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Wednesday, October 19, 2022

RSN: FOCUS: Charles Pierce | When the Deep-Sea Snow Crab Is the Canary in the Coalmine

18 October 22

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FOCUS: Charles Pierce | When the Deep-Sea Snow Crab Is the Canary in the Coalmine
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "Nature is taking a terrible vengeance on humanity in many ways, some of them more subtle than others."

Climate change is coming for your seafood buffet.

Nature is taking a terrible vengeance on humanity in many ways, some of them more subtle than others. Right now, it’s making serious war on expensive wedding buffets and opulent salad bars all across the world. From CNN:

The Alaska Board of Fisheries and North Pacific Fishery Management Council announced last week that the population of snow crab in the Bering Sea fell below the regulatory threshold to open up the fishery. But the actual numbers behind that decision are shocking: The snow crab population shrank from around 8 billion in 2018 to 1 billion in 2021, according to Benjamin Daly, a researcher with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “Snow crab is by far the most abundant of all the Bering Sea crab species that is caught commercially,” Daly told CNN. “So the shock and awe of many billions missing from the population is worth noting – and that includes all the females and babies.” The Bristol Bay red king crab harvest will also be closed for the second year in a row, the agencies announced.

The typical explanation for something like this is overfishing, which is certainly an ongoing factor; but there’s something different, and ominous, about the circumstances this season.

“We call it overfishing because of the size level,” Michael Litzow, the Kodiak lab director for NOAA Fisheries, told CNN. “But it wasn’t overfishing that caused the collapse, that much is clear.” Litzow says human-caused climate change is a significant factor in the crabs’ alarming disappearance.
Snow crabs are cold-water species and found overwhelmingly in areas where water temperatures are below 2 degrees Celsius, Litzow says. As oceans warm and sea ice disappears, the ocean around Alaska is becoming inhospitable for the species. “There have been a number of attribution studies that have looked at specific temperatures in the Bering Sea or Bering Sea ice cover in 2018, and in those attribution studies, they’ve concluded that those temperatures and low-ice conditions in the Bering sea are a consequence of global warming,” Litzow said. Temperatures around the Arctic have warmed four times faster than the rest of the planet, scientists have reported. Climate change has triggered a rapid loss in sea ice in the Arctic region, particularly in Alaska’s Bering Sea, which in turn has amplified global warming.

Since last summer, officials have been tracking this decline, but it’s been obvious to the region’s fisherman since at least last year. From the Washington Post:

Prout, 32, and his brothers bought out their father’s partner, becoming part owners of the 116-foot Silver Spray. They took out loans and bought $4 million in rights to harvest a huge number of crabs. It was a year that many young commercial fishers in the Bering Sea bought into the fishery, going from deckhands to owners. Everyone was convinced the 2021 snow crab season was going to be huge. And then they weren’t there.
“It was a struggle,” Prout said. “We were pulling up close to blank pots. We’d be searching several miles of ocean floor and not even pulling up 100 crabs. We were grinding away and barely caught what we were allowed to catch.”

And there are massive real-world consequences at the source of the problem.

It is the main source of income for many of the 65 communities that make up the Western Alaska Community Development Quota Program, which allocates a portion of the annual fish harvest of certain commercial species directly to coalitions of villages that, because of geographic isolation and diminished access to sources of income, have had limited economic opportunities, says Heather McCarty, a fisheries consultant in Juneau.
“I work in the Pribilof Islands for an Aleut community of 450 people, which is heavily invested in the crab quota,” McCarty said. On the island of St. Paul, Trident Seafoods has one of the largest crab processing plants in the world, employing as many as 400 workers during peak snow crab season in February. This February, it was quiet. “The whole community of St. Paul is run on the fish tax. It’s 85 percent of the revenue of the community,” she said. “They had some [financial] reserves last year, but it’s not going to go well in the future. King crab has been declining for a while, but snow crab had been quite successful and took a nosedive that nobody expected.”

A way of life is being disrupted all over the Arctic regions—from subsistence hunters on the mainland to commercial fisherman plying some of the most dangerous waters on the planet. Waters that are now warmer than they should be, an adversary to man and crab alike.

