If you think Regulation is slow and difficult, just wait until you see how long it takes to change consumer behavior enough to make a difference.

Certainly difficult, but would it be easier or harder than trying to organize a sustained global boycott of industrial fishing? Not trying to be cute, seriously--regulation would also have to be on a global scale for it to matter. I agree, something needs to be done now.

The market solution is a non-starter. We need laws.

You think blanket laws fixes it either? You need good, well thought out law free from lobbyist influence that tackle the heart of the issue. In other words, something extremely difficult to produce and often times hard to enforce.

Or else you get more trash laws like making it illegal to serve water without asking in San Francisco.

you need more than laws, you need enforcement of those laws.

How do you enforce laws in international waters on foreign flagged ships?

shrug. wasnt addressing that situation specifically. but the means would be established by negotiated treaty, obviously.

With a navy.

Environmental protection is a better casus belli than most wars get.

These kinds of responses are akin to “If it’s illegal and people are still doing it, then clearly the solution is to make it extra illegal!”

These kind of comments are akin to "why bother with laws if people break them?" Environmental crimes like using plastic nets should be treated as smuggling or piracy is. Total elimination of plastic nets likely won't be possible, just as total elimination of smuggling and piracy hasn't been achieved, but usage would certainly be reduced and any reduction is a win for the environment.

it is easy to pass a law and then turn the other way when it's violated. happened leading up to financial crisis. or that law about registering as a foreign agent in the us.

Most people are unable to discipline themselves even if it affects directly their own health (smoking, heavy drinking, lack of excercise, unheathy eating), color me skeptic if we are to rely on people willing to change their habits for the greater good.

It seems like it would be easy enough to ban plastic fishing equipment. Couldn't they make the nets out of hemp, or something else biodegradable?

You think illegal fishermen in the Philippines (where the bulk of the waste in the whale originated according to the article) really care you’ve outlawed plastic fishing nets?

Your solution needs to be extremely incentivized and also easy to enforce in those places of the world. “Banning” something will have a laughable impact and only affect people who never created the waste in the first place.

What you could do is subsidize biodegradable fishing nets so that they're cheaper than plastic ones. Then everyone everywhere stops using plastic ones because the only reason they were used to begin with was that they're cheaper.

That also requires the government rather than industry to pay the cost of its regulations, and explicitly choose how to raise the money rather than implicitly taxing fishermen (and fish) without ever evaluating whether that is the optimal funding source.

Why would the fishermen not be the optimal finding source? Basically the premise here is that their use of plastic nets is already externalizing a cost onto society. Forcing them to pay for nets that cause less externalities just means we're moving the cost away from all of society and back to those who are benefitting from it.

You're assuming that they're the ones benefiting from it.

Suppose they use plastic nets and that makes fishing less expensive, but they all do that and it's a commodity market so they don't get to keep any of that money, it just means that it reduces the price of fish.

Now we need them to use more expensive nets. If we put the cost of them on the fisherman, it raises the price of fish, a healthier source of protein than many of the alternatives (e.g. red meat), and raises the price of food in general. Not super great as an outcome.

If we put the cost of them on coal companies, it raises the price of coal. Coal has nothing to do with fishing net, but we're actually trying to discourage coal, so since taxing coal burning is better than taxing fish eating, that may be a better choice.

I'm from that part of the world and laws here are more like "recommendations". It rarely gets enforced until there's a complaint. And the authorities are more likely to be focusing on factories dumping cyanide in a river or bauxite strip mining, rather than plastic nets.

The other side of it is that people are extremely poor. Possibly negative net value, lots of debts and no other way to pay next months bills. These people are going to use whatever it takes to live, and authorities who try to enforce it will look like villains.

Well you could ban at the manufacturing level, and ideally use political pressure to get other countries on board. It wouldn't be a %100 fix, but seems like it would be a simple step in the right direction.

Once their nets break and no new plastic nets are being produced then yeah, I think they’ll care.

Ya know, it should not matter how much lobby money is thrown at a politician or political party when the desire of the lobby money harms the nation. That right there is a litmus test for a captured, useless to the citizens, politician.

It's not really all that useful to place the blame on the individual politician when they are all susceptible to this behaviour.

It's like how in my town there's a stretch of road that is really shitty. All potholes and uneven road. Almost all drivers I've seen go over it way too fast and often damage their vehicles. Sure, I can blame each individual driver for not being 100% attentive, but when they all fuck up in the same way, some blame must be placed on the conditions that allowed them to all make the same error.

Depending on how small your "town" is, if these people damaging their vehicles are locals and not out-of-towners, I'd say they deserve a lot of the blame: they should know about this road by now. Out-of-towners, of course, I wouldn't blame the same way as I wouldn't expect them to know.

Now if by "my town" you really mean a city, then I might be expecting too much of the drivers.