Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not so simple - farmed fish produce a lot of waste in a very small area, which pollutes the water. There are also serious welfare issues with fish farming - for example, horrible mechanical and chemical treatments of salmon to remove lice, high use of antibiotics, terrible life expectancy of feeder-fish (which are introduced to eat lice off of salmon), poor environmental conditions for the fish (largely because…
I don't want to be all doom and gloom, and should add that some of these problems are potentially solvable, even if the solutions themselves have trade-offs. For example, aquaculture can be moved offshore to large farm, mobile farm vessels, so the pollution is spread about instead of being concentrated at a small section of coastline. These vessels are new though, and an accident or freak weather even could result in…
Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?
131–140 of 143 posts
Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its a very intriguing and sensitive subject that I personally don’t think is a waste of time and there is an awful lot more to the documentary than the first 20 mins.
It is an interesting topic, I don't disagree, I just really didn't like the presenter's style.
Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?
#133It's quite easy to see a pattern. Same pattern appeared for Cowspiracy [0] and a similar one for The Game Changers [1]. The same pattern can be seen with regards to pandemic warnings before this one. There's a very strong tendency to do business-as-usual and it's my non-optimistic belief that we will experience empty oceans and complete ecosystem collapse in our lifetime. These events are white swans (just like the p…
> will experience empty oceans and complete ecosystem collapse in our lifetime. This made me feel very uneasy. I believe this is the most important topic of our lifetime, as much as climate change is a major issue, retaining and preserving biodiversity and its 4 billion years of knowledge is surely just as important.
Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?
#134Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
It exists in plenty of places. The problem is that it's buried under denialist crap, and refutations of denialist crap. We should be teaching it in schools. When you try, the denialists demand equal time. In exactly the same way that the creationists demand equal time, because it's exactly the same people. I cannot win on this. I've simply accepted the loss. I get through my life by not talking to conspiracy theorist…
For what it's worth, as a kid in late 1980s California public schools, I do remember learning about the basics of the Greenhouse effect and why it would likely become a problem in our lifetimes, sometime between 4th and 6th grades, I think. This was in the era of Deukmejian and Wilson as governors, when California was still run by Republicans. I have no idea if that still gets taught, or how much of an effect it had…
Not in France (where academia has always been "left", which in US units of measure is approx. "deep communism") - it is more than the deniers are more visible / have simpler analogies.
Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are picking small fish from the depths of sea that don't want to be picked. I don't imagine this would be way harder. We just need someone willing to pay for it. Maybe we should not allow companies to sell another fishing net unless customer brings the damage one back for exchange? Maybe soft drinks should be sold this way as well? If you are packaging something, you can't sell a packaged good unless you take in u…
Maybe we are picking small fish, but not with cargo ships. I'd be all for a system with deposits like you describe. Most coke bottle here in Scandinavia at least do have a deposit fee, but it's not significant enough for anyone except children and the homeless to care.
And we should let them figure out what to do with the used bottles. Initially they'll probably resell the used bottles immediately and pass the price onto the consumers. But this will provide solid income stream to recycling companies and some innovative solutions might emerge how to reduce waste or make it more managable.
Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?
#137Are we destroying the biggest ecosystem on the planet or are we not? That's the only question that matters everything else is just nitpicking.
Exactly. Answer is yes. But some still make money from it and have lobbyists running in circles around politicians. So prolly not much will happen. In the mean while: just eat plants directly.
What plants should I eat that are eaten by sheep and goats?
Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn't really fly unfortunately. Eat vegan/vegetarian and you will have a minimal impact, that is what you see/hear everywhere. But in the meanwhile these new vegan/vegetarian companies are a huge cause of the deforestation of the Amazon [1]. The amount of vegan/vegetarian food necessary to actually get the same amount of nutrients are on a different planet and simple math shows that it wouldn't even work if we…
> Eat vegan/vegetarian and you will have a minimal impact This is mostly true. You could maybe have a "mostly rice + meat once a month diet" that has less impact than a vegan diet rich in Impossible/Beyond meat and avocados. But apart from comparisons of "outliers" this statement true. > But in the meanwhile these new vegan/vegetarian companies are a huge cause of the deforestation of the Amazon [1] Might be so, but…
I eat lots of dairy, particularly yogurt, mainly from sheep and goats (when I'm in Greece where it's available) and cheese. I eat meat maybe once or twice a week and eggs about the same.
Most of the meat I eat is from sheep and goats also (Greece doesn't grow much beef and about 80% of our dairy is made from sheep and goat's milk).
I think all of what you say above is targeted to people who grew up and live in another part of the world than myself, a part of the world where the word for "meat" means "food" [2], where a "meal" is commonly understood to include meat, and where "meat" is commonly understood to mean "beef". I think this because I see in your comment (although this is in response to the OP) that you are talking about how soy is used to feed cows for beef.
