111–120 of 246 posts
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.
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 goin…
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.
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 goin…
> 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 o…
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.
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 m…
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 on…
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.
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…
I can't tell if this is supposed to be sarcastic or not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 u…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 jel…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 u…
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 . Th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 p…
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 m…
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.