Way to drag your ugly activities into a nice looking picture, dudes.
Picture from Wikimedia Commons and covered by their license for reuse Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
A writer at The Economist says some people are arguing that environmental groups should be paying whalers to cease and desist instead of harassing them.
My comment:
What a great idea. And we can also pay burglars to not steal stuff out of peoples houses, or Wall Street bankers to not rip off their clients.
I wouldn't mind if someone paid me to not try to catch the last of a yellow light.
Still the trade off isn't really that static in ways the author notes and misses.
Mr. Babbage tells us to remember that we are paying the whalers to replace the money they would make on the open market, but if whale meat therefore became unavailable because whalers aren't whaling then it would instantly become "scarce"and therefore much more valuable.
Driving spiraling costs to cover the increase or leading to cheating.
Whether or not you want to contribute to the effort to stop whalers, the truth is that, if the whole whaling harassment scheme is dismantled and the payment demands for not whaling escalate to unreasonable levels, we would face the fact that the whole infrastructure of the whaling harassment system would need to be rebuilt. It seems to have taken over 20 years to get good disruptions of the Japanese whaling of in the waters off Antarctic waters built up until it is severely restricting the catch.. Are we going to force them to dismantle it so they can afford payments to whalers and hope it doesn't need to be rebuilt after a few years as "pirate" whalers (probably the same groups that were whaling before) step in to make the precious metal level money that a reimbursed whaling embargo has encouraged for the products of the slaughter? How long, in fact, until the world gives up and tells the whalers to just go ahead and kill them all?
Then again being able to pay off whalers, sure would put to rest the lies that whaling for modern societies was just a way to keep in touch with their heritage. But in fact, if the whaling nations are asking to be paid off, that actually does the exact same thing, though I note that you're not likely to learn that from mainstream news sources who are careful not to insult big money sources.
Want some more good news? I've read evidence that monetary and political support for whaling in at least one nation appears to be a disguised crony payback scheme. Similar games may be going on in the other nations still promoting whaling. Does the world believe environmentalists should fund corrupt politicians at ever increasing costs to keep a horrific slaughter from happening?
The Economist (mobile format): Good whale hunting
More news on whales and whaling:
Saboteurs blamed as Japan whale catch falls short
Following an even more disastrous season for the Japanese Whaling fleet this year's catch fell short of 1/3 of it's desired catch.
Rare whale swims up West Coast at 100 miles per day
Yahoo! Gets Heat for Whale and Dolphin Meat Sales
