Are MSC-certified ‘sustainable fisheries’ in fact unsustainable?

Small fisheries that use highly selective, low-impact techniques, such as hook-and-line fishing or hand picking, are often sustainable, but make up only a tiny fraction of MSC-certified fisheries.

As part of ClimateProgress’s effort to focus attention on the grave threat to ocean life, today’s guest blogger is marine-biologist-turned-filmmaker, Randy Olson.

Fisheries economist Jennifer Jacquet and a team of A-list marine biologists today took the Marine Stewardship Council out behind the woodshed and left it limping away with a sore posterior. It came in the form of an Opinion piece in Nature appropriately titled, “Seafood Stewardship in Crisis.”

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Poor Carly Fiorina.  To make conservative ideologues happy, she has to abandon science and her previous positions on the key issues of global warming and clean energy (see “The dumbing down of Carly Fiorina” and links below).

But to win election statewide, she has to appeal to the majority of California voters, who understand that clean energy is the key to the state’s long-term economic and job growth — and that unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases will devastate California more than most states.

And so in her first debate with climate and clean energy champion Barbara Boxer, she simply couldn’t give a straightforward answer to the simple question of whether she supported the Big-Oil-funded Prop 23 effort to gut California’s landmark climate and clean energy laws.

Let’s go to the videotape (watch to the end):

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CEI’s Chris Horner joins the group shark jump

This bizarre tragedy has exposed the shockingly extreme views of some of the anti-science ideologues, as I discussed yesterday.

Media Matters has a must-read post on the latest example of Gore Derangement Syndrome.  Right-wingers from Fox News to Drudge to WattsUpWithThat have tried to pin this crazy guy’s actions on the Nobel Prize-winning former vice president.

Typical is Chris Horner of the Big-Oil-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute, who makes that absurd argument … where else but on the website of Andrew Breitbart (who famously mashed up a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her appear racist, when she was in fact explaining how she was “getting beyond the issue of race”).  His post’s self-defaming headline is “An Inconvenient Truth:  Enviros’ Doomsday Rhetoric Breeds Eco-Terror.”

Now you know those conservatives are pushing an uber-extreme position when the voice of reason on their side comes from Michelle Malkin (!) and Glenn Beck (!!), but MM ends their post with those two explaining why the argument utterly fails:

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UPDATE:  Now the Coast Guard says they were wrong, the rig explosion did not cause a spill.

No, it’s not even close to BP redux, but the story is noteworthy — and not just for its irony, as TP makes clear:

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Banks Grow Wary of Environmental Risks

Blasting off mountaintops to reach coal in Appalachia or churning out millions of tons of carbon dioxide to extract oil from sand in Alberta are among environmentalists’ biggest industrial irritants. But they are also legal and lucrative.

For a growing number of banks, however, that does not seem to matter.

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CAP’s Joshua Dorner exposes the latest Big Oil effort to dupe the public in this TP cross-post.

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