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>> 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

>> 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? Source: - https://goodseedventures.com/worldwide-food-consumption-per-capita-2/ https://goodseedventures.com/worldwide-food-consumption-per-...

irrational 4y ago
I'm already doing my part by not eating any kind of seafood.
darth_avocado 4y ago
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. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fish-and-seafood-consumption-per-capita?tab=table https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fish-and-seafood-consumpt...
- judge2020 4y ago
  > 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.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    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. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-35815444 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-35815444 https://archive.is/ZKSJq https://archive.is/ZKSJq https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/30/china-beijing-fishing-africa-north-korea-south-china-sea/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/30/china-beijing-fishing-a... Edit: Force should be used against antagonistic nation states when required, otherwise words are meaningless.
    - anonymouslambda 4y ago
      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 https://www.goarmy.com/how-to-join.html
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - O__________O 4y ago
        Or, just teach fish how to sink ships and supplies to do so: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_marine_mammal https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_marine_mammal
        noduerme 4y ago
        What if the fish switch sides, though?
        O__________O 4y ago
        To the side that kills fish? Even fish that eat fish still wanna be the ones doing the killing and eating. Am I missing something?
- O__________O 4y ago
  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.
- noduerme 4y ago
  > 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?
  - syrrim 4y ago
    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.
    - Thorrez 4y ago
      You could see a country with a high population and small amount of land as having an "unfairly high population level". You could see a country with a low population and a large amount of land as "greedily taking more land than necessary". Kind of akin to NIMBYism. I'm not sure either is correct. I've heard statistics that living more densely is better for the environment.
    - noduerme 4y ago
      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).
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  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.
  - myrmidon 4y ago
    > 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.
    - throwawaylinux 4y ago
      > 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.
- cdogl 4y ago
  > 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.
  - anaganisk 4y ago
    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.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    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.
    - cdogl 4y ago
      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.

irrational 4y ago

I'm already doing my part by not eating any kind of seafood.

darth_avocado 4y ago

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. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fish-and-seafood-consumption-per-capita?tab=table https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fish-and-seafood-consumpt...

judge2020 4y ago
> 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.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  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. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-35815444 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-35815444 https://archive.is/ZKSJq https://archive.is/ZKSJq https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/30/china-beijing-fishing-africa-north-korea-south-china-sea/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/30/china-beijing-fishing-a... Edit: Force should be used against antagonistic nation states when required, otherwise words are meaningless.
  - anonymouslambda 4y ago
    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 https://www.goarmy.com/how-to-join.html
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - O__________O 4y ago
      Or, just teach fish how to sink ships and supplies to do so: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_marine_mammal https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_marine_mammal
      - noduerme 4y ago
        What if the fish switch sides, though?
        O__________O 4y ago
        To the side that kills fish? Even fish that eat fish still wanna be the ones doing the killing and eating. Am I missing something?
O__________O 4y ago
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.
noduerme 4y ago
> 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?
- syrrim 4y ago
  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.
  - Thorrez 4y ago
    You could see a country with a high population and small amount of land as having an "unfairly high population level". You could see a country with a low population and a large amount of land as "greedily taking more land than necessary". Kind of akin to NIMBYism. I'm not sure either is correct. I've heard statistics that living more densely is better for the environment.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    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).
throwawaylinux 4y ago
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.
- myrmidon 4y ago
  > 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.
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    > 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.
cdogl 4y ago
> 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.
- anaganisk 4y ago
  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.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  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.
  - cdogl 4y ago
    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.