I really hate articles like this. It's like they're only written for the shippers and their margin and no one else. The country as a whole suffered under those huge rates. Why is "falling" to normal prices a bad thing?
Shipping is around 2.5% of global emissions, and notably the change in pricing didn't seem to substantially affect the volume[1] which is of course the thing that effects emissions.
Shipping also uses RFO [1][2] (Residual Fuel Oil, often just referred to as bunker fuel). It is the absolute filthiest petrosludge that's essentially unfit for any other purpose, and the exhaust waste is dumped into the ocean directly. That 2.5% is likely a gross underestimate of the true impact [3][4]. The "scrubber" systems which are supposed to reduce the sulfur dumped into the air, just wind up dumping it into the sea [5].
2.5% would be far from insignificant. The European Commission Climate Action website put it closer to 2.9% and volumes are expected to increase by as much as 100% until 2050.
The percentage is even more significant if you look at it from the point of view of relatively clean part of the world like the EU. Shipping is 4% of our emission.
Something will definitely have to be done with shipping if countries want to hit their emission targets.
That’s a false argument. There’s no activity that of itself produces 50% of humanity’s emissions. Every single one is “not worth reducing” because the bulk is always somewhere else.
Nope. Every .1% reduction counts. That’s how we got here, ever so slightly increasing, and that’s how we must fix it.
There are activities that produce significantly more than 2.5% emissions, like burning coal for electricity and heating (which is something like 20-25%, I guess).
Also, coal-fueled power plants have clear alternatives (nuclear, solar, etc). What is the alternative to transporting containers by ships?
You're mixing analyses. "burning coal" and "electricity" are not an activity. They are transformation methods to obtain energy. Nobody generates electricity or burns coal for the intrinsic purpose; those transformations generate energy that are used for activities. Those activities can however be reduced or substituted, and that is where we can find solutions.
Some methods for reducing the impact of transporting containers by ship:
* optimize (logistically, more efficient motors, capture wind energy)
* substitute (produce / consume more locally)
* reduce (consume less / differently)
.. of course all of those are more expensive and less practical.
I feel this is something that is often forgotten in public debate. Mass consumption, abundance and middle-class comfort are not a human right. Having a non-messed up planet, is. Behind your question is an implicit suggestion that you are willing to compromise, but only if it does not impact you, and that in the end, your and my children's future is subservient to our generation being able to consume cheaply and easily. This notion has already reached the German high courts, that have ruled that the state is currently failing to protect the safety of future generations.
I have been reading a lot lately on distributed and generational guilt, specifically how Germans and Japanese were not able to collectively act when their respective governments derailed and people where being beat up in the streets. And how their children regarded them.
And I am starting to think that we in the same position. We, society at large, know that what we are doing is endangering our collective future, and have known now for 20 or 30 years (the intellectual elite has known so since the 70's). Some of us are speaking out, but we sit back while our governments are inactive and empirical proof of a grim future is piling up.
My oldest son (10) was crying the other week, because this last hot summer has driven home for him, and many others with him, how life will inexorably change in the coming decades. How will his generation and their children remember us? Like the Germans that knew, but didn't act? Or like responsible adults that did not act in a selfish manner.
The alternative is building and sourcing things locally. This might not be feasible in the case of key primary materials (can’t build cars if there’s no steel) but a lot of manufacturing was moved overseas simply because salaries there were lower (which is changing) and the environmental laws were weaker (which is also changing). It’s not inconceivable any more that local is preferable to outsourced, and it might even be cheaper in some cases.
Taking north Korea as an example is not a good idea. Also they still import allot through backallies. I don't see anything good from north Koreas way of doing things unless we want to go back 200 years
The amount of global trade in the middle ages was enormous, literally from Europe to china with the middle east in between. If anything the laissez faire spirit of global trade was more alive in the middle ages.
There was very far-reaching trade since the beginning of time. It just had to be carried by people and animals, and accordingly you only find small precious things traded far around the continents.
I just read 'The dawn of everything' and it seems that knowledge about the past has been evolving quite a bit in the past few decades. Societies still cling to the old myths of progress and premeditated development from hunter-gatherers in small bands over cities to kingdoms to states, but this a) not based on facts and never was at all (the ones putting out these ideas basically invented them over coffee) and b) not what happened.
The way the common narrative is accepted now can really hold us back.
> What is the alternative to transporting containers by ships?
Ships are not going anywhere as there are no other/better solutions. Using ships that are powered by something other than engines using the dirtiest form of oil allowed would be the best solution, and it could be a combination of alt sources of go juice on the same ship
> What is the alternative to transporting containers by ships?
reducing, repairing, buying laptops every 15 years instead of every 2 years, etc.. that's what we need, there's no miracle solution, just limiting our carbon impact under 2T per year for each of us
>That’s how we got here, ever so slightly increasing, and that’s how we must fix it
We got here by non-renewable fuel extraction being profitable, not by variations in demand - that only affects the timescale of extraction.
