…and of course, the environmentalists hate it:
The point deserves emphasis. The advent of higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere has been a great boon for the terrestrial biosphere, accelerating the rate of growth of both wild and domestic plants and thereby expanding the food base supporting humans and land animals of every type. Ignoring this, the carbophobes point to the ocean instead, saying that increased levels of carbon dioxide not exploited by biology could lead to acidification. By making the currently barren oceans fertile, however, mariculture would transform this putative problem into an extraordinary opportunity.
Which is precisely why those demanding restraints on carbon emissions and restrictions on fisheries hate mariculture. They hate it for the same reason those demanding constraints in the name of allegedly limited energy resources hate nuclear power. They hate it because it solves a problem they need unsolved.
I hope this means a lot of cheap fresh wild salmon in the stores this summer.
I hope this means a lot of cheap fresh wild salmon in the stores this summer.
Indeed. I love salmon. This would be particularly nice with all the other meat prices rising dramatically.
A couple disclaimers first. 1. The iron seeding seems to have worked and been apparently harmless. 2. the complaints of the usual suspects are overblown.
However. Messing with ecosystems is probably not a hobby for amateurs. Witness the mess from kudzu in the US south, or the history of rabbits and toads in Australia. Nmerous other examples are available from Google.
Like any engineering in public, you better be damn careful, and aware of the potential for disaster.
Open ocean farming seems like a great idea to me. I have heard of a couple of experiments a couple of years back but they were less than successful from a financial point of view. Some of them involved using refurbished oil platforms with nets to grow the fish inside them. The problem I see for something like this in a commercial basis is that the fish are free to move wherever they wish so it makes commercial exploration difficult to say the least. It probably made financial sense for that tribe since they cover a wide area and this increased the overall fish stocks for later years as well.
It may make sense to do this in other places as well. e.g. to restore Canadian Atlantic Cod stocks or Mediterranean Bluefin Tuna stocks. However unless it is done by a consortia of some sort this seems hard to finance.