I received some e-mails today that confirmed my suspicions about the Discovery Channel’s “Alaska Week,” heavily promoted throughout some Deadliest Catch episodes that I had turned on yesterday as wallpaper, while spending a rainy Sunday afternoon the way it was meant to be spent — that is, before I had kids — who, I am convinced, were napping too.

The promos offered a healthy dose of global-warming alarmism, so I knew better and steered clear. But not before noticing the increasingly alarmist Discovery Channel (like the nearly unwatchable History Channel) stumble onto a salient point.

A dominant theme running through the Deadliest Catch episodes was that certain quotas had been deeply cut and lots of folks were desperate for, and put out of, work. Specifically, DC mentioned how some of the smaller boats had sold their quotas to larger operators and just went into the business of not catching fish. That sounds familiar, and not just from our agriculture policies but more appropriately the Spanish ceramics-plant closing I described last spring.

This is a useful point to help bring home the wonders of the Lieberman-Warner “cap-and-trade” bill about which, for example, Alaska’s Senators and certainly those from Washington State are wavering.

By the way, I also noticed the cost in human life needlessly incurred and significant hardware and human assets that the Coast Guard has to maintain in places they otherwise would generally not be, in force, simply to feed our unslakeable desire for King Crab and Pacific Cod. I think we need to work with certain among our “neo-con” friends to ensure that the public and our policymakers recognize the real cost of our dependence on this resource. Maybe then we will finally embrace the next generation of renewable food: Soylent Green.