>> mostly Asian countries consume more seafood than the next 50.
This is false. Per capita, aside from Africa and South America, who both eat roughly half the fish per person as the rest, majority of world per person eats same amount of fish. Sure, Asian has more people, but do you really think telling the majority of people they need to eat less fish while everyone else is not told that is going to go over well?
The ocean doesn’t care about per capita. If a billion people eat 50 pounds of fish annually, you still remove 50 billion pounds of fish. A country with a 1 million population eating 100 pounds of fish will still be doing less harm. And before we go into “rights”, just because a country irresponsibly has a larger population, doesn’t mean that country has unilateral rights to destroy the oceans.
Besides the claim Asian countries not eating as much seafood is false. Per capita, China, South Korea, Japan are easily the top consumers, if you exclude small island nations and low population countries. [1] Vietnam and Myanmar would also be in the list, but their consumption is based more on fresh water fisheries and not ocean based.
> just because a country irresponsibly has a larger population
What does this mean? If Japan split into 5 countries, each eating the same amount of fish per capita as now, would that somehow be more responsible?
If by "irresponsibly" you mean they failed to execute sufficiently draconian population control, it's hard to imagine anything more extreme than China's longstanding former One Child Policy - an exemplar of what you'd describe as responsible environmental behavior, right?
Who's more irresponsible? A Chinese family buying fish for 2 children or a Westerner buying twice as much food for themselves as they need?
Your analogies don't wash! Westerners fish legally! How about telling China to fish legally? Here is list of just a few territories, "just" eighty of them, where they have illegally fished: https://www.tibetrightscollective.in/news/new-report-shows-c....
China fishing more aggressively than a lot of other countries - and yes sometimes illegally so - doesn't make his comment wrong.
The only way you can have some sort of international agreement on things in general(outside of fishing) is if its fair to everyone. It's absurd to assume that Europe and the US can just consume as they want and "the rest" need to fish more responsibly. It also disregards that a lot of fish is actually imported from those countries.
This is akin to when in the UK Boris Johnson went to have Covid parties while telling everyone to lock down. Or when Gavin Newsom went to the French Laundry during the height of the pandemic while telling everyone to stay at home.
You lose all credibility and nobody wants to listen to you. There's a reason why "Rules for thee and not for me" is a saying.
In regards to Boris Johnson and Gavin Newsom, IMO that is a straw man argument. You talking hypocrisy and now not about illegal fishing. This is about protecting ocean resources and there is de facto evidence China is not. If the United States and the EU buying illegally caught fish. please post a link so it can be investigated and prevented. As for China, they have overfished their waters and there is de facto evidence that China is depleting populations of over 90 other countries: https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2022/08/03/chinas-efforts-to-r....
I wasn't trying to defend the US laundering their fishing through third world countries. At all. That's the height of hypocrisy. I was angry that the other poster considered it immoral for one country to have more people in it than another country. When obviously that's not something they can control, and shouldn't be blamed for. Per person, this all works out to the fact that humanity is wildly overfishing the oceans. I'm more on your side that the wealthy countries - per person - bear more responsibility for fixing it. But I don't believe it's helpful to blame poorer countries for having too many children.
If the US is importing illegally-caught fish, and then those illegally fishing countries stop illegally fishing, the price of fish will go up. This will reduce consumption in the US. So the US won't continue to consume as they want.
We could attempt to define the "fair" population of a country based on its land area and some other factors. Splitting up a country into parts then wouldn't grant it a larger fair population, since you would split up the area as well. The necessity of doing this is that otherwise, when one country decides to expand its population, every other country has to accept a lower allocation of the world's resources. The difficulty of doing this is that you are inflicting on the residents of a country a lower allocation of those resources on the basis of something they had no control over, namely the country of their birth.
well then, I guess the only fair thing would be to distribute people randomly in equal proportion to every square meter of dry land /s
Please wiki: (1) Mercantilism, (2) Colonialism, (3) Nazism to understand why your plan for equality leads to massive, inhuman levels of suffering. (Let's throw in Malthusianism just as a pivot to draw a circle around).