We didn't tax the polluters enough to break the economics driving climate change. We still don't.
The problem with taxing polluters is that it doesn't happen in a vacuum. Those costs get passed down to consumers. So you're really asking for shared sacrifice from society in general, which has been a complete non-starter on this issue since the 1970s.
If we don’t spread the pain, people don't start voting for the right actions, and we will have highly concentrated pain instead. At first. Then just high levels of universal pain, anyway.
Depends on the type of emissions. Shipping uses bunker oil one of the most unclean fuels out there .
Few ports now are providing power supply so they don’t have to burn bunker oil while berthed and can also shutdown power systems to do maintenance, but connectors are not standard etc. IMO has reduced the % of sulfur allowed recently and so on . Still it is a problem.
Sulfur content is especially high and is estimated to cause 150,000 deaths/year and, 13% of SOx emissions is attributed to shipping[1]
A lot of countries have laws about which types of fuel can be used within territorial waters, usually they restrict it to marine diesel, so nobody is burning bunker oil in port.
> notably the change in pricing didn't seem to substantially affect the volume
I don't think that means much.
Changes would be long-term, there is a lot of inflexibility short-term, you can't just create new suppliers locally overnight. It also depends on expectations of where the price will go. If it is expected to be a local maximum and that prices will sink again then few will take the price as signal to move production locally.
That's a good example of why I'm reluctant to read and rarely read such articles, the WSJ, or the MSM (mainstream media).
Also a good example of why, for such a topic, I want to see well done graphs over time. And the graphs should be as good as needed for, say, lab reports in freshman college physics.
And I want quality at least up to that of common high school standards for term papers, e.g., references to credible, hopefully primary, sources. As in a popular high school literature short story, I want to be able to "look it up".
The Internet is permitting new sources including some with some good reporting.
For the WSJ and MSM, for me, on paper they can't compete with Charmin and on the Internet are useless for wrapping dead fish heads. They want to grab me, by the heart, the gut, and below the belt, always below the shoulders, and as soon as I start reading their work I feel their fingers on me.
I do care, a lot, about the economy and news about business, but this WSJ article is a good example of why, still, I won't read the WSJ.
It seems like no one criticizing the article read it. There's a graph, starting in Feb 2020 so that it highlights the pandemic spike in rates and return to normalcy.
And the article is written in the most neutral tone possible, pretty clearly targeting a business audience that wants information about shipping rates because of their importance for the economy and financial markets.
> And the article is written in the most neutral tone possible,
I disagree: Instead the article is written with lots of adjectives instead of numerical quantities.
E.g., in the title of the article, there is "Plunged".
I object to "Plunged": When I was in college in math and physics, in grad school for my Ph.D. in pure/applied math, and taught optimization in an MBA program, I never used plunged. When I taught college calculus, I did a lot with derivatives that showed quantities increasing or decreasing but never used plunged. In my opinion, that word is intended to give the article, say, an emotional kick instead of
> the most neutral tone possible.
Other uses of adjectives I don't like include
"sinking,
surging,
easing,
shrinking",
etc. When I pleased the highly concerned BoD and, thus, saved FedEx with some revenue projections from the differential equation
y'(t) = k y(t) (b - y(t))
I presented a clear graph with clear numerical quantities and never used any adjectives, e.g., surged. Uh, here t was time, in days, y(t) was revenue at time t, b was the maximum revenue from earlier estimates of the market size, and k was, as is common in calculus, a constant of proportionality, and y'(t) is the calculus first derivative, that is, the rate of growth of revenue in revenue per day. So, the assumption is that at each time t revenue will grow directly proportional to current number of happy customers and also the current number target customers not yet customers. Then, sure, the growth curve will be a lazy S approaching the maximum market size b asymptotically from below. The BoD cared.
I can't get anything meaningful from those adjectives. Instead I want to see numerical data, and for those uses of those adjective, the numerical data graphed over time.
Such uses of adjectives remind me of short stories in high school English class and a children's movie where a teacher assures that class
"adjectives are important in ANY writing".
The article has
> In 2019, the average cost to send a container across the Pacific to the U.S. West Coast was $1,500.
I doubt that anyone can do much with that one number $1,500. But a graph of the rates, or even the average rates in some version of average, from 2019, or some years before, to the present should be good progress understanding how rates have changed.
And still better would be, say, a good fitting regression model with independent variables from promising, common macro economic variables and variables particular to the container shipping industry -- that might let us make more sense out of rate variations, that is, identify causes (for a loose definition of cause) and make some progress predicting rates in the future. Gee, last time I heard, even Microsoft's spreadsheet software Excel would do the arithmetic for regression models!
Once a world class mathematician specializing in stochastic processes reviewed my work predicting the expected number of surviving US missile firing submarines in a scenario of global nuclear war limited to sea. So, I had a model and some real data and gave expected values over time, including in a graph. The mathematician had an objection and I reminded him of how to make an application of the strong law of large numbers for bounded, independent, identically distributed (i.i.d.) random variables, and he agreed with me with "that's a good way to look at it". So, with some more analysis, it should be possible to make some useful predictions of shipping rates over time -- the article could be improved by doing such.
