https://www.pulsefishing.eu/what-is-pulse-fishing/techniques

If it doesn't destroy the plants too, it probably ~is better for the ecosystem than what it's replacing, but if aliens come and start dragging electrocution nets over human cities to electrocute us all, we won't be able to say we didn't have it coming.

NOAA states:

>Fishermen sometimes catch and discard animals they do not want, cannot sell, or are not allowed to keep.

There’s a huge difference in not allowed to keep and we would keep for ourselves. If you’re netting a bunch of undersized fish you have to release them, I catch lots of undersized fish I’d love to eat but I’m not legally allowed to.

https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/insight/understanding-bycatch

Not exactly. Bycatch becomes energy diverted towards the scavengers part of the trophic chain. They are feeding other animals with it.

What a dark future: "Bluefun tuna is extinct in the wild but you can still eat it from Mitsubishi"

And then: "Today the last bluefin tuna in the history of the world was sold for $20M to a billionaire."

Something like that...

Read up on the Simon/Ehrlich wager. Nobody knows the future, but your professor was demonstrating a solid economic principle.

And if we found alternatives to Tuna, it doesn’t mean that other species like sharks and Orca can.

Economically, mining is exploitation of any resource on a basis which fails to account for the full ecological formation costs of that resource.

In the case of petroleum, we can look at one ecological cost: time.

Petroleum formed over a period of hundreds of millions of years. It's been extracted by humans for a couple of hundred years. Even on napkin math, the time cost is being discounted by on the order of one million fold.

If the resource were so vast that it could not be meaningfully exhausted, this wouldn't be an issue. But we've hit peak conventional oil within numerous major producer countries, and quite probably the world, which corresponds to roughly half the total exploitable resource having been exhausted.

The economic theory most often mentioned for pricing of nonrenewable resources is Hotelling's Rule, formulated in 1932. I've read that paper numerous times, and the fact that strikes me most about it is that although it cites earlier economic works and numerous references of the author himself, it cites absolutely no scientific, geological, or petrochemical references. It's utterly devoid of any real-world grounding.

And we have pricing data to invalidate it, one of the most comprehensive being crude oil prices dating to 1870 or so. That's published as part of BP's Annual Statistical Review of Energy, showing both nominal and inflation-adjusted prices.

What's clear is that price does not follow the trend predicted by Hotelling, but rather reflects, at various times, unrestrained extraction (when the price collapses), various catellisations and embargos (when it peaks), and several periods of long-term managed output, during which it remains quite nearly constant. The longest and most stable such period was from the early 1930s to the early 1970s, following the establishment of regulated extraction in the United States (at the time the world's peak, and surplus-capacity, provider of oil).

Immediately prior to this period, following major discoveries and unregulated extraction in East Texas, the price fell from a target $1/bbl to $0.13/bbl, and finally as low as $0.02/bbl. The rational for pricing wasn't Hotelling's model, but the bare minimum price required to meet marginal costs of extraction.

More recently, in the 2000s and 2010s, what's emerged has been the flip side of demand destruction, where prices of oil can rise to the point that economic activity can't support them, and demand collapses, with it ultimately price (as more expensive marginal wells are withdrawn from production). Price has see-sawed between highs as the global economy surged, and lows, as it collapsed. Sometimes exogenously as with the 2020 global COVID pandemic, which saw US spot futures prices fall negative briefly at contracts expired and delivery had to be made --- there was no available storage and traders paid to have their oil offloaded.

The upshot is that extractive commodity prices don't behave as one might expect during periods of exhaustion. Rather than rising monotonically, they'll jump around on thin trading, surges in supply and demand, and external influences.

If you want less of something, don't subsidize it.

> Tax the caught fish

How would you tax the bycatch?

How would you price the dead whales, dolphins and turtles?

How would you price the sharks dying because the populations of fish are collapsing?

As earlier responses have noted, this is an exceedingly common misperception. It further fails to acknowledge harms done.

