Not surprising, but irritating nonetheless – heading of CITES at the pass, Japan says they’ll buy and eat the last damn bluefin tuna regardless of scientific research and world opinion.
Where is the Kevin Rudd of the Mediterranean? The Bob Barker of Bluefin?
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd tells the Japanese to stop whaling by November 2010. Good on ya, mate! Why can’t our Dem leaders grow a pair?
Truth is stranger than fiction! None other than Bob Barker of 70s and 80s TV game show fame has come to the rescue of Sea Shepherd, through a $5 million gift to go buy a boat that won’t get crushed in the ice in Antarctic waters. And believe it or not, the new ship, the ‘Bob Barker’ has already proven it’s worth – it came to the rescue of several crew members of their little ‘attack’ vessel the Ady Gil after said boat was deliberately rammed by a whaler.
While I like and support Sea Shepherd’s work, I’m no big fan of their founder, Paul Watson. Case in point, he’s equating the potential end of Japanese Antarctic whaling with the end of commercial whaling:
“Whaling was shut down today,” Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson said via satellite phone from aboard a nearby ship. “There’s no whaling now and hopefully no whaling after this.”
Well…what about Iceland? What about Norway? What about so-called Russian & U.S. “traditional” indigenous whaling? I think his organization would have a much easier time putting pressure on those countries and shutting down whaling faster than playing faux pirate in the Antarctic waters with the Japanese cast as the only villains.
Anyway, hopefully Bob Barker’s courageous donations will be a clarion call that will inspire other game show hosts to donate additional money and tools to pro-environmental groups…how about a 16 inch/50 caliber Mark 7 naval gun for the new ship?
Carbon limits are for the little people! Faster, driver!
Sir Richard Branson saw fit to lecture to world leaders currently debating carbon emissions limits at Copenhagen on behalf of the airline industry. “Reduction targets”, not carbon taxes is what he’d like. He’s also pushing the idea of moving the airline fleets to biofuels, something he terms green fuel.
Biofuels, you know – things like ethanol and bio diesel derived from industrial agriculture that require more energy inputs then they produce in outputs and exist only as pork delivery vehicles for firms like ConAgra?
Keep in mind this bullshit is from a guy who has made an a second fortune from running an especially carbon porky business, an airline. And if that weren’t enough, his latest venture is to fly fat rich tourists into space. Hey Sir Carbon Asshole, here’s a reduction for you – shelve your stupid space tourism and save the planet an additional 54,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions annually – and tell your rich buddies to go plant some trees on one of their 365 days of yearly vacation instead.
And while you’re at it, why don’t you make a real statement and shelve your new Formula 1 racing team. I don’t think the additional 50 tonnes of CO2 your car will emit per season will ‘tip the balance’ but talk about hypocrisy.
Sea level rise chart
Curious about when your coastal town or property will go back to the sea?
“To establish a timeline, choose a location … and find out its elevation. You can then use the graph to determine if the area will be underwater at any particular date between 1990 and 2100.”
Don't worry kids, Big Oil says a magical sea creature symphony awaits you!
Here is a distinction a country would want to avoid – first to disappear under the seas due to the rising sea level stemming from global warming. The population of Tuvalu has already started to abandon their sinking island as increasingly high tides smash up their houses and a salty water table kills off their crops.
So does the ‘country’ still exist after the last Tuvaluan has left? Do they keep their U.N. seat? How about their lucrative “.tv” top-level domain?
Joking aside, we should round up the prominent loud-mouth global warming deniers and shove them onto the soggy uninhabitable land as punishment for their crimes against humanity.
The opening paragraphs of this Washington Post story on Sunday sound more like a pitch for a science-fiction movie:
For plants designed in a lab a little more than a decade ago, they’ve come a long way: Today, the vast majority of the nation’s two primary crops grow from seeds genetically altered according to Monsanto company patents.
Ninety-three percent of soybeans. Eighty percent of corn.
The seeds represent “probably the most revolutionary event in grain crops over the last 30 years,” said Geno Lowe, a Salisbury, Md., soybean farmer.
From there, the story goes on to what it sees as the important issue — Monsanto is steadily raising the prices of the seeds, and the Obama administration is considering antitrust actions.
