Janet Lubchenco has successfully been installed into the seat of power at NOAA by a unanimous Senate vote coming from a unanimous bunch of Senators who apparently either unanimously didn’t understand how her close association with a group like Pew who have no qualms about speaking out on their anti-fishing agendas could possibly constitute a conflict of interest or unanimously didn’t give a crap.
To quote Nils Stolpe writing for FishNet in the fall of 2007:
Before foundations established with mega-corporation funds discovered that just about any “fishing is bad” issue could be turned into a cause célèbre, the regularly recurring articles predicting the destruction of various fisheries seemed to have minimal impact on the fishing industry in general. The anti-fishing flames were often fanned by the media through uninformed reporting, but only relative to a particular issue/area, and cooler heads and more fully informed opinions usually prevailed.
Unfortunately, that is no longer the case. With tens of millions of foundation dollars at their disposal, the anti-fishing activists can afford to do a much better job of buying the scientists, spinning the facts and convincing the public and our elected officials that the manufactured fisheries crises that have been endemic in the public print and broadcast media for as long as those media have been in existence are actually real. The fishermen, the fish and the consuming public deserve a lot more than that.
Here’s hoping she remembers all the words she spoke about good science, the public do certainly deserve a lob more than a government agency controlled by these well financed groups with narrow anti-american worker agendas. However, it is hard to believe there is anything but bad going to come of it.
Lubchenco said she was eager to get started because of pressing burdens on the economy and the environment, including global warming, polluted coastal waters and severely depleted fish populations.
“We really don’t have a choice,” she said in an interview. “We have to move rapidly ahead because of chronic problems that need immediate solutions.”
Don’t have a choice? Why not, are you a woman or a whelk? Move rapidly ahead? Since when did science move rapidly without making mistakes? “chronic problems that need immediate solutions”? There are no simple solutions to complex problems and there are no immediate solutions to chronic problems unless one considers pro-active closures of healthy fisheries just in case it will help an “immediate solution”.
S.S.D.D. Sounds like more justification for “emergency rules” and closures to me.
Information from the following was used in writing this post:
Fishnet article: “Over a Century of Crises”
RFA article on Hijacking Fishery Management
Climate Science Watch Post
Tags: Government Regulation, Ranting general by Fishing Fool
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