Having watched Seaspiracy recently (highly recommend it to everyone who hasn’t), I’m getting more and more certain that the governments (UK one included) and the institutions (for which the governments pay subsidies – from our taxes basically) aren’t doing anything to stop the death of our planet. Having basically learned (as the Seaspiracy producer found out as well) that keeping the oceans healthy is actually more important than anything else for preserving the life on this planet as we know it, I see no hope for human kind. Basically we are destroying everything in our way and we are looking forward to move to Mars or other planets to just get on with it, as life on Earth will never be the same again. And the MSC (Marine Stewardship Council) is working hand in hand with the fisherman to just put a safe label on the fish products saying it’s sustainable when it is not, the government ministers sayng their only action is to ban kayaking when asked what are they doing to protect the only 5% of the oceans that are under protection, it just makes me sick of this world, while we are asked to give up our petrol cars or reduce our plastic waste, being told to eat sustainable when the high officials don’t even have a definition or implementation of what sustainable is.
The only way we could fight this, as the government clearly does nothing for this, is to stop funding the fishing industry, which might be a radical measure but I really see no other way, as voting and trying to ask questions about all the corruption that happens upstairs seems impossible, whoever is trying to do that doesn’t last long.
A few key numbers taken from the documentary:
– fishing takes 2.7 trillion fish from oceans globally each year. If this rate of fishing continues, the oceans will be “virtually empty” by 2048
– 46% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is Made Up of Fishing Nets
– only 0.03% of plastic entering our oceans is made up of plastic straws (the main advice from the ocean protection organisations was to give up on the use of those)
– 93% of all carbon is stored in the ocean
marine plants can store up to 20 times more carbon than land-based forests
– the equivalent of a garbage truck load of plastic is dumped in the sea every minute
– 90% of the coral reefs will die by 2050 (and it’s mainly because there is not enough fish left – when they excrete, they feed the reefs)
– every year over 50 milion sharks and 300 000 whales + dolphins are killed as a result of by-catch
– 250 000 sea turtles are captured, injured or killed each year by fishing vessels
– a single salmon farm in Scotland produces as much waste as a town of up to 20 000 each year
Source: https://earth.org/facts-from-seaspiracy
P.S. Explained – season 3 – end of oil episode explains how BP and other mega oil companies who pledged for renewable energy and being carbon neutral, are actually will invest 90% of their capital in oil till 2050 and just 10% in renewable energy.
28 comments
Firstly, it’s worth pointing out that nothing we do is likely to render the planet dead. They are however likely to reduce biodiversity ( well of the sort we notice) or make it significantly more difficult for us as a species to live comfortably.
That doesn’t mean that you are wrong. There is a problem with democratic ( or even authoritarian governments that still rely on consent to some extent) government (and with the funding of those politicians) . Our governments tend to be focussed on winning the next election and telling people that they can’t have what they want, that they need to make serious sacrifices in their life style , that they might lose their jobs is problematic – you might well just be replaced by someone who doesn’t make people feel bad. Of course democracy also gives a method to persuade governments to act if enough people want them to.
At the same time governments are influenced by those that fund them not just those that vote for them ( and simple immediate self interest in non democracies) , and those that fund them often don’t want inconvenient change and also have ways to manipulate public opinion. There is also a word .. I can’t quite remember… for the reluctance to be the first country that makes changes that reduce the economic success of of that country while competitors don’t , and that seem likely to be ineffective if no one else follows suit.
While Seaspiracy was a fun programme, the claims made in it were thoroughly debunked in multiple threads on here and even a whole BBC More or Less episode.
There is more than enough bad behaviour in the world so no need to exaggerate.
Ahh…
Well yeah.
Dunno if you noticed but COP26 didn’t actually have a single first world representative group propose we reduce consumption.
Instead what you got was proposals for what was basically rent seeking.
e.g. UK electricity and gas consumption problems can be solved by:
A) Reducing required consumption through cheap and easy available methods like housing insulation. (short term cost, immediate concrete results)
or
B) New ‘green’ label energy production that you’ll pay a premium for forever.
Conservation had nothing to do with it.
It was an international sales pitch. (if anyone says ‘economic growth’ and ‘green energy’ in the same paragraph you know they’re a cunt)
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Doesn’t matter what it is we need to do the public wont support concrete action to do something about it so our government wont do anything about it either. We are the problem, we fail to back protests that attempt to force our government to adopt climate change action and we don’t vote in anyway to try and save the environment in any real numbers. We will severely damage if not destroy our habitat that much I think is certain, because we haven’t even turned our behaviour around yet.
