Every year, my friend and I pick Major League Baseball city and head there for Opening Day. This time – I can't say the 75-degree weather didn't have something to do with it – we went with San Diego.

The day before the game, a friend and I took in the S-D. The highlight was the Maritime Museum. We toured a B-39 Cold War Russian submarine, the Star of India one of the last great ironclad ships of the Age of Sail, and my favorite (having read every O'Brien novel) the stout 18th century replica frigate Surprise (formerly HMS Rose) used in the filming of the Russell Crow film Master & Commander: Far Side of the World.

We also took a tour of the bay on a reconstituted 1914 harbor boat. San Diego, in many ways, feels like a brand new city, especially downtown. From the harbor you get a magnificent view of the shining new hotels and skyscrapers, the Disneyesque Seaport Village, the gorgeous new convention center, and the ballpark. Docked off its shores are the most recent descendents of the great ships we'd just toured – warships that can evade radar detection, or cruise at enormous speeds in shallow water. It's also apparent that the city's shoreline, maintained by the Port of San Diego, has benefited from extensive remediation work in the last few decades – highlighted by several reclaimed parks.

But the harbor tour surprisingly had a lot of the old city left to show us. Nestled between the parks and piers is a small, unassuming, single-story building. Its continued purpose is displayed proudly on its bay side: American Tuna Boat Association.

What we didn't see was many tuna boats. In fact, we didn't see any. Our captain explained: San Diego was once the home of the tuna fishing industry. major brands like Chicken of the Sea and Bumble Bee still reside in San Diego County, but the boats now dispatch from someplace else. How did a $30 million industry of the 20th century just…disappear.

Apparently, we regulated them out

As tuna fishing methods improved, and net size increased dramatically, the tuna population far off the coast of Southern California was taking a major hit. The U.S. joined international treaty organizations to protect the industry from fishing itself out of business, and enforced quotas on its ships, but other nations were not as tough on their boats. It was a major blow to San Diego seiners. Some left California and re-flagged under nations with more relaxed regulations. Others left the industry. A few hung on.

The problem was then compounded by porpoises, who often travel with tuna in that part of the Pacific, and were getting caught in the nets. Egged on by regulation and public pressure, not to mention their own dolphin affinities, American fishermen developed advanced new nets and best practices to rescue any porpoises caught in the giant nets. Some got pretty good at it, too. But not good enough, and not fast enough. After passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and under pressure from the public, in 1990, the canning companies stopped buying tuna from the San Diego tuna boats.

That the regulatory burden fell on the American fishermen was particularly galling, since of all the seiners on the ocean, the Americans were better than any competitors at saving captured dolphins. At the twilight of the San Diego tuna fishing industry, American captains were saving an estimated 99.4 percent of all dolphins trapped in their nets. Next was France. At 80 percent. The difference, according to one former tuna boat captain, was that the Americans would also jump in the water and physically help the dolphins over the nets.

Today isn't yesterday

Since 1990, international treaties meant to prevent over-fishing have been ultimately unsuccessful in many cases. The U.S. has signed on and instructed its boats stay under quota, but left up to individual nations to enforce, and because boats needed to catch double their quota just to be profitable, the tuna populations of both oceans continue to decline. While dolphin deaths aren't as high today as they were 19 years ago, they're also not as low as the American boats achieved almost two decades ago. Meanwhile, fish stocks continue to dwindle, with fingers pointing every which way as to which nations aren't holding to their agreements.

So did we regulate an industry out of existence?

Not entirely, but it's folly to think that the porpoise-kill regulations and strict quotas didn't play a role in that. So how could we have done it better? For one, it seems the public outcry was overblown, for that forced the canners' hands into pulling the plug. Second, without a strong push for international solidarity on the issue, we would have ended up facing a very difficult choice between breaking our own laws, or end up the only country regulating as it said it would.

On the other hand, if San Diego did still have a fleet, in the current tuna climate, it wouldn't be in particularly good shape. And from appearances, the city's doing just fine, even if a large part of its history is now gone.

But whatever the would-be fate of the San Diego tuna boats, these are important lessons to take with us as we start corralling carbon. Standing idly by is not only irresponsible, but foolish, considering we're now officially aware of the consequences. On the other hand, over-blowing the threat, or vilifying our own industries is not going to solve the problem.

There's one last lesson we can learn from the death of the tuna fishing industry in San Diego: by killing off our own fleet, the U.S. removed the innovating influence fishing industry the boats who were the best at avoiding overfishing and porpoise-kill. And by folding our hand as it were, we also lost any leverage we might have to affect play at the table.

Applying this to GHG control, it's becoming more and more apparent that the world isn't going to be able to get a handle on its carbon without America playing a central role. We're also not going to like the results if we make our industries face tougher regulations than their competitors. That's not to say everybody's going to survive. And we'd better be up front about that now: controlling GHG emissions is going to put some people out of business. Weaning ourselves off of oil and natural gas is going to make things tough on many Americans in Texas and Alaska, and very likely in your state too.

It was rough on the tuna fleet, but ultimately the city recovered, and now has a brand new waterfront driving a thriving tourism industry. And a really nice new ballpark. As we were pulling in, I caught a glimpse of a cargo ship carrying one more symbol of that new economy: wind turbine blades, fresh from Pittsburgh, ready to be shipped overseas.

We can't be afraid of change or challenges. We can't be afraid to admit our mistakes in past environmental actions, and having done so, we must also find the courage to forge ahead, more intelligently this time, with new regulatory efforts. We can't even trust one treaty or one brilliant new technology to give us a final solution. But we have this going for us: we're still the biggest. We're still the lynchpin of the global economy. And we're still the guys who not only can design the most dolphin-proof nets on the planet, but also don't mind jumping in with our snorkels, grabbing a dolphin by the beak, and showing him over the lines. And that could make all the difference in the world. PE