Don’t forget the market in whale bone for corsets and ambergris for perfume.
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True that. I like to think the latter was necessary because the corsets would squeeze out “the vapors”.
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sadly this is ineffective at carbon sequestration. it does use less energy than cremation so that’s something nice about it.
liquefy and seal me in a plastic barrel, then drop me to the bottom of the ocean. if the plastic stays intact I might gel up into something the next sentient species can use.
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Gotta nuke somethin’
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Great, now there’s a theoretical dollar value on their utilitarian value… but how do you get anyone to pony up that cash money? Meanwhile, Japan and Norway find whales to be delicious, and will pay a premium to harvest them… scientificially!
Capitalism is a wonderful framework for explaining how perfectly rational economic actors were compelled by the laws of mathematics to make their planet uninhabitable.
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You suffocate if you get behind a whale, apparently, so don’t do it.
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The Japanese believe they are a more environmentally responsible food source than cows. So they have taken up killing them again:
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If I recall, while the Woods Hole folks were testing the iron idea, the Scripps Oceanographic Institute were measuring similarly in the Pacific… and found that the idea is a wash. I don’t have the citation, like you do, I heard about it from a friend working adjacent to the researchers.
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Now some bean/molecule counter will figure out the optimum rate at which whales should reproduce and the optimum age at which they should be killed, for quickest/greatest sequestration of carbon.
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The bumper sticker I remember from the late 70s or early 80s was “Nuke the unborn gay whales.”
There is plenty of scifi that supports this, such as Wool by Hugh Howie.
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Makes for a catchy headline but the numbers seem way off. Large trees (comparable to whales in terms of sequestoring) are not worth $2 million each as carbon sequestors, although I’m sure some carbon offsetting corporations would love it if they were… the actual cost of offsets is closer to $30/ton giving each whale a far smaller offset value of $1000 odd … so off by a rather drastic factor of 2000.
I can’t stop asking myself, how much money is a livable planet worth? It feels like a divide-by-zero error. If you go ahead and spend the money, while someone else somewhete else chooses not to spend the money, they still benefit from your expenditure while you’ve just impoverished yourself. Whuch is why no one wants to go first.
But surely, it makes sense to budget different strategies to see where we get the most bang for the buck? They’ve figured two million a whale based on the commercial value of that much CO2 in industrial markets. But the price for any resource is in no way related to the price of the exact same pollutant. The value of the lead in the soil around Notre Dame, is the cost it will take to clean it up, not the value of the metal on the open market.
The value of CO2 in making soda pop, cryogenics, drilling, and other industrial uses is a positive value that has no bearing whatsoever on its negative value as an unwanted side effect.
Similarly, the electricity represented by the temporarily stored nuclear waste around the world, has already been spent. But the negative value embedded in this stuff, has yet to be calculated. (Its the economics of a blackmailer: how much will we pay, not to live with this stuff in our food and water and air?)
I would like to believe there is a rational way to ask these kinds of value questions that don’t involve putting a thumb on the scale, valuing a brief convenience today far more highly than long term survival down the line for someone else.
By any sane engineering standard, it will always be far cheaper to find a way to avoid releasing the carbon In the air to begin with, than to release it for convenience sake now, and then go chasing after it again once its out there in the atmosphere. Until I see that kind of numerical comparison, all of this seems like junk science to me.
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“sequestering carbon” is my new favorite euphemism for throwing dead bodies in the ocean
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This is considerably more optimistic (for the whales) than the infamous analysis by Colin Clark that it was profitable to exterminate whales. They breed so slowly that you get better return on investment if you kill them all, sell the meat and invest the money than living off a sustainable harvest.
Band Name!
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Wiki’ed the book series. Looks interesting. To the Amazons! I have more material for my commute reading.
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My understanding is that the results from the iron fertilization experiments is that there is no net carbon capture from algae … Which throws a lot of doubt on the idea that there would be any from phytoplankton or whales. If true, then we wouldn’t be saving the whales, we’d be dumping iron waste into the ocean
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