When no fish farms existed, liberals loved the idea. It was another one of their favored nonexistent solutions.

Then the farming of fish actually got underway. The supply of farmable species skyrocketed. Salmon, once endangered, became the 'bison of the sea', saved by farming.

Hold on there.

In the first place, a lot of "liberals" and "greens" still support most forms of aquaculture and fish farming- including salmon farming.

They target salmon farming practices as problematic for fish farming for several reasons: it's an unsatisfactory substitute for wild salmon harvested from their natural habitats; hatchery fish are prone to epidemics; they lose their homing and nesting instincts and their natural prey and predator behaviors; they're penned in close quarters that lead to their water products being concentrated over a small area of sea floor, turning the offshore littoral areas where they're penned into manure dumps; they're fed with food meal that most often contains bioaccumulative toxins that result in the salmon flesh containing much, much higher concentrations of toxins like mercury and PCBs, as compared with wild salmon.

You contend that "salmon, once endangered, became 'the bison of the sea', saved by farming.' That's patently false. It also illustrates your ignorance of some basic features of the aquatic ecosystem. "Salmon" are not simply one species, as your statement implies; in fact, Atlantic salmon is one species, within the genus Salmo; Pacific salmon consist of several different species, of the genus Oncorhynchus.

Atlantic salmon are gone from most of their original range in North America; the runs are almost entirely extinct in the USA, except for a few remnant populations in Maine, and a marginally successful restoration project on the Connecticut River. They're also gone from much of their natural range in Europe.

Fish farming using fish spawned in artificial hatchery habitats do not make up for that loss. And hatchery smolts and penned salmon have proved to be terribly vulnerable to infectious epidemics, parasites- and, lately, to the massive blooms of ocean jellyfish that some scientists view as linked to ocean warming, and which almost totally wiped out the penned salmon of Northern Ireland's only salmon farm, in the year 2007.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-495480/100-000-farmed-salmon-farm-wiped-massive-jellyfish-invasion.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/2178959.stm

Penned salmon farming doesn't sound much like a practice designed to ensure the stability of the species, to me.

Additionally, your statement that "salmon, once endangered, [were] saved by farming" doesn't accord with the facts of the case at all, in relation to the fate of Pacific salmon species:

Final Hatchery Listing Policy & Salmon ESA Listings

On June 16, 2005, NOAA Fisheries Service issued its final Endangered Species Act Pacific salmon hatchery listing policy, final ESA listing determinations for 16 West Coast salmon populations, and six-month listings extensions for Oregon coast coho and 10 O. mykiss (steelhead and rainbow trout) populations. Below are documents associated with these actions.

On Mar. 16, 2009, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld NOAA Fisheries Service's hatchery listing policy for Pacific salmonids. The court's decision ends an eight-year chapter in NOAA's salmon and steelhead listings. It affirms the current listing status of 27 salmon and steelhead populations under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The good news for NOAA Fisheries Service, other federal agencies, and citizens with ESA permits and approvals, is that NOAA's decisions over the last several years relying on this policy do not need to be revised. The good news for ESA-listed species is that the court upheld the principle that a viable species is one that is self-sustaining in the wild. [italics added. ed.]

http://www.nwr.noaa.gov/ESA-Salmon-Listings/Salmon-Populations/Alsea-Response/Final-Listings-Hatchery-Policy.cfm

That decision- thankfully based on sound scientific principles of aquatic biology and wildlife management, instead of venality and denial- means that hatchery and farmed salmon are no substitute for wild populations.

As this happened, Greens turned against fish farming, just as they automatically turn against any human solution to an environmental problem.

agore, I've taken your side of the issue in regard to controveries over energy generation that you should know better than to lump us all together.

But in this case, it's you who appears to not have apprised yourself of the facts, or of the scientific principles required to interpret their significance.

Finally, much of the environmental community is on record as taking a "mend it, don't end it" approach to the salmon farming industry- check out this release from the Environmental Defense Fund, for instance:

http://www.edf.org/article.cfm?contentID=5323

I think it's a damned shame that we don't have healthy, restored ecosystem for wild salmon to raise themselves. In a better world, farming these species for food should be unnecessary. But if salmon farming can be done responsibly and with harm minimization, I'm not opposed to it in principle. However, it's no substitute for an ecosystem approach that protects habitats; curbs pollution and overfishing; and works to prevent the possibility of radical climactic alterations that might alter the entire biochemistry of the oceans, leading to results like coral reef extinctions, or the ascendancy of jellyfish species over higher vertebrate species like fish and marine mammals.

This is not rocket science. But it is science.

http://www.earthsave.org/environment/water.htm

I read this whole thing slowly and in detail, hoping, actually hoping, to be proven wrong. To have my foot up my ass, as it were.

I was a bit apprehensive, to tell the truth. I figured my 25 years of avid nonfiction science reading was no match for real scientists studying things in detail and making accurate judgments based on extrapolation of facts.

SO, what did I get out of that web page?

I got that they never really got to the point of how this 2500 gallons had been calculated.

Oh, they did the typical liberal, "I know better than you" dance of describing the hallowed degrees the scientists possessed, what prestigious universities they studied at or worked in, how many other hallowed scientists used their data, how often and in how many publications their proclamations were repeated.

But still, as I was reaching the bottom of the page, one little itty bitty thing was MISSING. HOW THE FUCK THEY ACTUALLY CALCULATED THE GODDAMN NUMBER!!!!!!!

This is how the phony global warming fuckfest works. Keep repeating that important people know better than mere simpering you, without ever really explaining the BASIS behind this divinely ill gotten knowledge. Of course the mouth breathing lefties swallow it all whole. No questions asked. Why, of COURSE the drooling lefties know man is inherently evil and destroying the planet. No need to ever even question that. The only question is "WHEN do the gas chambers begin to roar to destroy the populace and save the planet?"

It is times like this when I realize that not only is a comedian like Lewis Black not exaggerating when his jowls shake in mock anger, but he is actually UNDERREACTING when clowns like you people take bullshit web pages and send them to me without sincerely laughing yourselves silly over what you've just done.

You can pull one over on your liberal doofus friends who barely comprehend logic (though they are GREAT at pretending to be SUPERIOR to you and me), but don't try that crap on me...

Al Gore is a MASTER magician