yah you're right, it was only showing the comments from yesterday, not all of them. There's about 500. Most of them seem to be against the ban. The ones I read in favour of the ban did not read as though the authors really understood the issue - "evil humans bad, mother nature good! Yay nature!"
And yah, the whole legal structure surrounding endangered species needs work. There clearly should be some sort of legislative structure governing the conservation of reef species, but it seems like there's just no appropriate tool in place for them. The ESA is a smothering blanket that is blind to the nuance of the aquarium industry, but there's no question there's an over-harvesting of some species that are hard to propagate, like elegance corals.
I hope it doesn't pass. The group who nominated these corals for the ESA did it pretty much for pure political reasons to try to force the US government to act meaningfully on the topic of CO2 emissions. 99 times out of 100, I'd have been on their side, but they're effectively holding our hobby ransom for political gain. Heck, if listing those corals as threatened or endangered had one lick of a hope of affecting global CO2 emissions, I might actually support it, but it won't and never will.
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