The inefficiency you point out, of "feed(ing) plants to animals" pertains to beef, not sheep, goat, or pig meat. The latter are meats of animals that eat plants (and, er, other things, when it comes to pigs [3]) that cannot be eaten by humans. For instance, the vast majority of sheep and goat's meat production in Greece is from animals that graze freely in the spring and summer and are fed hey in the winter. When grazing freely, their diet consists of wild grasses [4] that are inedible to humans.
To be perfectly honest I don't know how sheep and goats are raised in other parts of the world, but my understanding is that they mostly graze freely also, although there are different races of sheep and goats in different countries, for example Greek ones are mostly raised for their milk and meat and not for their wool (which is not normally used).
What I'm trying to say is that, personally, as a Greek person, I feel that you and others should learn to restrict the scope of your advise to "please be vegan", and generally of your advise to change dietary habbits to harm the environment less, to the people from those places in the world that are really causing the problem with industrial beef production and over-consumption. Your indiscriminate encouragement to "please be vegan" sounds to my Greek self as unfair and unnecessary, and ill-informed to boot.
Think for a second please, how unfair it sounds to hear your plea to "go vegan" for the environment when I have eaten most of my life a diet that by all intents and purposes is "plant-based" (i.e. not exlusively, but predominantly made of plant matter) and where most of the meat comes from free-grazing animals and produces less than half of the greenhouse gas emissions of beef [5]. The environmental destruction that you are rightly concerned about is caused by the dietary excesses of others, but _I_ have to forego the little meat I eat to save the environment that those others are destroying with their overconsumption? Like I say, this is blatantly and infuriatingly unfair.
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[1] https://www.thenomadicvegan.com/the-nomadic-vegans-guide-to-...
[2] https://www.etymonline.com/word/meat
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_toilet#/media/File:Green_g...
[4] Happy to dig into my refs to list species - but Greece has an amazing biodiversity that includes a vast richess of different grasses, which in fact comes out in our sheep and goat's meat and dairy products. When I eat sheep's meat in the UK, where I stay most of the time, it feels to me bland and tasteless. And don't let me start on the dairy.
[5] https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-footprint-food-methane
Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?
#139Both cowspiracy and seaspiracy, received a lot of critics and fact check by prominence professors. "oversimplifies a complex issue", so why don't try to explain it to us? Instead of criticizing and discrediting real issues that we're going to face in a few years. Ah, they're quoting multiple times professor X and study Y without links or reference... I'm not a Netflix fan/users, but I saw those documentaries and I re…
Note that this is the BBC's turn of phrase, not a quote from one of the interviewed experts.
As to the studies mentioned in the BBC article, most of those are the ones cited in Seaspiracy itself. The BBC seems to have asked the authors of the studies to comment on how their findings were represented by Seaspiracy.
In the case of Cowspiracy (the prequel, so to speak) there have been careful analyses of the claims in that documentary. From wikipedia:
>> Doug Boucher, reviewing the film for the Union of Concerned Scientists, disputed the film's assertion that 51% of global greenhouse gases are caused by animal agriculture. Boucher describes the 51% figure as being sourced from a 2009 Worldwatch Institute report by Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang,[18] not from a peer-reviewed scientific paper. Boucher asserted methodological flaws in Goodland and Anhang's logic, and said that the scientific community formed a consensus that global warming is primarily caused by humanity's burning of fossil fuels.[1] Boucher stated that the scientific consensus is that livestock contribute 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions - far lower than the 51% stated by the film.[1] Boucher's review concludes: "Movies like Cowspiracy aren’t believable, not only because of how they twist the science, but also because of what they ask us to believe: that the fossil fuel industry—the ExxonMobils of the world—aren’t the main cause of global warming... and that thousands of scientists have covered up the truth about the most important environmental issue of our time."[1]
>> (...)
>> A 2018 peer-reviewed meta-analysis estimates that the food supply chain is responsible for 26% of annual anthropogenic GHG emissions. Within the food supply chain, animal products (including fish farms) account for 56-58% of GHGs,[3] implying that animal products account for roughly 15% of total anthropogenic GHG emissions.[23][24] In a 2019 erratum to the meta-analysis, the avoided annual greenhouse gas emissions arising from a "no animal products" scenario are estimated at 28% of the total, which includes 8.1 Gt CO2 of removal by trees regrowing on land no longer required for livestock.[25]
>> A 2019 Forbes article quotes Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize winner and former U.S. Secretary of Energy, stating: “Let me say it again: agriculture and land-use generates more greenhouse gas emissions than power generation." The article references the 2009 Worldwatch Institute article that estimates livestock are responsible for at least 51% of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions.[26]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowspiracy
No doubt, a similar careful analysis of Seaspiracy will follow at some point. The BBC is probably not that interested in a careful analysis anyway.
Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> privileged Westerners What about the folks that are poor? Those are the biggest group, and it's a little tone-deaf to call them privileged just because they were born in a place that contains folks that got rich.
There's a huge misconception that eating vegan is expensive. Vegan diet staples are dirt cheap. Legumes are absurdly inexpensive, especially when compared with meat. If governments ever get around to closing the loophole of externalizing costs (for instance, through a carbon tax), then the difference would grow even wider.