Since no one has mentioned the elephant in the room: this appears to be a lobby of countries not happy with the current absolute ban on whaling. Norway never signed, Canada has always had natives continuing to hunt, and Japan dislikes how the treaty meant to restore whale populations has become a treaty to forever ban. Thus we see the world's pro whaling group. Plus the smaller nations who can be bought to the table.<p>One should expect sustainable whaling to be top of this groups agenda.
I like this approach of coalitions of the willing. If the willing can gain critical mass they can hopefully apply enough trade pressure/incentives for the unwilling to join too. These sorts of efforts seem to need momentum. Everything seems impossible until it's done.
>The 14 members are Australia, Canada, Chile, Ghana, Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Namibia, Norway, Portugal, and the island nations of Fiji, Jamaica, and Palau.
I don't see how any commitment to protect the oceans can be taken seriously without China committing to it. See this prior comment I made in a different discussion, concerning China's distant fishing fleet, which is ravaging ocean environments worldwide: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25120998" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25120998</a>
A great recent book that touches on the topic of overfishing and ecological damage to the oceans is: The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier by Ian Urbina.
I saw "The Cove" a couple of days ago (in streaming here, btw <a href="https://azm.to/movie/the-cove" rel="nofollow">https://azm.to/movie/the-cove</a> ) where Japan is portrayed pretty bad: the worst is how they "engage" small/poor countries to support their national policy over fishing: the list of these 14 reminds me that a bit.<p>Anyhow, as some of you said: it's probably better then nothing
I hope this might be the start of a solution to the planet wide tragedy of the commons of the ocean. I do not have high hopes. The territory is too large and the criminals too small.
Australia, the country destroying its own Great Barrier Reef on the altar of resource extraction (coal, etc), is promising to protect oceans? This commitment isn't worth the paper it's written on.
Since it's buried a little:<p>> The 14 members are Australia, Canada, Chile, Ghana, Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Namibia, Norway, Portugal, and the island nations of Fiji, Jamaica, and Palau.
These are <i>not</i> the "key" nations. Those are USA, China, India, Japan, EU, Britain. Until they get on board, it's still too little (and probably too late).
Don't panic! Don't worry! China is more than willing to pick up the ocean destroying slack from these 14 nations! They're already doing around 80% of the damage, how could they not just do a bit more?
I'm still surprised the "99%" haven't made a pact to all use a cryptocurrency. I can understand why the 5 wealthiest nations that all want to be the one with a world reserve fiat global enslavement system would oppose such a thing.. but the bottom 190 nations with no chance of theirs being the world reserve currency should all get together and agree to use, contribute to, and defend Bitcoin. These allied nations could agree to contribute at least some minimum, and not exceed 25% of the mining power, with each nation limited to 1/195th of that total. Any attempt at corrupting should be seen as a crime, and act of war, against humanity.
Nations can only control their sovereign seas. The majority of the world oceans are unpoliced. And honestly, I don't see why I, as a developing nation, shouldn't overfish the seas. The developed nations (excluding perhaps the US for being so young) are where they are because they chopped their forests, killed their wildlife, and burned what else they could find.<p>England isn't going to reforest. Germany isn't going to reintroduce all the wildlife they hunted. And the peoples of neither nation have paid reparations to the Earth (for good reason, they can't afford to). If I were running China, the right thing for me to do is to strip the Earth dry, and then a century later when I'm rich demand that "All nations must do their part".<p>After all, it's not like anyone will make me pay for everything that happened a century ago. So you'll either have to make me not do this or you're going to have to suck it up. China's navy doesn't have the ability to protect her shipping fleets so that's her problem.