general (assuming you can capture these from the skies or collect them from the land).

I think resale value generally refers to its price.

I wanted to make explicit the distinction between "value" which can denote a range of concepts, and "price" which specifically refers to a sum of money. Since value itself is at question here.

Though yes, "market value" generally equates to "market price". And the pedants will note that "price" needn't be strictly limited to monetary assessments, though that's how I'm using the term here.

Thank god you were here.

Why stop there? You can thank my parents, God and Ayn Rand.

There are three ways to handle a resource.

You can allow it to be owned.

You can regulate its use, which is how the San Francisco Bay is managed.

Or you can do neither, which is how the San Francisco Bay used to be managed. Back when it was being filled in to create private property.

The last is clearly not good. One of the other options must be used or you can say good bye to a finite resource.

The Soviets employed the second option for everything, so that clearly doesn't work globally.

You mention national parks. There was a time when these parks were government owned but companies were allowed to extract resources for a song. In fact, that's still going on. So government ownership doesn't prevent crony capitalism.

As far as getting things for a song, again that is crony capitalism, which is totally a product of how we elect our leaders. That is a separate problem that won't be fixed by preventing private ownership of a resource.

You may still ruin a resource that you own, but if you paid a fair price for it, you are destroying your own net worth in the process. When people loot an owned or regulated resource, they suffer no such direct loss.

> Private property creates an incentive to preserve the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Not really. Private property is about ownership, not maintenance. We've already seen that privatization isn't generally enough to encapsulate the negative externalities an activity generates. Further, we've actually seen that in some cases privatization creates for new negative externalities or incentives to ignore negative externalities.

Private property in a case like this can also, and perhaps to a higher degree, create an incentive to put the squeeze on it, pump it dry, cash out, and start a business somewhere else in 5 years.

Imagining that self-interest alone creates outcomes that are morally right, or that make sense long term, is a terribly common fallacy.

>"They told us that his was just a small fraction of one day's by-catch. That they were only interested in tuna and to them, everything else was rubbish. It was all killed, all dumped. They just trawled that reef day and night and stripped it of every living thing."

This makes me sick. So sad to see such waste and disregard for the ecosystem.

Indeed, and not to mention, depending on the by-catch, the stuff they're throwing away more be more valuable than what they're targeting, pound for pound, in different markets.

That is to say, just because you're fishing for tuna and pulled up aji doesn't mean you've wasted your time. There is a great market for aji, and to be honest, you'd pay more for it in a sushi restaurant in my town than you would 90% of the meat in a yellow fin.

By-catch is becoming a big deal as a general restaurant issue on the gulf coast.[0] A lot of people have been pushing bycatch as delicacies in local restaurants. Just last week, a chef prepared us several courses of bycatch as sashimi or aged, depending on the fish - including scorpionfish and blue runner. I definitely would not have had a better lunch if he brought out tuna and snapper. (And wouldn't have ordered them, either.)

[0] - http://www.edibleaustin.com/index.php/food-2/cookingfresh/97...

Reading stories like this are incredibly depressing. I love the ocean and aquatic ecosystems, always have. I grew up fishing and boating and still spend as much time as I can on those hobbies. I moved from Ohio to Maine in large part to be by the Ocean. I wish there was more that I could do to help affect real change. I volunteer, I try to be as environmentally friendly as possible, and I support a lot of different conservation groups but what I wish was that there was an open source like community to help with the science and education. I mean I would gladly help to contribute to some thing like that. For me that's worth more than chasing all the startup success in the world.

Maybe it's worthwhile to spend more time and brains on saving our environment. At least until we are able to leave this planet. Which I don't see in the near future. We are able to walk on the moon, build atom bombs and heal deadly diseases. Are we smart enough to not destroy this planet?

No. We are too greedy on the whole to avoid slowly destroying it.

And even when we can leave this planet, we should still endeavour to keep Earth as well as we can.

Maybe this is the answer to Fermi's Paradox.

You may care to read the discussions from previous submissions:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ocean+broken

This is a great story--unfortunately, it's just that, a story.

It's not surprising to me that there are people recklessly over-fishing, but without any numbers, no government can take action to stop it.

On a tangential point, earth-life has survived five mass-extinction events, and a future one is almost certain. This doesn't negate the tragic, useless destruction of life, but the earth itself--and some form of life on it--will endure.

Is this supposed to make me feel better? I'm real happy for the earth surviving and all, but I want to survive too, and I want people to survive. A philosophy of, "The earth will survive though we'll be gone—and maybe that will be justice," is ridiculous, because if we're gone, who will be left to celebrate the justice? Justice lies in the conscious mind, and if the conscious mind is gone, justice goes too.

