Oceans in Crisis - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 190

The Future
We have focused on only a few of the current, unprecedented and
(currently) accelerating changes to the oceans. There are others:
pollution—hydrocarbons, heavy metals, human-made chemicals of
all kinds—that flood into the sea; noise pollution—the din from our
boats—that hinders communication between marine mammals; the
change in sediment patterns caused by damming rivers and coastal
construction works, and the tearing up of mangroves to build shrimp
farms; and species invasions that are not climate-related, but result
from the transport of species by humans. (In the sea, a very effective
means of transporting species has been the widespread use of ballast
tanks, by which sea floor sediment, complete with living creatures, is
simply scraped up in one part of the ocean when needed to make up
weight, and then dumped elsewhere.) These and yet more contempo-
rary changes have been eloquently summarized in topics devoted to
this subject. 111
The situation is not quite hopeless. Measures such as marine
reserves have been put into place, and these can be effective, at least
as shelter from human predation. The single most dangerous by-
product of human civilization in this respect (and in others) is carbon
dioxide. The single most effective measure to bring it under control
is likely to be an effective carbon tax, given the central position of
money in our lives and the failure of the touted alternative, the carbon
market, to make a scrap of difference to rising carbon dioxide levels.
A carbon tax could be linked to a stable regulatory framework to
encourage business investment into, and incremental improvement
of, non-carbon-based energy sources. 112 Substantial decarbonization
of the world this century is possible (and indeed can be profitable,
because it entails growing a very large industry). Carried out quickly
enough, it might even confound the pessimists and preserve some