> And before we go into “rights”, just because a country irresponsibly has a larger population, doesn’t mean that country has unilateral rights to destroy the oceans.
It's not about "rights", it's about actually making things happen. Telling China to consume less fish with the justification "you do the most damage because you have more people" isn't going to cause them to actually regulate it or do anything to curve consumption. It's childish playground behavior, but if the children have nukes, you won't get them to do something they don't agree to.
Right, you can’t negotiate with them. Agree to the terms or sink/confiscate their vessels. China has thousands of vessels currently extracting from the ocean globally; do we wait until they’ve exhausted global marine stocks? Doesn’t sound tenable.
I volunteer you to go fight in a war after we sink/confiscate another country's vessels.
EDIT: You've edited your response a bunch of times from "hell yeah, I'm ready to die in a war" to whatever it is now. So here you go Internet Tough Guy(tm). Have fun, I guess https://www.goarmy.com/how-to-join.html
> And before we go into “rights”, just because a country irresponsibly has a larger population, doesn’t mean that country has unilateral rights to destroy the oceans.
People aren't "irresponsible" for being alive, and nation-states aren't individuals who can exercise the kind of moral responsibility you're alluding to. You seem to be implying that countries like China should have gone even farther than measures like the inhumane and authoritarian One Child Policy.
I don't even have words to that, while a top western nation has multiple states banning birth control rights, they say another country irresponsibly has a large population.
Without any consideration on why a certain social group prefers a certain food, why the demographic has multiplied so huge etc.
The HN crowd seems to be the wrongest place when it comes to discussing politics. People tend to apply their tech thinking and suggest a bugfix without understanding what leads to a particular situation and what repercussions of their bug fixes might be, while having no problems exploiting the same abundant cheap labor to manufacture the latest gadgets, encouraging those countries to build more workforce at cheap rates.
It's inhumane and authoritarian, but I would not be at all surprised if sooner or later other countries will adopt similar measures, maybe not in name but in effect. Think 'child tax' (convenient, because it allows the wealthy to pretend it doesn't exist).
The interesting thing here is that there is a lot of tension between on the one hand a graying population that would like to be supported by the next ones and a massive wall in the form of the number of people that we can sustainably support long term. If we don't find a way to support the existing population without a huge push for more people then eventually we'll hit that wall. And that won't be pretty.
I highly doubt it. We've seen the effect it had in China: impending demographic crisis. And most developed countries have below-replacement-rate fertility.
First, I agree your list is a better source, though India offsets the Asian countries you mentioned.
As for populations being irresponsible, please feel free to explain your reasoning behind this claim, since unless I am missing something, it’s missing from your comment.
Again, if it’s so easy to not do X then getting even small countries that are democratic should be easy; obviously not, in fact, this has nothing to do with countries and everything to do with cultural norms, or the lack there of.
Yeah, agreed. Per-capita and the whole social justice thinking that comes from is the worst thing to happen to environmentalism since they joined forces with the fossil fuel industry to lobby against hydro and nuclear.
The perverse incentives it creates for regimes to increase population and reduce living standards are ridiculous.
> Per-capita and the whole social justice thinking that comes from is the worst thing to happen to environmentalism
I strongly disagree on this. I believe instead that per-capita arguments are helpful because they make environmental hypocrisy painfully obvious.
> The perverse incentives it creates for regimes to increase population and reduce living standards are ridiculous.
My current belief is that this is a complete non-issue, for two reasons:
1) Meaningful population control is hard, expensive, unpopular and comes with a myriad of (problematic) side effects
2) Nations care *very little* about per-capita pollution in the first place
The very idea that e.g. EU/US would ever even entertain the notion of boosting their population for the purpose of improving per-capita CO2 emission numbers seems absolutely ridiculous to me.