For the "uncertainty" mentioned in the article, my Ph.D. dissertation was in best decision making over time under uncertainty, stochastic optimal control, and that might be relevant to customers of the container shipping industry. The application I made at the time had to do with varying oil prices -- hmm ...! So, the article could be improved not just mentioning uncertainty but making progress on doing something about it.
> So where do you get that kind of analytical journalism then if not in MaiNsTReAm mEDiA?
Part of my discussion was to explain that
"that kind of analytical journalism"
is not available in the MSM. Soooo, can't get such journalism from the MSM. So, get it elsewhere or don't get it at all.
For a little more depth, the MSM has been in business for 100+ years, paper, radio, TV, and now the Internet. My view is that in this time they have found some techniques they believe in. In simple terms, they discovered long ago that they didn't know how to get many readers for
"that kind of analytical journalism".
And the MSM publishers are astoundingly similar in the "techniques" they use. Indeed, when one publisher gets a hot headline, many of the others will copy it, content, terminology, etc.
In particular, for numerical data presented as I outlined, apparently the MSM hates that: (A) They concluded 100 years ago and have not changed their mind since that such numerical data presentations will cause the eyes of their audience to glaze over and the readers to move on. (B) As can suspect in the subject of this thread, presenting the data as I outlined, especially graphed over time, and as already observed in this thread, as is obvious, would make the alarmism of their story disappear. That is, one of the reasons for sloppy, incomplete reporting is that this is an easy way to get what we now call click bait. And one of the main reasons I want the
"that kind of analytical journalism"
is to reduce the amount of click bait.
And, sure, there is the remark that, following what I am asking for, the MSM "would publish monthly" -- extra credit for knowing the source.
That's not true, of course, since there is nearly no end of content to be reported, but, again, the MSM has treasured techniques, e.g.,
If it bleeds, it leads.
I wrote:
> The Internet is permitting new sources including some with some good reporting.
I didn't say the sources exist yet!
Such sources will appeal to fractions of the current MSM audience. Right: I am predicting that the audience will fracture into many small audiences. In a different sense from the MSM audience, this prediction of fracture is an assumption of my startup.
I suspect that there are more and as time goes on will be many more.
Well, there are more:
(1) YouTube is becoming a single source for essentially all video content. Some of the content is "analytical". There promises to be more content, i.e., there are YouTubers.
Uh, it is easy to notice reports of financial problems at CNN, WaPo, and the NYT. Since these are all ad supported, the problems are audience problems -- audience too small. Soooo, the MSM is changing, maybe just slowly going out of business.
A lot of the content creators and publishers I've mentioned are essentially one person efforts. This means that, with the fraction I mentioned, the MSM is facing some severe pressure on cost of doing business.
I had a look too, because I'm always looking for new sources of information and I was willing to entertain the possibility of this being one. It's not. Just throwing in some numbers doesn't make something analytical. Being analytical means analyzing. It means collecting the right data to support or refute a thesis, and applying a defensible methodology to their analysis. Without that, it's just numerology at best. Throwing random unsourced factoids around is just bait for the credulous; it's exactly what anyone bashing "MSM" should know enough to recognize and avoid.
Unfortunately, some people will always conflate comfort with credibility. If they prefer certain conclusions, they'll overlook how those conclusions were reached. It's called confirmation bias, and GP seriously needs to look it up.
There were some good analytical pieces on (A) the fact that we are and have been in a recession and (B) fentanyl and some of its money flows. And there were many more.
It's been some weeks since I read the article, but one of the pieces of content was how cheap 1 Kg of fentanyl was in Mexico and how much, from memory, something over $10 million, 1 Kg sold for on US streets.
That was some really good information, e.g., the street revenue is providing money enough to buy off likely some politicians.
There was more analytical content there, right, however no partial differential equations, than I saw anywhere else.
Sources? The common high school term paper writing standards want references to credible sources, hopefully primary. In this case, fentanyl from the Mexican drug cartels, the information is terrific and publishing sources might be dangerous.
For the article on the recession, there was good data that clearly established that, according to the usual definition of a recession, we are in one. As I recall, the data presented was detailed and proved the point. I'm not returning to read the piece again, but I was thrilled with how solid was the case made when I did read it.
Meanwhile I've seen a lot of words about recession in other media with never any actual definition given or actual data from good sources and responding to the definition. E.g., as I recall, some economists are quoted as predicting that we WILL be in a recession (suggesting that we are not yet, when the economist was quoted which was still after the article). To me, the other media just toss around recession while omitting any meaningful content.
I just joined it. Apparently they don't create or really publish any content but just give summaries of and links to content. Maybe one advantage is that apparently they curate the content they provide links to. That could be good, and maybe it will encourage more analytical, better, content.
Yes, they curate, but also summarize the the major pieces in their daily email. The summaries are not inflammatory or emotional. Think Walter Cronkite.