But me, I’m still stuck on this 80-90% of seeds being genetically altered based on a single company’s patents. And it gets even more disturbing when you learn the reason why these seeds dominate the market:
The modified plants can stand up to the powerful herbicide glyphosate, best known commercially as Roundup, allowing them to use the weedkiller not just before planting but also after the crops have come up.
And who makes Roundup? Why, Monsanto, of course!
Before it jumped into biotechnology, Monsanto was already one of the nation’s largest chemical companies and had patented glyphosate, bringing it to market as Roundup in the ’70s.
The product kills just about all weeds, and for farmers it served as a wonderfully effective herbicide. Instead of tilling the earth, they could simply blanket it with Roundup. . . .
If there was a practical drawback with Roundup, it was that it couldn’t be used after planting: Applying Roundup at that point would kill the crops, too.
But where there’s science and profit involved, there’s always a solution:
Monsanto was producing Roundup at a plant in Luling, La., and the water and sludge in the waste ponds around the plant were exposed to the chemical. . . . After bacteria discovered in the pond sludge proved resistant to the chemical, scientists isolated the gene that gave the bacteria Roundup tolerance and placed that gene, known as CPS4, into soybeans, then corn.
The resulting plants, called “Roundup Ready,” represented a billion-dollar breakthrough and, as Monsanto sees it, a just reward for its $1.5 billion investment in biotech research.
Got that? A chemical company develops a near-monopoly on the weedkiller market… and before too long, it’s an agriculture company with a near-monopoly on corn and soybeans that are compatible with the weedkiller. And the only problem anyone seems to have with it would be if Monsanto gets a little too greedy in its pricing.
“Everybody likes Roundup Ready,” said William Layton, a grain farmer on the Eastern Shore. “Maybe it costs a little more than we like. But everybody’s going to keep using it.“
It’s not hard for me to imagine this going horribly, catastrophically wrong at some point. And I don’t even read that much science fiction.
Did you really think an organization like International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), run as it is by countries with a vested interest in fishing for tuna would listen to warnings about the collapsing fishery and impending extinction of the fish and take real action and suspend fishing for a few years until the fish population recovers? Seriously?
It’s like expecting the International Whaling Commission which includes only whaling countries, several of whom subsidize their <strike>commercial</strike> “research” whaling activities to seriously ban whaling – it’s not going to happen.
Why do we carry on these charades? Well in the absence of a serious transnational authority over oceanic resources, the only way to get these countries to sit at the table is if they are scared that by not participating, somebody else will destroy the last of the ’stocks’ first. I guess it’s sort of a tragedy of the commons situation where all the parties sit around regularly and jawbone about the looming tragedy, then just do whatever the fuck they want to during the rest of the year.
At this point the tuna’s only hope appears to be tiny Monaco’s attempt to get CITES to declare the tuna endangered, thus triggering far stricter action on the part of CITES members:
Environmental groups are now backing a call from Monaco for the issue of bluefin tuna to be taken before a March meeting of CITES, an international body that sets rules against illegal wildlife trade, with the aim of declaring the fish endangered and putting a ban on catching it.
In related news, Pacific whales may have some hope not from positive political action but rather from Japanese government funding cuts that may cut the subsidies that keep their ‘research’ vessels in business.
*Update* Check out the Sea Shepherd’s new speedster 
*Update 11/17/09* Found this funny South Park parody of Whale Wars – I think that kid may be onto something
*Update 11/18/09* Speaking of overfishing, prepare to say goodbye to this skate
This story is great on so many levels – a bear in Kashmir kills two militants in a cave. First it’s funny – the two bear-chow boys were armed with AK-47s, and if an unarmed bear can take out some supposed ‘militants’ with automatic weapons…
Second, it’s encouraging from the perspective that apparently all the crazy conflict in Kashmir has resulted in an increase in wildlife in the region as poaching has decreased. I guess if the bear could only figure out how to use those AK-47s he could probably wipe out the insurgency by himself while improving the odds for local wildlife!
Limbaugh the Nazca denounces the liberal tree hugging alarmism
Well okay, maybe rampant deforestation created conditions for terrible erosion and floods that brought down the Nazca civilization, but otherwise…poppy-cock! Er…and of course the deforestation of Easter Island had similar consequences…oh yeah, and the Anasazi had a similar problem…but under no circumstances is that anyway comparable to today’s increasing desertification and global warming which of course have nothing to do with human activities and certainly won’t lead to the collapse of our civilization…