Land, sea, air its all in a dire state already and most people just don’t care. Enjoy the end of humanity party and try not to think about the impending disaster too much, we had a real opportunity to do something about it in the 1980s-2000s but its honestly too late now and people are just apathetic. Keep backing the right action but its not your fault if it fails, you can do everything right and still loose.
Before recommending people watch something multiple times, it might be worth having a quick Google to see how well it fared when experts fact checked it.
In Seaspiracy’s case, the answer is “not well”.
That’s slightly at odds with the UN’s progress on the creation of no fishing zones. If we can virtually end whaling we can fix the fishing industry.
No one is looking at Mars to escape & “write off” the earth. Not even the biggest Elon Musk nerd fan is saying that. You could spent 10,000 years terraforming Mars & you still wouldn’t have anywhere near as habitable as the Earth
I hate the lazy notion that space exploration is somehow anti Earth. In fact some of the solutions of our urgent climate crisis will no doubt be from offshoot technologies from the next generation of space science.
I really think climate change is the number one priority for the next century & I really dislike the likes of Musk & Bezos. But it’s just disingenuous to link space exploration to other issues. People landing & exploring Mars & beyond would be an absolutely amazing feat for our species
Genuinely serious…why do the big boys have zero fucks? Why is it a young person problem? Well off people, government, etc who ever it is have children, grandchildren. Surely it’s in their interest to preserve the planet we all live on.
Global warming, waste, species dying out is such an obvious problem, it’s crazy to think these people that could make such a difference choose to ignore it even though the repercussions could affect them so much?
I don’t know. It’s so worrying and I dread to think about where we’re going to be in 20 years if there isn’t a drastic shift.
I’m a vegetarian, don’t drive, don’t have kids, and I’m so bloody fed up of being shamed for using plastic tampon applicators and disposable cotton wool pads when these are NOTHING compared to the devastation big companies wreak upon the planet. It’s heartbreaking and it seems like no one cares.
I watched Don’t Look Up last night and whilst being a mediocre film its message was terrifying. The parallels are so obvious, it was painfully real.
Saving the planet isn’t a vote winner. It means massive upheaval and change not only to our everyday lives but to the systems of business and the fabric of society it all sits on top of. It also involves a lot of money, spending it and watching businesses die through lack of it because of said change. Some are in a position to evolve their ways of making money, some are stuck in the mud and change means the death of their livelihoods, their source of income and in the case of larger businesses, those of the employees.
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What political party who wants to remain in power and control things to their own end (thinking Tories here but they are equally corrupt) wants to suggest everything needs to be turned on it’s head next month, or next year or any time soon? Vote for us and we’ll kill your business! Vote for us and you’ll be unemployed in 6 months and all the skills you’ve spent a lifetime attaining will be redundant! All that does is create an opening for another party to just attempt to carry this unsustainable shit show on, on and on. Mechanics are looking at this situaton right now; the rise of the EV, the demise of the internal combustion engine and all those moving parts, gear boxes, fuel systems, it’s slowly disappearing along with their jobs. Anyone qualifying as a mechanic now on paper has about a decade to practice before they need to retrain or move with the times.
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We just had another land fill laden christmas. Another 10,000+ containers arrived from China in October and the majority of either what they contained or replaced will be in the ground at some stage in the future – that’s every year. Can you imagine someone suggesting we end all that? How many people rely on Xmas as being their annual pay day? Changing life as we know it and making the necessary changes will be the job of a government but no one would ever want to be that government, too many people are unwilling and unable to let go of the life we currently lead and those in power are unwilling to dictate what would be a hugely unpopular change, and at the end of the day, how would they even get into power? They’ve got 4 years to effect change and anything too harsh or extreme means that’s all they get, then another bunch of chancers comes along with another bunch of incoherent ideas. if we’re having trouble getting people to wear a fabric mask for the greater public health, can you imagne the level of backlash from what would be required to properly get on top of anthropic climate change? People hoarding toilet rolls tells you all you need to know about what happens when it gets even a little out of kilter.
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It has to be a dire emergency, like what we’ve seen with the virus. It has to be a knee jerk ‘fix’ to a problem that whilst may have been staring us in the face for 60 years suddenly becomes a national emergency. I’m convinced of that based on the current setup. We already know that pollution and a bunch of other things are already killing people wholesale but no one in power or those eabling them are anywhere near ready to quit this money making party, raping the planet is great for business, besides, they’ll most likely be dead and they don’t even care that much about their own future ancestors, let alone those of the minions out there. We are fucked by nature of our own patterns of behaviour, and mostly by the patterns of behaviour of the ruling class. It’s a political football that no one wants to pick up and call their own, it will continue to get kicked around until the brink of the collapse of society. That may be 50 years away but I’m not betting on much of a change to the system as it’s currently set up. Too many people, not enough planet too.
