51–60 of 99 posts
Interesting, but gives too little credit to the anti-whaling campaigns: it certainly was no accident that whaling was forbidden as soon as that became economically feasible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you name an economic system that doesn't have similar flaws? Economic systems only usable by hunter-gatherers don't count, unless your real argument is with civilization rather than capitalism.
You ask this question as if it were a rhetorical question. Is there any reason to believe that such an economic system that also combines much of "good" properties of capitalism cannot exist? Disciplines like game theory and mechanism design have made tremendous advances over the last few decades. Surely we can put these ideas to work in designing better political and economic systems.
Sad how there's no discussion of the economy that enables stuff like this to happen. "Why were people so cruel and evil?" is a stupid question; it's not about cruelty or being "evil". It's about money. Don't expect people to be moral in this economic system. Morality is a weakness in a capitalist society, and you'll go out of business if you bring morality into a competitive business ecosystem. This is why we need to…
> Moreover, sure P. S. Landis "saved the whales", but he didn't do it to save the whales, he did it to generate an enormous amount of profit for Mobile Oil, and was paid for it handsomely. OP mentioned that with different intent: in conservation of nature, we can get better results quicker by focusing on improving technology & organization than by merely loudly protesting current uses of natural resources. Alas, it's…
I don't see how a synthetic oil developed in the 1980s could be responsible for a law signed in 1973, and I'm pretty sure it was the law (regardless of where the law came from (the future??)) that directly stopped the killing.
In this case, I'd say the passage of the law led to greater interest in synthetic oil. Conservation led to improving technology, not the other way around.
That's a sharp irony, to think the anti-whaling community of the 60's and 70's was driving around with whale oil in their cars! I wonder if they had any idea?
Of course I still benefit from cars, I am aware of that (goods get transported by cars, which I then consume). Just saying that some environmentalists actually also avoid driving.
I expect we'll see a similar process with using animals for food. As our scientific knowledge increases, and as our needs increase, synthetic meats will become more and more attractive, eventually leaving us all meat-eaters who do not harvest animals. Complex systems remind me of a theater set up for a complex play. Hundreds of ropes hang down from the ceiling. Somebody is always pleading us with us to pull rope A to…
One could even argue that it's already happened. Modern breeds of food animals are more or less "synthetic meats." They're much more efficient at converting feed into flesh than any natural animal is, and they'd have no chance of surviving in the wild.
Interesting, but gives too little credit to the anti-whaling campaigns: it certainly was no accident that whaling was forbidden as soon as that became economically feasible.
The stipulation is that whaling was forbidden as soon as nobody needed whale oil.
> Ecological activism did not play significant role in all of these developments; neither did the numerous well-meaning international treaties, moratoriums, and other chest beating displays.
That may be true for the whales themselves, but there were indeed regulations passed on automobiles in the 1970s due to the oil shock:
> In the 1970s, the car companies were required to develop engines working at higher temperatures to comply with lower emissions and improved efficiency and that changed the regime for the tranny fluids. Suddenly, the car companies did not need to lobby any more.
So it was government action regarding auto emissions that wound up propagating into saving the whales. Perhaps that was not among the intended consequences, but we also can't claim that the change was simply due to "market forces."
It boggles the mind why the car companies lobbied to keep whale hunting when their numbers were already so low. They wanted a few more years of automatic transmission working at then-current levels, and then what? The same mass transmission failures that happened, only without anymore whales left. Poachers are similarly mind boggling. Instead of leaving a viable population to harvest more animal parts (not saying it'…
Poachers are similarly mind boggling. Instead of leaving a viable population to harvest more animal parts ... they hunt down every last animal then move on to other animals. Poaching makes sense to the poacher. Take a guy I might or might not be related to. When he was growing up his family was dirt-poor and rural. Taking game out of season meant the difference between eating and starvation. Hard on the deer, if you…
one have domesticated deer, offered good conditions for it to breed (protected it from other predators including hunters like himself) and then he and his children prospered off their cattle...
the other one just hunted his food to extinction...
guess who's children have survived to tell the story?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Moreover, sure P. S. Landis "saved the whales", but he didn't do it to save the whales, he did it to generate an enormous amount of profit for Mobile Oil, and was paid for it handsomely. OP mentioned that with different intent: in conservation of nature, we can get better results quicker by focusing on improving technology & organization than by merely loudly protesting current uses of natural resources. Alas, it's…
It was not their attention grabbing activities that stopped killing whales, but the unsung efforts of chemists finding a synthetic replacement to sperm oil. I don't see how a synthetic oil developed in the 1980s could be responsible for a law signed in 1973, and I'm pretty sure it was the law (regardless of where the law came from (the future??)) that directly stopped the killing. In this case, I'd say the passage of…
> Fortunately for the whales, by the 1970s engines became subject to tighter emissions regulations and engineers had to design them to run hotter (...) increased heat load destroyed the modified sperm oil in the ATF faster (...) forcing research efforts into synthetic lubricants.
> (...) freshly developed synthetic analogs were performing even worse. Only in the 1980s, a chemical solution to this problem was found (...)
At any rate, law prohibiting or limiting something is but a synthetic incentive. It can work, but only to a certain point; works best if there's a substitute available.