It was vegetable oil, not an international treaty, that saved the whales. Ninety-nine percent of all whales killed in the twentieth century had occurred by the time the International Whaling Commission (IWC) got around to imposing a moratorium in 1982.34 The Commission’s moratorium on whaling in the 1980s, according to the economists who did the most careful study, was a “rubber stamp” on a “situation that had already emerged. . . . Regulation was not important in stabilizing populations.”