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Why aren't Democrats talking about the real cause of inflation?

It would be a political winner for them — and has the virtue of being true

Robert Reich

Oct 18

Despite the Federal Reserve’s most aggressive campaign in generations to slow the economy and bring price increases under control, prices continued to climb at a brutally rapid pace in September — with a key inflation index increasing at the fastest rate in 40 years.

Even though the Fed has quickly raised interest rates from near zero to a range of 3 to 3.25 percent, overall inflation — 8.2 percent over the year through September — continues to roar. Worse, it’s headed in the wrong direction. After stripping out volatile fuel and food, inflation increased. No wonder investors expect the Fed to announce another rate increase at the end of its next meeting, on Nov. 2.

All this could have severe political consequences for Democrats in the midterm elections three weeks from today. Republicans are focusing on inflation because voters see it as their biggest immediate problem, and it’s easy to pin blame on the Democrats because they’re in charge. Biden and the Democrats have provided no retort except to talk about their efforts to reduce drug prices.

Why are Democrats so reluctant to blame inflation on one of its major causes — corporations raising their prices faster than their costs in order to fatten their profit margins?

The evidence of this is now all around us. “The companies who set prices are really reluctant to stop increasing them,” says Jeanna Smialek, who writes about the Fed for the New York Times. “What we saw was that corporations were actually pocketing quite a bit more profit off this…. They’re still putting up prices very rapidly, even in instances where their own costs are starting to fall.”

As a result, corporate profits continue to climb, even as consumers are taking it on the chin. It’s a giant redistribution from consumers to corporations.

The Fed’s rate hikes aren’t working because they’re based on an anachronistic idea — that slowing consumer demand causes prices to fall (or climb more slowly).

But with monopolistic corporations raising prices to preserve or enlarge their profits, the Fed would have to raise interest rates far higher, bringing the economy to a crawl before having the desired effect — by which time the human cost will be overwhelming.

Better to wait out the global supply shocks and deal with corporate power with a temporary windfall profits tax and more vigorous antitrust enforcement.

Would this truthful message be helpful to the Democrats?

I defer to my favorite (and most accurate) pollster, Stanley Greenberg, who did a large survey last month of more than 2,000 registered voters.

Greenberg found that the following statement had the biggest impact on moving voters toward the Democrats:

Corporate profits are at a 70-year high, yet corporations are raising their prices. They are not raising their prices because of their increasing costs. They’re using the cover of inflation to increase their profits. They’re doing so because they face little competition. Most American workers haven’t seen a real wage increase in 40 years. Income and wealth are being distributed up to CEOs and shareholders, while working people are living paycheck to paycheck. And the CEOs are now paying a lower tax rate than working people. Republican leaders in Congress won’t stop price gouging and letting working people pay higher taxes. Democrats say enough. They are cutting taxes for working people and raising them on big corporations and billionaires. And they are fighting against unlimited secret campaign funds.

Greenberg believes this is a winning message for Democrats. Hitting big corporations and Republicans on price increases wins them a large portion of voters under 50 and the working class overall.

So why aren’t Biden and the Democrats hammering away with this message?

I’ve wondered the same thing. Nine months ago, the White House’s National Economic Council was putting out research papers on the relationship between corporate power and inflation — but then abruptly stopped.

At the time I suspected this was because more conventional economists from the Obama administration, such as Larry Summers and Jason Furman, were claiming that the theory didn’t hold water because monopolistic corporations would have exercised their pricing power all along, not just during this burst of inflation. (The reason they’re doing more of it now, by the way, is that inflation has given them cover.)

But after speaking to several insiders, both in the White House and in Congress, I believe I’ve found the real reason — and it’s more troubling. To put it bluntly: Corporate funders of Democrats have made it clear they don’t want the White House or the Party to blame this inflation on them.

That’s a pity, because until Democrats tell it like it is — and talk accurately and clearly about such abuses of corporate power — their electoral majorities will continue to be fragile. And they’ll never get the political mandate they need to take on corporate power as directly and forcefully as it must be taken on.