You're overselling the "true cost" of maritime shipping - it's far and away the most efficient form of freight we have. Ocean freight has carbon emissions of 7g of CO2 per tonne-kilometre. Road freight by comparison has emissions of 137 gCO2/tkm - nearly 20 times the ocean emissions.

So, you would need to ship something 2000km before it has equivalent emissions to a 100km trip by road. So yea you're right that it'd be silly to ship something around the world rather than drive it 100km - but that's a a rather small distance. For a real-world example, you would produces less carbon shipping something from Shenzhen in China to San Francisco (11,078 km) than you would produce shipping it from San Francisco to Los Angeles by truck (616km by road).

No country has the density of population and the natural resources to have every conceivable industry within a 100 miles of every conceivable destination - eventually some goods are going to have to travel a longer distance, and once you get more than a couple of hundred kilometres away by road it genuinely becomes more efficient to move it across thousands of kilometres of ocean.

Isn't your first conclusion only true if every point in the country is close and equi-distant to a port and all ports get the same goods? In practice, you still truck multiple tonnage. In your example, the port is in LA and say, manufacturing plant in Michigan and I am in Atlanta.. it is still less carbon-emitting to truck from Michigan to Atlanta than ship from Shenzen to LA and then truck from LA to Atlanta..

This seems like the kind of analysis we should do more of.

Thanks for widening my understanding.

I like the general idea of societal "code smells." I think a full list of these would end up getting very long.

“The "cost" doesn't reflect _in any way_ the resource/energy usage, or pollution emission of the system: only the human "cost", which is biased and lobbied strongly towards maintaining existing power”

This is the crux, and I totally and completely agree