Preface. Oil has allowed us to extract 90% of the fish in the ocean by being able to go to the ends of the earth using sonar and spotting planes to find the last schools.
Menhaden have been overfished for decades because this profitable industry has been powerful enough to prevent reform for over 20 years.
Even more money could be made, by more people, if there were a 10 year moratorium on catching them, because they are the main fish at the bottom of the food chain that eat biomass (phytoplankton) on the East Coast of the U.S. If their numbers could be brought back to what they once were, the population of blue fin tuna, striped bass, redfish, bluefish, and humpback whales, just a few of the 79 species that feed on menhaden, would explode and create many commercial and sports fishing jobs.
Preface. Much of this post is based on Miriam Pemberton’s 2023 book “Six Stops on the National Security Tour”. Large sections of the book are about why past attempts to cash in on the ending of the cold War since 1991 or even before that didn’t work out. She proposes that military funding should be diverted now to prevent the climate crisis to set up companies to build electric vehicles, wind turbines and more.