alt Hacker NewsDestroying ecosystems beyond a tipping point. And the politicians just care about being re-elected. Focusing on short term gain.
” The decision taken by the Council of Ministers earlier this week on the 2024 fishing quotas in the Baltic Sea is in many ways unique. It shows a remarkable historical short-sightedness, ignorance of the fish and fishing in the inland sea, inability to understand the scientific advice of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) and - perhaps most of all: the ministers are bending the laws that regulate fishing, ecosystems and the marine environment to the limit.”
https://balticwaters.org/en/baltic-sea-brief-60-the-final-he...
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Fishermen are weirdly powerful in the EU for an industry that employs few people and doesn't make a lot of money. I'm not clear how that works, I'm guessing because it's a job the public understand and has macho overtones. Fishing was a major part of the advocacy for Brexit despite being a smaller source of revenue than Warhammer.
Nobody is going to be elected telling people the harsh truth: that we consume far too much than the planet can sustain.
Farmers and fishers on top of that will always get cross partizan sympathy.
People just don't want to hear that the way they eat impacts and stresses the planet beyond its limits and that the producers of food get in any way penalized.
Truth is that we desperately need carbon taxes asap, to at least slow down the planet destruction. But it will never be popular.
I once saw a fascinating TV program about fishing quatos that were first introduced for the North Sea in the 1970s. It led to a war between Dutch government inspectors and fishermen.
Thirty years later everyone involved agreed that it had saved the industry.
> And the politicians just care about being re-elected. Focusing on short term gain.
It's really convenient to blame the politicians instead of the people that vote for them.
If people had a long term vision, politicians would too.
This isn't on the politicians. If you look at it from the perspective of a politician, if you enact a strict fishing quota, you've personally decimated jobs in the industry. You've saved the industry, but said industry will never forgive you and will always hold the job loss against you. If overfishing causes job losses, that's on the fishermen, they're the ones to blame.
The world reached peak fish catch in the mid-90s. [1] And we now eat more grown fish than caught fish. The problem is that with increased acidity in the oceans, as part of the ocean absorbing mor CO2, we get less algae and eventually less fish. [2] But, yeah, let’s keep fishing until the stocks collapse. [3] They take a very very long time to recover.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/capture-fisheries-vs-aqua...
[2] https://www.ioc.unesco.org/en/articles/ocean-acidification-t...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...