Estimates are that upwards of 90% of all marine animal life has been destroyed largely by human activity.

Vast fisheries have utterly collapsed, notably Grand Banks cod off Newfoundland, sardines off California, orange roughy, and more. Surviving fisheries are hugely impacted, often with both far fewer and far smaller individuals than in historical records.

Records and understand themselves are exceptionally limited, as major scientific study of the oceans dates only to the mid-20th century, after which much of the harm had already been done.

A fascinating trivium is that there is more oil floating in tankers over the oceans than there are fish swimming in it.

And, as myshpa noted, the deep oceans tend not to have much biological activity. Fish (and plankton) aggregate near continental boundaries where upwelling provides essential nutrients. Sunshine and water alone are vastly insufficient.

Map of global fisheries / fish stocks: <https://www.theglobaleducationproject.org/earth/fisheries-an...>

State of fisheries: <https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-2/fisheries/state-of-fis...>

Notably this map showing sustainable- / over-exploitation status: <https://worldoceanreview.com/en/files/2013/04/wor2_c3a_s52_3...>

In general, you tend to find much more biomass and biodiversity closer to the coasts. But you can get hotspots of productivity in other places such as upwelling regions and also near seamounts (shameless plug of my paper on this)."

"People assume, well oceans are massive so fish stocks are massive as well. But if you went hunting for game as a protein source you wouldn't assume it lives at the top of every mountain and bottom of every valley. You know it has a range that confines its distribution and therefore its abundance. You dont go hunting across the vast, empty desert.

Commercial fisheries know this and are squeezing the last bits they can out of the pelagic fish we all expect on the dinner table (tuna, mahi, etc), but as you aptly point out, the majority of fisheries biomass is near the coast. Fish we eat do not come from habitat that covers 70% of the planet, its much closer to < 10 %."

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/imu81a/if_you_p...

https://www.sciencealert.com/there-s-a-desert-in-the-middle-...

The ocean is really big and was teeming with life.

There, fixed it for you

Yeah I absolutely don't agree. I don't believe it can be done at scale - but it can be done. Watch a channel like Harry's Farm on youtube - guy basically has cattle on moors where nothing else could possibly grow - they just stay there all year, eat grass, then one day they get slaughtered. There is nothing about farming them this way that's unsustainable.

>>The only sane and ethical response to this devastation is to completely reject the economic exploitation of animals - to adopt a fully vegan philosophy.

I think you might be getting too much of that "greenwashed" propaganda yourself friend.

We should be fighting against factory farming with all our might, and especially the US is a sad place when it comes to animal rights. But going out and saying it can't be done sustainably is a lie peddled by people who either literally can't imagine how it can be done, or who don't want to see it. I believe meat can be sustainably produced, but it should be reflected in its cost - people shouldn't be eating meat 3x times a day because it's so cheap.

I eat a lot of eggs. 100% of my eggs and the occasional chicken come from my parents, who, with twelve chickens, produce an insane surplus of eggs, letting them eat whatever bugs they find and feeding them scraps.

People will argue this isn't scalable, and maybe it isn't. But the price of my beef suggests it is underutilized at this time. Certainly more rural and semirural people could keep chickens. I would favor this alternative anyway, since industrial-scale food production isn't just inhumane, it produces inferior products that are subject to enormous risks and shocks as producers race to centralize and become more and more efficient. You don't want hyperefficiency in your food supply. Hyperefficiency means fragility.

Massive industrialized agriculture is its own ecological disaster. The farming of corn for ethanol (!!!) and the massive, endless fields of soybeans and canola in the US midwest (foods eaten by almost no American a few decades ago) are permanently destroying the ecology of nearly half the US. It's annihilating topsoil at alarming rates, eradicated huge swaths of natural wildlife, and filled watersheds with massive amounts of fertilizer and pesticides which are then contributing to killing all the fish. You see how we've come full circle.

