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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   36400 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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Somewhat ironically, the oil industry also killed off whaling by making kerosene a viable alternative to whale oil.

I'm not an expert on whaling but I thought that whale fat(?) was mainly used to produce high-quality candles and certain machine lubricants.

Nope, whale lamps were the main use case in the wooden ship days of sailing from Nantucket, although whale oil has a zillion uses only some of which are replaceable(nasa still doesn’t have a petroleum based replacement).

The crash in whale stocks mostly came later, after whale oil for lighting became obsolete- the Japanese, Norwegian, and Soviet fleets killed an utterly unsustainable number of whales for eating(/faking fish quotas), not oil. Right whales are the only species that was threatened by the Nantucket whaling industry.

This is a historical misconception- whaling to produce oil for the purposes petroleum would later replace it in was sustainable. Whale stocks crashed when they were heavily exploited for protein, and also partly to make numbers go up for the Soviet fishing industry.

The old school ‘some guys in a wooden boat throwing a harpoon’ whaling industry was replaced by the Norwegians ‘hunt whales in an actual warship’ method.

Protein?

Cheap meat/fish? The wooden ship days of whaling didn’t feature a lot of eating whale meat, but the whaling revival which actually crashed stocks did- mostly in Europe and later Japan. Today only the nordics and Japan still eat whale meat, but it was common in institutional food and sometimes for the poor(a much larger percentage of the population at the time) in the first half of the twentieth century.

Of course it still might have been sustainable if it wasn’t for the Soviet Union’s ‘kill as many whales as possible to count towards total fishing tonnage’ scam.

Today only the nordics and Japan still eat whale meat

And Alaskan Inuit.

And Greenlanders and a few indigenous tribes elsewhere in the world, yes, but I thought a ‘other than primitives only Nordics and Japanese still eat whale meat’ was implied.

Fuck you, whale! Fuck you, dolphin!

Pls no ban, it came into my head when I saw that and I couldn't help myself, kthx!

I think you need to distinguish between sperm whales and other species.

While sperm whales were heavily targeted by Nantucket whalers, they weren't particularly threatened as a species because whalers preferred to target bulls, which are infinitely replaceable.

Now right whales, on the other hand, may have actually been badly impacted by the Nantucket industry- stocks of right whales depleting was the cause of the shift to targeting sperm whales. But there's no records of sperm whale stocks depleting like that. Rorquals, on the other hand, were mostly impacted by the later whaling industry mostly going after food.

Add "saving the whales" to Rockefeller's long list of accomplishments.

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