As the world’s largest emitters gathered in Mexico for the US-led Major Economies Forum, several of my colleagues staged a banner hang to call on the United States to take the lead on climate action. A banner reading "Save the Climate, Act Now!" was unfurled in Cuernavaca City, where the meeting is being held. Leadership is urgently needed to achieve a climate-saving treaty at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December and, sadly, that leadership has so far not been provided by the Obama Administration.We're calling on the Obama Administration to make serious commitments to deep mid-term cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, as well as to provide long-promised funds for developing countries to adapt to climate change, bypass the dirty energy sources of the past where possible, and protect the world's forests. The 16 other major emitters — Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, and the United Kingdom — must see that the US is serious so they will take the necessary action, too.

Today things got ugly. We are in Valletta Harbor in Malta. We learned that there were two vessels here owned by Fuentes, the tuna tycoon who controls over half the bluefin catch in the Mediterranean. We decided to board the vessel to inspect the cargo and documentation. Three women, Emma, Rita, and Liz, were the first to volunteer. After the vessels refused our polite request to allow us access, Emma stepped on board to press the point. She was immediately attacked – they punched her, pulled her hair, picked her up and threw her overboard. One person hurled a large wooden pallet which whistled by our heads, and another tossed a full bucket of paint into one of our boats. If either of those had hit their intended targets, someone could have been seriously injured, but fortunately no damage was done. Greenpeace is not known for taking no for an answer. For us, the violent response to a simple request to inspect the vessel reinforced our belief that they had something to hide. And even if they did not, greater transparency is essential to ensure that vessels are not able to obscure the kinds of illegal activity which have contributed to the bluefin’s decline. We climbed onto the pier, where Emma again tried to board one of the Fuentes vessels. She was viciously assaulted by a burly sailor twice her size, holding her down and punching her repeatedly in the face. (We brought her to a clinic here for treatment, and she has a black eye and her neck is swollen but she’s ok.) We refused to leave the pier, which is private property, until the two vessels were inspected. The police came, and boarded the two vessels. They reported to us that they did not see tuna on board, and that Malta fisheries inspectors were on the way. Then we were taken to the police station, where statements were taken but no charges were filed against us. Whether or not the fishermen will be charged with assault remains to be seen. Unfortunately, corruption is widespread in the Maltese Fisheries Conservation and Control Division. After several calls, they finally blurted “will you stop calling please; we’ve been instructed not to talk to Greenpeace. If you want to pursue this further, I suggest you take this up with the Fisheries Minister.” Calls to the Fisheries Minister went unanswered, but we will take this up with him in detail later. There is a lot at stake here, especially for bluefin tuna, which are being mismanaged out of existence. But also for fishermen – including many of the ones we spoke to last week, which are no longer able to make a living except by towing fish caught by much bigger, more expensive boats. We were happy to see a French warship out on the high seas, inspecting tuna vessels. The Mediterranean is too big for inspectors to cover every boat, however, and illegal activity continues. And unfortunately, even the legal catch is far too much for the population to sustain. Last year, we overheard one tuna vessel owner complaining that it was not fair that Greenpeace activists were often women, as it’s awkward to beat them up. Apparently, times have changed – these thugs did not hesitate. Of course, their violent attack has already backfired, turning what could have been a simple (and frankly not very interesting) inspection into an international incident. Footage of the attack has already traveled widely, and the story – and the fight to save bluefin tuna - continues to gather momentum.  

On Friday the 19th, I was invited to participate in a short Q&A session directly following the release of The End of the Line, a new documentary about the state of our oceans, at a movie theater in the East Village. Even though Greenpeace has been engaging in rigorous cross-promotional efforts with the producers of this film, including campaigning against Nobu restaurant and taking to the water to expose the repugnant activities of bluefin tuna pirates, this was the first time I actually saw the movie in its entirety… and I’m now more convinced than ever that it merits our unconditional support. The End of the Line is a masterful work that details one man’s crusade to save our world’s oceans. The author and subject of the documentary, Charles Clover, found his love of the ocean as many of us do: at the end of a line. While fishing in Wales, Clover snagged a very lonely salmon – a salmon that turned out to be the last one ever caught in that river. Overfishing, rampant development, pollution, and habitat loss have combined forces to annihilate a population that once made annual pilgrimages to the Welsh highlands. After witnessing the melancholy fade-out of this salmon run, Clover began to ask that simple question that so many of us are struggling so mightily to ignore: Why are our fish disappearing? His quest to find an answer became an odyssey that took him from Senegal to Tokyo and a thousand points in between. The movie is replete with dazzling imagery; shots of Almadraba, a traditional bluefin tuna hunt undertaken by Spanish fishermen in the Strait of Gibraltar capture the true vitality and power of this regal animal. During the sequence, I overheard a woman in front of me convey her astonishment over the bluefin’s massive size to her companion in hushed expletives. The irony is that the bluefin pictured in The End of the Line aren’t large at all… maybe 150 pounds. Just a short decade or two ago, there still were bluefin swimming about that had reached sizes closer to their true potential – upwards of 600 pounds. That's three or four times larger than the "massive" fish in the movie. Our baselines have shifted. Aside from the wrinkled old seadogs that haunt the docks of towns like Gloucester, MA, no one remembers a truly gargantuan bluefin. No one remembers that there used to be alligators in Chesapeake Bay. No one remembers the true nature of a healthy ocean. A number of aging fishermen appear throughout the film, underscoring this issue by weaving an old salts’s lament into the story. With their greybeard perspective and sun-stroked skin, these old men of the sea decry the waste and rapacity of the modern fishing industry, citing our rampant overfishing as a glaring example of today’s generation cutting its own throat in search of a quick dollar. Near the conclusion of the film, an unnamed woman sums up the problem when she smiles into the camera and candidly delivers the line, “I like to eat fish. To me, fish are food.” Those who have read some of my previous articles and blog entries on this subject know that I do not necessarily dispute this statement. I don’t have a problem with the concept of a human being feeding on a fish. The problem arises with the strange assumption that once an animal is relegated to the status of “food,” it no longer merits any kind of respectful treatment. It does not deserve to be treated as a living thing; rather, it exists for the lone purpose of one day graduating to the status of fish finger, salmon burger, or 2-piece nigiri plate. Speaking to this issue (albeit somewhat indirectly) is Dr. Daniel Pauly, a UBC professor who is prominently featured throughout the movie. Pauly is one of the most well-known fisheries scientists in the world. He speaks at conferences and symposia in cities across the globe. The particularities of his theories are often disputed within academia, but no one would deny the man’s brilliance and devotion to the planet. At one point during the film, Pauly offers a frighteningly simple answer to Clover’s overarching question about the fate of the world’s fish. When Clover asks, "Where are the fish going?, Pauly responds, “We are eating them!” Fish may be food to some, but that does not mean that they are not still fish first and foremost, living organisms with which humans have a delicate and complex relationship. This relationship is being abused to a terrifying extreme. Factory trawlers, dynamite fishers, bluefin tuna pirates, absurdly greedy corporations (et tu, Mitsubishi?) and corrupt politicians have stretched the ability of our oceans to nurture healthy fish populations to the breaking point. I beseech all those who read this message to make a point of seeing The End of the Line as soon as possible. It depicts the reality of the state of our oceans better than this blog ever could. ALL YOUR FISH ARE BELONG TO US