My entire life I havnt funded the fishing industry, and look it’s bigger bigger ever without me.
There’s no such thing as death of the planet, stop the panic please.
Try googling “Seaspiracy Fact Check”.
It’s very very rare that a documentary is honest and factual. The medium is just not fit for it; in format or motivations.
Suffice to say though Seaspiracy and Cowspiracy are literally some of the most egregious examples that can be found. The director is pretty much just a manipulative, lying pos. Riling people up for profit with any crazy new unbelievable story he can paint a narrative for, and actively hurting the causes he claims to promote.
There are a lot of global problems with the climate and fishing. I wouldn’t look to Seaspiracy for any guidance on understanding or solving them.
Earth won’t die. This is a common misconception. I think it’s more about the inevitable impending *extinction* of humankind, and (sadly) thousands of other species. Climate change is pushing ecosystems around globally. Species dying out, others migrating. Evolution will succeed here, but I think your point is that the powers that be don’t care to change. The irony being that devastating change is impossible to avoid at this stage.
In my opinion, there is absolutely no chance that enough humans will co-operate on climate-change mitigation measures to make a difference. The trajectory here is that humans will cause a dramatic ecosystem collapse, large-scale dying off of animal and plants life, and the vast bulk of humanity dying off in consequence.
Then, after a few millennia of life just about hanging on, we start a new cycle of the creation myth.
Yep. We’re fucked. This is the collapse of the biosphere right now.
Can we trust in governments, certainly not. But can we get enough people of this capitalist consumerism train to slow destruction? Maybe. It’s all about messaging right now it’s hard to break through MSM and as you’ve seen, people will debunk seaspiracy and even cowspiracy. They will deride China for creating the most pollution whilst consuming products made there. A collective message that our actions can make a change needs to get out and not be blocked with those who have vested interests in keeping us on the train for as long as possible.
Fair is fair, it’s people that make it this way. Everyone pretends they want something done about the environment. Until someone does even the tiniest thing. Just look how people are reacting to higher gas and electric prices. And they’re not even paying those higher prices yet.
I think it is far to late. Things will only drastically change once we see a massive collapse in food production and mass starvation due to climate induced drought etc. The billionaires are already building penis rockets to get off this dying marble.
The problem with capitalist Democratic governments typically, most leaders only have a short tenure 4 to 8 years, so there is no incentive to change anything long term.
Democratic institutions are ultimately controlled by voters. It’s obviously more complicated than that, but the reality is that the UK governemnt and other democratic governments like it aren’t willing to act more than they have because it isn’t popular with voters.
Factory farming is a huge issue, but raising the price of beef or taxing farms are super unpopular with either key voters (farmers) or everyone (most people want cheap meat).
Fossil feuls are THE problem, but the entire economy runs on them and noone wants the rise in prices that comes with the abolishment of fossil feul subsidies.
With respect to fish, people want cheap fish all the time. We know its a horrible issue, but very few people are willing to reduce or eliminate their consumption.
Voting with your wallet as well as your ballot is essential.
Good point well made.
I received Attenboroughs “A Life On Our Planet: my witness statement and a vision for our future” for Xmas. Should be mandatory reading for every MP, CEO and financial director on the planet.
I don’t eat fish any more after watching that and I donate an Ayrton a month to the Sea Shepherd.
I’d like to see more done, same as you.
It’s funny how everyone here is quick to debunk certain facts from the film, as if the fishing industry and its lobbyists probably didn’t immediately pour MILLIONS of pounds into an anti seaspiracy campaign to discredit the maker and the film, as soon as this thing started getting some traction.
For me the film just proved that the individualism of responsibility is bullshit, no matter how many plastic straws you ban people from using it won’t make a blind bit of difference while the fishing industry gets away with what it currently does.
I’ve pretty much stopped eating fish now. Based on the over consumption of fish that we do not farm, it’s impossible to be sustainable at our current rates. Plus those fish are now all likely full of micro plastics which can pass through our blood brain barrier.
Eating fish is eating plastic these days.
People still kill each other in the name of whatever tribal identity they associate with. Mad dictators are vying for nuclear power or already have it. We are on the brink of a 3rd world war, all it takes is 1 bad move. I don’t think climate change even figures in top 5 urgent issues.
im an environmental science student, the government isn’t doing anything, everything they’ve agreed to they’ve only agreed to it because they can kick the can down the road.
There’s only so much governments can do when they’re accountable to the public.