Saving Seafood

KIMBERLY STRASSEL: Barack Obama’s Midnight Regulation Express

December 23, 2016 — The technical definition of a midnight regulation is one issued between Election Day and the inauguration of a new president. The practice is bipartisan. George W. Bush, despite having promised not to do so, pushed through a fair number of rules in his final months. But Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were more aggressive, and Mr. Obama is making them look like pikers.

Mr. Obama has devoted his last year to ramming through controversial and far-reaching rules. Whether it was born of a desire to lay groundwork for a Clinton presidency, or as a guard against a Trump White House, the motive makes no difference. According to a Politico story of nearly a year ago, the administration had some 4,000 regulations in the works for Mr. Obama’s last year. They included smaller rules on workplace hazards, gun sellers, nutrition labels and energy efficiency, as well as giant regulations (costing billions) on retirement advice and overtime pay.

Since the election Mr. Obama has broken with all precedent by issuing rules that would be astonishing at any moment and are downright obnoxious at this point. This past week we learned of several sweeping new rules from the Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, including regs on methane on public lands (cost: $2.4 billion); a new anti-coal rule related to streams ($1.2 billion) and renewable fuel standards ($1.5 billion).

This follows Mr. Obama’s extraordinary announcement that he will invoke a dusty old law to place nearly all of the Arctic Ocean, and much of the Atlantic Ocean, off limits to oil or gas drilling. This follows his highly politicized move to shut down the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota. And it comes amid reports the administration is rushing to implement last-minute rules on commodities speculation, immigrant workers and for-profit colleges—among others.

Any action that is rushed is likely to be shoddy, especially if it’s from the federal government. The point is for Mr. Obama to have his way and to swamp the Trump administration with a dizzying array of new rules to have to undo. That diverts manpower from bigger and better priorities.

Read the full story at The Wall Street Journal 

What If We Had All Listened to NASA and Started Eating Krill?

October 5th, 2016 — Way back in 1977—the year Star Wars came out, British Airways launched Concorde SST service between London and New York, and Jimmy Carter signed legislation creating the Department of Energy—NASA published an exceptionally forward-looking report called “The Role of Aerospace Technology in Agriculture.” Its purpose was to figure out how to feed a ballooning world population given the Earth’s limited resources—using space-age technology. Oddly enough, amid high-minded discussions about the aerial application of chemicals and remote-sensing systems, was tucked this suggestion: Perhaps humans could subsist wholly—or partially—on a diet of krill.

The succinct proposal clearly fell to the wayside and remained buried in the NASA report until we happened upon it recently. It got us thinking: What if we humans had actually embraced this notion back in the day and had become a race of krill-eating beings? Was this forgotten report from the 70s a viable proposal for saving the future of mankind?

Krill, of course, are the tiny, shrimp-like crustaceans that are found near the rock bottom of the food chain. They feed on phytoplankton and—because they are protein-rich—are a primary food source for larger fish, which eventually get eaten by us. Although some nations certainly do make use of krill as a food stuff—the Japanese call it okiami, and Norwegians eat krill paste with crackers—in most of the world, krill is just used as fish feed in aquaculture. Vitamins are also made with their oil, and certain enzymes found in krill are used in various food and medical products. However, not eating them is understandable, too—krill are quite salty, and each crustacean’s hard exoskeleton must be removed before being eaten because it contains contains fluorine, which is toxic in high enough concentrations. But still, if humankind’s sustainability problems could be saved by krill, maybe we should figure out a way to use them as sustenance. Who needs Soylent or crickets if the oceans are filled to the brim with underutilized krill, right?

Evidently not.

As it turns out, the harvesting of Antarctic krill has greatly increased since the report was published, and conservationists are now increasingly concerned about its diminishing global supply. Not only do countless fisheries rely on Antarctic krill as feed, but demand for krill oil and its enzymes has skyrocketed. “It is well-known that many proposals in the 1970s were made to greatly increase food production from the sea—including harvesting krill and other zooplankton,” explains Boris Worm, a marine research ecologist and associate professor at Dalhousie University. “At the time, it was still thought that the sea could feed a rapidly growing human population, but by the 1990s, it became clear that wild fisheries could not be increased any more.”

Read the full story at Vice