Yesterday, Climate Progress called out the New York Times for running a front page ExxonMobil advertisement. As Climate Progress points out: "Needless to say — or, rather, in this case, needful to say — while today’s car has lower emissions of urban air pollutants thanks to government regulation, today’s car has, if anything, higher emissions of greenhouse gases, which threaten the health and well-being of the next 50 generations. And needful to say, ExxonMobil has done more than just about any other company to undermine efforts to achieve the greenhouse gas regulations that could lower those emissions." "ExxonSecrets details the millions of dollars that the company has shoveled to fund the disinformation campaigns of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, all of which continue to advance unfactual anti-scientific attacks as I have detailed recently (see posts on Heritage and CEI and AEI). Chris Mooney wrote an excellent piece on ExxonMobil’s two-decade anti-scientific campaign. A 2007 Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) report looked at ExxonMobil’s tobacco industry-like tactics in pushing global warming denial (see “Today We Have a Planet That’s Smoking!”). So it is especially egregious that the New York Times would take money to publish this disinformation on their front page." Please email the NYT at nytnews@nytimes.com about this egregious ad and/or email its public editor at public@nytimes.com to explain you are “concerned about the paper’s journalistic integrity.”

Patrolling for tuna pirates here in the Mediterranean is a 24-hour operation. My day started with a four AM wakeup call "John! We have found more boats!" but others on the crew had been working through the night. By eight this morning, we had inspected and traded information with nine boats. Since the official close of the bluefin fishery, we have not been seeing the expensive pure seine boats that we frequently encountered earlier in the expedition. Instead, most of the vessels we see now are small, old, and worn. A couple people said the fishing has been “passable” or “mediocre,” but most have reported that catches have been quite low. One fisherman held up his net to show us his catch, and the fish were so small it reminded me of the “Tiny Fish” video. And as before, we have seen more fishermen who are no longer fishing, but instead towing cages for other, wealthier fishermen. The cages can be quite large, over 50 yards across, and can hold more than 200 tons of tuna. The cage in this photo held 2800 bluefin. (We call them cages, but actually they are circular nets, supported by floats and plastic supports.) The captain of the boat towing these fish invited us on board for a tour, and at times it seemed that rust was all that was holding the vessel together. The fishermen had been at sea for 66 days, with very little shelter, much less luxuries like flush toilets or comfortable beds. Back on board the Rainbow Warrior, we calculated that these guys had been towing over a million and a half dollars worth of fish. I don’t know whether or not they realized the value of their cargo, but it was very clear that these guys were not getting much of a share of the profits. A couple fishermen mentioned that they had been fishing for a long time – one man said he’d been fishing for sixty years. Others said their families had always fished, which I imagined might mean as much as a hundred years or even more. Yesterday, however, I learned that people have been fishing for bluefin in the Mediterranean since before the rise of the Roman Empire. It is difficult for most of us to even imagine that kind of continuity of history, tradition, and culture. And now, a fish that has been prized – and fished sustainably - for thousands of years has gone from abundance to the verge of extinction in just a few short decades. This is an emergency, and we are here to sound the alarm. We can only hope that our wake up call is enough to jolt the members of ICCAT to their senses, while there is still time. Or better still, to help convince the Obama Administration and other influential governments that the time has come to take responsibility for bluefin management out of ICCAT’s hands, and to bring the issue to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Stay tuned – we have been hearing reports that illegal vessels are seeking shelter nearby, so we’re on our way there now. For the Oceans – John Hocevar Oceans Campaign Director Greenpeace USA