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The unsustainable growth of the container ship industry

prospect.org

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Re: The unsustainable growth of the container ship industry

#21

Post by xnx »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #20

> No upstart carrier could possibly compete with the alliances; they couldn’t afford the massive startup costs to build or lease their own mega-ship. This is such a common pattern with optimization. Something starts small-ish, but gets optimized and optimized to the point that newcomers aren’t viable and everything gets locked in. It happens all over the economy, and the unprecedented scale of everything only makes t…

Giant corps in adjacent industries. Look at how a bookstore (Amazon) now runs a logistics operation that competes with USPS, UPS, and Fedex.

Re: The unsustainable growth of the container ship industry

#23

Post by specialp »

WJW wrote: post #18
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #4

monopoly power, except effectively extranational so no antitrust Faaaantastic. Of course the entire "make 5000 miles away, ship it over the pacific" was enabled by the lack of a proper carbon tax. If monopolies perform the same "service" then more power to them.

> ship it over the pacific" was enabled by the lack of a proper carbon tax. This is just demonstrably false. For a typical household product, more carbon is emitted trucking it from the port to the store than is emitted shipping it across the ocean. Cargo ships are extremely energy efficient. And of course for a great many products the raw materials are not actually produced locally, so if you shift manufacturing bac…

It depends where the port is, and where the store is. While it is true that a cargo ship produces 20% of the carbon per km per ton that a truck does, the distance is very large. This also does not account for freight rail which produces half the carbon per km per ton that container ships do. So yes, if a cargo ship goes the 11,000 km from China to LA, then a semi-truck takes this from LA to NY the overland route would produce more carbon.

Also, the part about the raw materials not being produced locally, this is true abroad too.

Re: The unsustainable growth of the container ship industry

#24

Post by paganel »

smm11 wrote: post #17

We just need to run railroad tracks over the oceans.

One can still dream about the Bering Straight bridge (or tunnel) [1] coming to life someday, plus the connecting (and now missing) railway parts over the two continents.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bering_Strait_crossing

Re: The unsustainable growth of the container ship industry

#25

Post by TameAntelope »

user10874967111 wrote: post #12

I was excited to read about the hidden cost of dockerizing everything…

I will pay someone in pageviews if they write that article!

But it's kind of funny, you can see a few comments at the bottom from people who didn't actually click the article, and therefore thought similarly to us.

Re: The unsustainable growth of the container ship industry

#26

Post by AtlasBarfed »

topkai22 wrote: post #14
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #4

monopoly power, except effectively extranational so no antitrust Faaaantastic. Of course the entire "make 5000 miles away, ship it over the pacific" was enabled by the lack of a proper carbon tax. If monopolies perform the same "service" then more power to them.

Ocean shipping is extremely carbon/energy efficient and would likely be advantaged with a carbon tax. It’s emissions are concentrated in sulfur from the low grade oil it burns, which is harmful to humans and the environment in other ways. You could potentially argue that a carbon tax's impact on transportation generally would increase local manufacturing, but I kind of doubt it- it would advantage those manufacturers…

You might be correct, but what we have now is an effectively subsidized system.

If it is properly regulated / priced to account for externalities (I would like some conservative regulation to make up for the unaccountable/unknown externalities, perhaps protectionism could function in that manner), then it would likely properly account for environmental concerns.

My top comment of course didn't even deal with the "environmental arbitrage" that international shipping represents. You make stuff where there isn't as much regulation/price accounting for externalities, THEN you ship it 5000 miles.

It used to be this amounted to simply getting to offload localized pollution on the third world, and the first world gets the benefits. You know like this:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...

But carbon emitted in China impacts us here. And that is the existential threat.

If you want a good, modern "Web3" example of this, hm, why is Mongolia a new bitcoin mining hub?

Re: The unsustainable growth of the container ship industry

#27

Post by yurishimo »

paganel wrote: post #24
smm11 wrote: post #17

We just need to run railroad tracks over the oceans.

One can still dream about the Bering Straight bridge (or tunnel) [1] coming to life someday, plus the connecting (and now missing) railway parts over the two continents. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bering_Strait_crossing

Yeah, building the connection is one thing, but it's arguably more work to construct the railway to get to that remote region of Russia.

There's a documentary (Long Way Round) about Ewen McGregor riding a motorcycle from London to NYC by going around the world across Eurasia. They were essentially ferried by a giant off-road truck through rural Russia and even then they had to practically dig a new path for truck to pass in some spots.

That was in 2004, but I doubt the road of bones has gotten any better since then...

Re: The unsustainable growth of the container ship industry

#28

Post by Gormo »

theginger wrote: post #16
umvi wrote: post #6

Containerization has a specific meaning in the context of computers so maybe the title should be changed to "The Hidden Costs of [Shipping Containers]" to reduce confusion for people clicking the link thinking it is going to be an article about the drawbacks of docker

Even the real life container ship imagery doesn't give it away because often containerization articles are full of that too

Hell, Docker's logo evokes that imagery.

Re: The unsustainable growth of the container ship industry

#29

Post by aledalgrande »

umvi wrote: post #6

Containerization has a specific meaning in the context of computers so maybe the title should be changed to "The Hidden Costs of [Shipping Containers]" to reduce confusion for people clicking the link thinking it is going to be an article about the drawbacks of docker

Not me openinig the article already thinking if they're talking about CPU overhead when using docker compared to bare metal.
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