It isn't supposed to make you feel better at all; just to make you aware of the fact that the Earth will probably survive even if you, me and all of our descendents don't.

Not in the slightest. It is the conscious mind that gives meaning to the world around it. There is no splendor in nature that is not in the eyes of those watching it. We have seen no evidence of any intelligence beyond our own. If we die, all meaning goes out of the world.

Ironically, this is the same foolish anthropocentric sentiment that is preventing most people to care about the environment. Congrats, you're part of the problem.

I care about the environment, because it supports humanity. If at any point it fails to do so, whether by its own shifting or by our destruction of it, our course of action should not be to sit back and say "Oh well, I guess our death is for the greater good of the universe.". Our duty would then be to grasp the environment and mold it to best suit our needs.

Dolphins and whales, hopefully. But they're most likely gone long before us.

> On a tangential point, earth-life has survived five mass-extinction events, and a future one is almost certain.

We are actually right in the middle of it.

Plenty of data...

http://www.conservationgateway.org/ExternalLinks/Pages/estim...

Reviewing the situation in 54 countries and on the high seas, we estimate that lower and upper estimates of the total value of current illegal and unreported fishing losses worldwide are between $10 bn and $23.5 bn annually, representing between 11 and 26 million tonnes. Our data are of sufficient resolution to detect regional differences in the level and trend of illegal fishing over the last 20 years, and we can report a significant correlation between governance and the level of illegal fishing. Developing countries are most at risk from illegal fishing, with total estimated catches in West Africa being 40% higher than reported catches. Such levels of exploitation severely hamper the sustainable management of marine ecosystems. Although there have been some successes in reducing the level of illegal fishing in some areas, these developments are relatively recent and follow growing international focus on the problem

http://news.discovery.com/earth/oceans/oceans-fish-fishing-i...

- Fishless oceans could be a very real possibility by 2050.

- According to the UN, 30 percent of fish stocks have already collapsed.

- One billion people, mostly from poorer countries, rely on fish as their main animal protein source.

The world faces the nightmare possibility of fishless oceans by 2050 without fundamental restructuring of the fishing industry, UN experts said Monday.

"If the various estimates we have received... come true, then we are in the situation where 40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish," Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN Environment Program's green economy initiative, told journalists in New York.

http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/oceans-without-fi...

This estimate is similar to other recent estimates of the impact of overfishing, but really gains new resonance in light of the recent politicized CITES meeting which, due entirely to political pressure from Japan and other nations prioritizing short term financial gain over all else, failed to ban trade in the critically endangered bluefin tuna. At current catch rates (four times the official quota due to illegal, often Mafia-backed, fishing) Atlantic bluefin will be extinct in less than three years.

Overall, the report says that 30% of world fish stocks have already collapsed--meaning yielding less than 10% of their historic potential--with only 25% having healthy numbers of fish, and these are only the less desirable species.

As to one major factor contributing to the decline, the report says government subsidies encouraging bigger fleets is to blame. Annually $27 billion in subsidies, mainly from wealthy countries, are doled out. That compares to the entire value of fish caught being $85 billion.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120920-are-we-running-out-...

Last year, global fish consumption hit a record high of 17 kg (37 pounds) per person per year, even though global fish stocks have continued to decline. On average, people eat four times as much fish now than they did in 1950.

Around 85% of global fish stocks are over-exploited, depleted, fully exploited or in recovery from exploitation. Only this week, a report suggested there may be fewer than 100 cod over the age of 13 years in the North Sea between the United Kingdom and Scandinavia. The figure is still under dispute, but it’s a worrying sign that we could be losing fish old enough to create offspring that replenish populations.

Large areas of seabed in the Mediterranean and North Sea now resemble a desert – the seas have been expunged of fish using increasingly efficient methods such as bottom trawling. And now, these heavily subsidised industrial fleets are cleaning up tropical oceans too. One-quarter of the EU catch is now made outside European waters, much of it in previously rich West African seas, where each trawler can scoop up hundreds of thousands of kilos of fish in a day. All West African fisheries are now over-exploited, coastal fisheries have declined 50% in the past 30 years, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/20/ipso-2011-ocean-rep...

If the current actions contributing to a multifaceted degradation of the world's oceans aren't curbed, a mass extinction unlike anything human history has ever seen is coming, an expert panel of scientists warns in an alarming new report.