Do you know what would be great and sustainable for the midwest? Fill the plains with cows. For thousands of years, they were filled with ruminants. The cows must be kept in tightly packed herds to emulate their behavior when predators are present. This will regenerate the topsoil, as that's what formed much of it in the first place, and end the flow of poison into the waterways. I'm not opposed to returning the buffalo instead, if you prefer.

You talk about greenwashing - that's a big part of the push behind veganism. Obviously there's sincere people like you, but there's a lot of money in producing highly processed foods and (soon) artificial meat. Highly processed foods (besides being a health disaster) can be easily produced via "food science" from relatively stable, controllable inputs, which animals are not. They are much easier to scale, which is where the real money comes from when you're selling commodities. Frequently, even when one input does become a problem, it can be replaced with no obvious impact to the consumer.

It's not about taking a holistic look what what we need to do ecologically and environmentally, which would include meat. It's about cash.

> fated to death from birth

Everything born into this world will die. That's nothing special about livestock.

What really works for ocean policy is putting informed experts in charge of global regulations and everyone adhering to the rules under strict observation and penalties. It’s just really hard to get those institutions setup.

There’s an opportunity to use the existing UNCLOS framework to establish rules around commercial fishing operations, but they’ve been stalled for years. Likely because China is the worst offender and currently disputes a lot of the rules around sea/ocean territory given their interests in their immediate maritime spaces.

Wildlife isn't owned by anybody. Contrast this with cows. Cows are in no danger of extinction, despite mass slaughter of them.

You may be disappointed to learn that lucrative radioactive sludge cover opportunities are quite hard to find in today's market.

You're right the fishing right zones need to account for fish migration paths etc.

2) I paid more than I’d like so the US could buy the biggest guns.

So, we may as well save the fish.

https://yourveganfallacyis.com/en/animals-eat-animals

> They have a relatively peaceful, predation, free life after which you consume them

https://yourveganfallacyis.com/en/humane-meat

We eventually saved the mother, but that donkey was truly scarred. For about two years, I would of said that donkey was clinically depressed. It really changed my perspective on just how intelligent animals actually are, and I’m sure they feel complex emotions just like us.

That distress has to get into the milk; this is one of the pathways of epigenetic regulation -- meaning the distress is heritable, and may impact cross-species.

And it is a completely unneccessary practice. See https://ec.europa.eu/eip/agriculture/en/find-connect/project...

On this farm, calves are kept with cows for 5 months after birth.

80% of the population will starve to death if we do this. Is that what you want?

Very little food is air-freighted; it accounts for only 0.16% of food miles.

Many of the foods people assume to come by air are actually transported by boat – avocados and almonds are prime examples. Shipping one kilogram of avocados from Mexico to the United Kingdom would generate ... only around 8% of avocados’ total footprint. Even when shipped at great distances, its emissions are much less than locally-produced animal products.

https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

The idea that continuing to live is a personal decision is tempting as a part of a moral code (Ayn Rand takes this idea to absurd conclusions, for example.), but depression/suffering must be ~extremely severe for people to get over their self-preservation instinct. You are ~not, in any meaningful way, making a conscious decision to continue living for the rest of your natural life. You never gave consent to be in the situation you're in as a human being, and the animals you're raising ~certainly didn't.

It’s not a great example of an effective policy response.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_fishing_in_Newfoundland

Cod stocks collapsed in the early 1990s, with a moratorium on fishing enacted in 1993. It took until 2011 for signs to show that the ecosystem was recovering.

The Atlantic cod industry waves hi.

Or, it would, if there was still an Atlantic cod industry.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Historical-Atlantic-cod-...

    Anglers have an enormous impact on fish and wildlife stocks.

https://www.leeoceans.org/initiatives/ptlobos-tire-removal

Literally nothing needs to change except stop growing a low value crop. Charging for water would have the same effect.

Outside of New Orleans, the only other useful preparation of catfish is pet food.