> I strongly disagree on this. I believe instead that per-capita arguments are helpful because they make environmental hypocrisy painfully obvious.
What do you think about "world leaders" flying jets to meet at conferences and events to agree that commoners have to reduce emissions, when they could have used a telephone and video camera? In any case, the environment doesn't care who emits what ton of CO2 or what humans might be hypocrites about it.
> 1) Meaningful population control is hard, expensive, unpopular and comes with a myriad of (problematic) side effects
It's hard because of perverse incentives.
> 2) Nations care very little about per-capita pollution in the first place
They care very much about it when arguing why they should be allowed to pollute more.
> The very idea that e.g. EU/US would ever even entertain the notion of boosting their population for the purpose of improving per-capita CO2 emission numbers seems absolutely ridiculous to me.
They're absolutely trying to boost population numbers, they explicitly out and say it.
> What do you think about "world leaders" flying jets to meet at conferences and events to agree that commoners have to reduce emissions, when they could have used a telephone and video camera?
I believe we don't require complete elimination of air traffic to hit climate goals and would be restricting it LAST for government use anyway.
So this might be an indicator of too few incentives against air traffic at the very most.
> In any case, the environment doesn't care who emits what ton of CO2 or what humans might be hypocrites about it.
The environment does not care about where the CO2 is emitted, but WE need to if we want to reduce it effectively.
It is VERY obviously MUCH easier and viable to save 1 ton of CO2 per year for a single American (with a baseline of ~15tons/year) than it is to save 200kg each for 5 Indian rice farmers with a baseline of 2 tons/capita. Because for the rice farmer, that might be "no heating during winter", while for the rich westerner it means "a smaller second car for children/wife instead of another SUV".
As long as EU/US emissions are higher per capita they have absolutely ZERO moral standing to argue for harsher regulations in developing nations, and this is pretty much already clear to everyone involved.
> They're absolutely trying to boost population numbers, they explicitly out and say it.
Pretty much every "western nation" has close to zero or negative population growth pre-immigration. This makes the governments job harder because they have to deal with demographic change (=> pensions) and second order effects (like cultural rifts from compensating immigration). That is already more than enough motivation to keep population growth somewhat up, CO2/capita considerations never even enter the picture.
It is also EXTREMELY doubtful that boosting the population in EU/US would help with CO2/capita numbers in any significant way in the first place, because CO2 emissions mostly correlate with WEALTH much more strongly than population density or somesuch, which governments are typically not in favor of decreasing for highly obvious reasons :P
> I believe we don't require complete elimination of air traffic to hit climate goals and would be restricting it LAST for government use anyway.
So you excuse the hypocrisy because teleconferences would have worked just fine. Interesting.
> As long as EU/US emissions are higher per capita
China has more CO2 per capita than EU, and yet they get concessions in those aforementioned hypocritical accords.
> Pretty much every "western nation" has close to zero or negative population growth pre-immigration. This makes the governments job harder because they have to deal with demographic change (=> pensions) and second order effects (like cultural rifts from compensating immigration). That is already more than enough motivation to keep population growth somewhat up, CO2/capita considerations never even enter the picture.
I don't know what you mean. Boosting population in the highest CO2 emitting societies in the world is not a good thing. They do it because of "the economy", because per-capita does obviously enter the picture. If they were actually interested in the environment, they would let population naturally reduce. It's the easiest thing in the world to reduce consumption by reducing population. You need zero new technology, and no changes to lifestyle, and you can achieve large reductions.
Not only in CO2 emissions but in all other environmental footprint. CO2 might have the limelight now, but there are many other catastrophic environmental problems and resource depletion that our massive global consumption causes which have no real solutions.
This is false. Per capita, aside from Africa and South America, who both eat roughly half the fish per person as the rest, majority of world per person eats same amount of fish. Sure, Asian has more people, but do you really think telling the majority of people they need to eat less fish while everyone else is not told that is going to go over well?
Source:
- https://goodseedventures.com/worldwide-food-consumption-per-...