The preliminary report from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) is the result of the first-ever interdisciplinary international workshop examining the combined impact of all of the stressors currently affecting the oceans, including pollution, warming, acidification, overfishing and hypoxia.

“The findings are shocking," Dr. Alex Rogers, IPSO's scientific director, said in a statement released by the group. "This is a very serious situation demanding unequivocal action at every level. We are looking at consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime, and worse, our children's and generations beyond that."

The scientific panel concluded that degeneration in the oceans is happening much faster than has been predicted, and that the combination of factors currently distressing the marine environment is contributing to the precise conditions that have been associated with all major extinctions in the Earth's history.

Well this is the main reason I prefer to buy farm raised fish. It might not do much to help the eco system, or my health, but I feel at least the fish I am eating was raised with the purpose of being eaten. Further, I find it rather gross that fishermen essentially "throw away" everything they don't want.

It does help. In terms of output farmed fish are far and away the most efficient of livestock. It's been a few years, but if I recall correctly farmed tilapia produce 1kg per 1.1kg of feed. That's incredible compared to beef or even chicken.

Also, encouraging well run fish farming operations takes pressure off of the wild stocks. In terms of eating meat, you're doing it right.

A few years ago, I was at the local natural food market and I overheard the manager explaining to a customer that the store did not and would not ever carry farm raised fish. He explained how farmed fish lived in horrible conditions and that the only moral and sustainable option is to only buy free range fish which were caught from the ocean, where fish were part of their proper ecosystem.

From an intellectual, sustainability standpoint, I suspect that you are right and that farmed fish is the way to go. However, this is why I've completely factored guilt and morality out of my environmental decisions - No matter what I do, one of the employees at the natural food store will tell me that I'm killing the planet.

Sadly, that's not free of problems either. At least with open-net farming, the disease and sea lice can cause decreases in wild populations as well. Some of the mortality rates are really depressing.

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/business/story.html?...

Well we can start by taking pictures of it instead of just writing walls of text about it hoping the average person will read about it and care.

Here's what pisses me off. Guy writes about how devastated the ocean is, doesn't take a single picture. The only photo in the whole article is him and his boat.

I noticed the same. Come on man, billions of pieces of trash? How about snapping a few pictures to bring more fire to the discussion? Nah...

A writer interviewed the boatie. It was likely published in print first where space is at a premium and/or only supported by the advertising at hand (they don't just add extra pages). Then online editors or lackies put up the story. News at that level and with that heritage is not at the level where they think like many of the rest of us on the net - e.g., add a gallery, etc.

Even the Great Pacific garbage patch page on Wikipedia has no photos - the cross-section of people out there able to take photos and people likely to be editing Wikipedia don't seem to cross.

You can see some on Google Images though I suspect that many are general garbage-in-water photos: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=great+pacific+garbage+pat...

A picture of the garbage patch would look like any other picture of the open ocean. Many of these problems are not visible to the naked eye.

I really wish this story had had more pictures. It's a shame that all this is happening and no one seems to be really documenting it with photos and video and these images aren't being shown with these stories.

Apparently, there is nothing to see anways

What a tragedy :(

Same here - I was expecting to see at least a picture of the tsunami debris they mention.

It is changing, like everything, adopting to having less fish and animals. Interface is changing, it is becoming hostile with human life, more demanding and unforgiving, reflecting us in every step and way.

"What can I do? I am only one person?", throws plastic wrapping against the wind.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world (or the ocean). Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

May Ms. Mead be with us always.

I agree that we need to sound the alarm.

December 2013, North Atlantic Ocean between Florida, Bermuda, and the Eastern Caribbean: nearly devoid of sea birds and fish; plastic garbage common.

January 2014, Coastal Everglades of Florida: silent. No birdsong. None.

February 2014, Florida Bay and the Keys: enough lobster pots that you could walk from Cape Sable to Key West without getting your shoes wet. This is absolutely not a sustainable fishery--this is an unmitigated rape of the planet for the almighty dollar, even inside the supposedly protected waters of the marine sanctuary.

This prompted me to do some googling and I found this:

http://www.oceanhealthindex.org/

Does anybody here have knowledge about this organization?

The ocean will recover after we're gone. Or after we've managed to put an end to poverty and educate everyone, though this seems an extremely distant dream.

I am really interested in companies like this: www.cleanseas.com.au that are trying to breed fish on their own. They still need to grow them in the ocean. Not sure of the cost to get there, but interesting none the less.

"Sailing" on Google Trends. Going down (generally) over the last 10 years.

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=sailing

What would go into building a vessel designed to remove all the junk from the ocean? How would it capture and process the waste?

