Fisheries science is known for having several high-profile controversies; and there is a new one these days: ‘balanced harvesting’. At issue is whether or not we should shift towards a fisheries management philosophy that tries to spread fishing pressure across all sizes and species of fish in an ecosystem – harvesting each size and species in proportion to…
Greece: A ponzi scheme with no end in sight (Eric Reguly, The Globe and Mail). Reguly provides a succinct summary of Greece’s economic death spiral: They are drifting from bailout loan to bailout loan from the IMF, the European Union (EU) and the European Central Bank (ECB). Each loan comes with conditions requiring Greece to put in place further…
From Matt: Eight million tons of plastic dumped in ocean every year (Laura Parker, National Geographic): A new landmark study has estimated how much plastic we are dumping in the ocean each year, and it’s a lot. Most of it is coming from east and southeast Asia, but what’s interesting is that it’s not all coming…
–Matt Burgess- Carbon pricing debates have been picking up steam worldwide in recent months. The issue has made a particularly strong resurgence in Canada, after being politically taboo for several years. As a growing chorus of economists and politicians of all stripes has echoed the clear economic rationale for carbon pricing, the debate in Canada…
–Matt Burgess– Many would like to see a new binding international agreement to reduce carbon emissions at the upcoming UN Climate Conference in Paris. Though there appears to be some political will for such an agreement, early cracks in the negotiations in Lima in December call to mind the limited success of past climate agreements. The widely hailed Kyoto…
The idea of a national carbon tax has been near the front of many Canadian news cycles since the Liberals included it in their federal election platform in 2008. The Liberals, under Stéphane Dion, proposed a carbon price of 10$/tonne initially, rising to 40$/tonne in the fourth year, levied on electricity and fuel consumption, with the exception…
–Matt Burgess- In July 2009, a group of scientists, led by Boris Worm of Dalhousie University and Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington, published a study in the prestigious journal Science synthesizing the current state of knowledge on the status of global fisheries. The study found that a large fraction of well-studied fish populations have been severely depleted…
The Tête-à-Tête 