That's true for international shipping, but for shipping between U.S. ports, the ships have to be U.S. flagged due to the Jones act.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920
I agree though that focusing on small U.S. flagged ships is not very representative of shipping in general.
https://capitalresearch.org/article/what-you-need-to-know-ab...
https://twitter.com/johnkonrad/status/1840904466310316459
" itβs somehow cheaper to truck containers hundreds of miles and let taxpayers foot the road repair bill than let the union touch it two more times for short sea shipping to work."
If every form of transportation had strong unions, the system could find whatever healthy or natural distribution was actually economically efficient. More stuff would be sent by Train and Boat, both substantially more efficient in most cases, and both industries that suffer in the US from being ignored.
Instead, so much of the US essentially just runs on Employee Coercion Arbitrage and we all suffer for it.
We should be able to shop around transportation choices without exploiting underpaid workers.
Realistically, a carbon tax would actually have the same outcome if you hate unions.
If that shipping method is cheaper than a union charge, then the union charge is too high.
Even though yes truck drivers should be getting paid more.
Like, okay, we could pay truck drivers twice as much and now it's only cheaper to truck the containers around 150 miles or whatever? That's still way too expensive.
And a carbon tax doesn't fix this. It makes trucking more expensive but it doesn't make the charge for using a crane less expensive.
A one-shot solution to reducing inflation and emissions would be in repealing the Jones Act. (Also, increasing the prevalence of ferry transport.)
Large container ships are pretty efficient and mostly stay away from populated areas.
0. https://at.govt.nz/bus-train-ferry/ferry-services/low-emissi...
Seems to me the 80/20 here would be to attack the problem near the top of the stack, not the bottom. Those massive heavy fuel oil burning container ships that basically just smog the ocean 24/7 might be a good target for improvements; as well as just general code enforcement.
Given that it's possible to offset the rise of CO2 elsewhere, it's hard not to argue that the sulphur emissions are strictly worse, and we are better off for having less of them.
Sulphur regulations just unmasked some of the global warming that had already happened, but that masking was only ever going to be temporary in the long run.
Should we have stopped the sulfur? Agreed that that answer is almost certainly still yes. Questions that this leads to are cleaner artificial clouds. Not to control weather, per se. Rather, to reduce ocean heating.
Scale has an advantage all its own when it comes to combustion engines.
If you have a Port State Control regime then the Flag State Control doesn't matter so much and so while it's true that most of these ships do not fly a US flag, they're not really sailing under a foreign flag for the reason you expect. A big reason instead is that these states have an Open Registry, which means everybody in the world can put a ship on their register. To fly the US flag, the ship's owners must be Americans.
Why doesn't Flag State matter so much (if you have PSC) ? Because the port states in effect control regulations if you visit their port, and unless your vessel somehow makes sense just pootling around in the ocean forever you will want to visit a port and thus be subject to their rules. Now, if that port doesn't have Port State Control, which fifty years ago none of them did, the Flag State is the only authority, but in 1978 the Europeans are agreeing rules to protect workers on ships in their water when blam - a shipping accident off the French coast causes world headlines. So of course journalists want to know, you're agreeing a treaty, how will your treaty fix this? And the bald answer for the intended treaty text was "It makes no difference, fuck off". But there are international journalists up in your grill and you've been telling everybody how important your treaty is and so... Port State Control, the Paris MOU is signed a few years later to formalize how Europe's states will coordinate to police everybody, regardless of the flag they're flying, if they enter a port.
The Paris MOU was a huge success, and soon anywhere with money imitated it. Tokyo MOU, there's a Carribean one, Indian Ocean, Black Sea... Anywhere you'd actually deliberately sail cargo ships to has Port State Control these days.
So yes, this does exclude all the cargo shipping, but not really because of the flag, it's because the cargo ships are enormous and so fall out of the size restriction.
My analysis: We're potentially going to require much less marine transport capacity in the future. How much of that can be electrified is the question, imho (versus "green ammonia" produced from low carbon energy [8]).
[1] https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2022/01/12/almost-40-...
[2] https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/rmt2019_en...
[3] https://www.iea.org/commentaries/china-s-slowdown-is-weighin...
[4] https://theprogressplaybook.com/2024/09/18/chinas-ev-and-hig...
[5] https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/chinas-slowing-oil-dem...
[6] https://www.axios.com/2024/11/14/companies-global-trade-chin...
[7] https://www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/2024/...
[8] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Fuel oil is approximately 80x the energy per KG when compared to lithium.
This is the buried lede. They are excluding basically all cargo shipping.
- Very little of the shipping industry is US-flagged. Most commercial ships sail under flags of convenience such as Panama and Libera, because of their reduced regulations and costs.
- Nobody carries cargo any distance in vessels of less than 1000 gross tons, because that scale would be uneconomical to operate. Modern seagoing cargo ships have about one crew member per 8000 tons of cargo.