There was (and maybe still is) a project to build an open-source low-power autonomous robot to clean up oil spills. https://sites.google.com/a/opensailing.net/protei/

Not sure if still active. Presumably, you could build something to pick up trash in general.

Bigger issue though is the trawling -- junk or no junk, trawling is incredibly devastating to the ecosystem.

I was curious about a ship designed to clean up the wreckage after a tsunami or the pacific garbage.

If the ocean is really broken and all the fish are gone, how come the amount of fish caught has not declined dramatically?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_fish_production

This story is anecdotal. Actual data would be better.

This is the fallacy that led to the collapse of the Atlantic northwest cod fishery. Regulators assumed that cod catches would start to drop long before the number of cod dropped to unsustainable numbers. This didn't happen. The number of cod caught remained stable until it collapsed.

What they didn't account for in their models is that cod are schooling fish, so the local density of them remains constant even as the global density is dropping. Ships would have to travel further to find cod, but provided they found them they would keep catching the same number until that region was exhausted, and they would move on. This meant that regulators were blind to the fact that the number of cod schools was dropping.

The same thing is likely happening with other fish, but due to whole ocean areas being devastated rather than schooling. So long as each boat can find some area of the ocean that is still alive, they will catch the same number of fish, until there aren't any areas of the ocean still living.

A similar scenario is likely with fossil fuels re: declining EROEI. There is always more oil, but as we use up the easy oil the harder oil takes more and more energy to get. This is hidden though, as the process will just scale and scale and use more and more energy to get the same amount of oil.

... until it can't do that anymore and production collapses. This will happen when overall system EROEI drops below some unknown threshold, probably 5-10X.

In any iterated debate between an economist and a physicist the economist will be right N-1 times and the physicist will be right once.

There is always more oil

I know what you mean by that. And yet I've got a problem with the phrase. What it suggests is "there's is always more oil ... available for useful extraction". And that isn't the case. Yes, there's more in the ground, but (as your EROEI argument says) there is a decidedly limited amount of feasibly extractable oil, and once that limit is reached, there is no more useful oil in the ground. The key being "useful".

I like your "iterated debate" quip.

That's exactly what I mean... energetically profitable oil.

I know. It's ... trying to marshal the argument in the most effective way possible.

A friend pointed me at a 1978 address Milton Friedman made on energy policy. It ... boils my blood (I'm not a Friedman fan): http://fixyt.com/watch?v=hj1974Ek4nw

It starts out relatively well: Friedman is quoting W.S. Jevons. And then he repeatedly simply asserts "he's wrong". And equivocates Jevons being mistaken in other predictions (which are pretty vaguely unspecified) with being wrong on this one. Etc., etc. I've been watching and reading a bit more of Friedman recently, and what I'm realizing is that 1) his biggest tools aren't factual ones but rhetorical ones, and that 2) he really likes making his debating opponent look dumb, even when the opponent is expressing views, however poorly, that Friedman himself supports. Makes me find him all the more non-credible in general.

Nailing down the language of peak oil seems somewhat useful. So I wasn't picking on you so much as trying to clarify (mostly to myself) what in the "there'll always be more oil" phrase bothers me.

Not sure which fallacy you refer to. I'm just trying to understand what is actually known about this issue and what is just anecdote like the OP.

I know about the collapse of the cod catch in 1992[1] as well as declining catch of some species of tuna in some areas[2]. On the other hand some fisheries have come back after they supposedly collapsed, such as the BC sockeye salmon[3]. And since the overall catch is roughly flat any losses must have been made up by increases in other species. Right?

So I guess we are talking about a prediction for future global collapse. Is there good academic research on this? What is the specific forecast? What data do they use in their forecast?

The best academic article I could find is this[4] from UCSB and seems to say we generally don't have enough information to make forecasts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_North...

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20100327022746/http://www.iss-fou...

[3] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/bc-sock...

[4] http://www.pnas.org/content/110/40/15859

The fallacy is that global fish production is related to the quantity of fish in the ocean. That number won't drop until after its too late.

Technology and techniques likely improving would surely be a factor? Fish finders, trawl eyes, larger craft (super trawlers, etc). The net on a supertrawler is now 500+ metres long which is obscene.

Here's some data

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7190706

Thanks arstra! Lots of good leads there. I'm still wondering where the forecasts come from, like UNEP's "no fish in the ocean in 2050". I can't find any academic paper detailing these kinds of forecasts. The UNEP's published report is not so extreme and seems at odds with continued production rates.

http://www.unep.org/greeneconomy/Portals/88/documents/ger/3....

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