'Ghost ship' washes up on Irish coast
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Maritime salvage law is always interesting as it feels like it was mostly written in the 1600 and 1700's :-)
It does not use AIS but Iridium, so the device can relay custom information. In this case, it could have been useful to know about the vessel's health from how it was moving: it would have been very easy to know if it was going to sink if it would have begun to list to one side permanently, for example. It would have been just a matter of dropping our box and a big solar panel on deck.
The Chinese have some too, but I guess they only bother with their back yard. ESA were doing something commercial too, but I haven’t been following details.
The shipowner is invariably located in a PO Box in a jurisdiction which makes Swiss banks seem downright extrovert; however, this is just a shell company controlled by an opaque holding company, &c.
Global shipping is a rather murky business, designed to facilitate tax and responsibility avoidance.
If this sounds interesting, investigative journalist Ian Urbina published a most informative (and scary) book on the subject last year - Outlaw Ocean.
On a related, but lighter note, the memoirs of Max Hardberger (Marine repo man, more or less) is an excellent collection of sea stories of the "Improvised ingenuity and brazenness while under fire" kind. I believe it was called "Seized!"
And slavery, you say? How does this manifest? Are we talking about Somalian pirates conscripting poor people in third world countries or something? I have read that following the collapse of Libya after Qaddafi's overthrow, things degenerated so badly that slaves began to be bought and sold and are even sold there today - but I suppose I've never dug too deep into who's buying them and for what purpose.
And I love a good memoir, especially of a seafarer! That'll be going straight on my Amazon wishlist, thanks!
This is often 'legal' in the sense that the (more often than not illiterate) crew have signed contracts stating that they need to repay a sign-on fee equating years worth of wages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9HW5361bBs
There were rumors the Air Force got to use a water-landed SpaceX booster for target practice back in 2018, too. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/18343/did-the-u-s-air-...
The more I think about this the worse it sounds. Big oil, car manufacturing, aviation, big tech companies, big pharma and agricultural companies. As soon as you think of a big industry you recall a recent or ongoing scandal. It’s grim.
[0] Large 300 ton+ ships are type A: https://help.marinetraffic.com/hc/en-us/articles/217631867-H...
So GPS won't help much.
But I can imagine an other kind of beacon could be useful to recover things from the sunken ship.
What do you mean by GPS beacon? It gets a GPS-position and transmits it... where? Using what carrier?
You do have AIS already, and it is absolutely battery-operable, but I’m not sure to what extent the equipment is battery operated in the real world.
A typical aid transmitter
There's very little intersection between hardware that would last in those conditions and would be cheap enough that coast guards would be willing to just leave it on a ship. Or maybe I'm underestimating the budget of the Coast Guard, but leaving this thing adrift in the first place seems to indicate otherwise...
>> Yep, exactly what I was thinking. Add a small solar panel and it could probably function for a decade.
> I think you're underestimating the harsh nature of the ocean. Few things last for a decade on the ocean without frequent maintenance, high up-front costs, or both - and often not even then.
A solar powered GPS beacon may be an exception to that rule.
Couldn't you just encase the beacon electronics and the solar panel in a hunk of clear epoxy potting [1], and then secure the thing to the deck with stainless steel screws? For an application like this, it's probably sufficient that the beacon only operate during daylight hours, so you probably don't even need a battery.
I don't imagine the electronics would cost much more than that for a PLB [2], so we're talking somewhere in the ballpark of $500. The main expense would be the receiving satellite and sending a helicopter to the ship for installation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
They would like to regain control of said coastline. In fact, they have a holiday to commemorate said loss: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%ADa_del_Mar
https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2015/05/09/beaches-of...
If I had access to a list of companies who held their entire supply chain to a certain set of standards, I'd be willing to pay a little more for my toothbrush.
We buy our toothbrushes from a retail store, many transactions removed from the manufacture of the toothbrush, and every organisation in that chain would have to voluntarily agree to honestly report its transportation details. This is unlikely.
Even if it did happen, the onus would then be on consumers to interpret these details, perform a comparison between a number of available brands, and determine the most conscientious choice. And then review this decision periodically, because transportation contracts come and go. This is a substantial amount of work.
Even if consumers were able to do that amount of work, they'd then have to replicate that work for every single product, because everything goes through a similar transportation process. There is absolutely no way that any individual has enough time in their lives to research the transportation details of even a reasonable sampling of products used.
And that's not even considering the transportation issues in the supply chain!
As you observe, individual organisations also cannot act, because doing so makes them less competitive.
This is basically the same reason why individuals can't effectively tackle climate change. There is far too much information that's hidden, and far too much time required to effectively assess information, for individuals to influence anything.
Like with climate change, there is a solution, and it's regulation. The problem would vanish overnight if the EU, the US, and I guess now the UK all refused to allow docking of ships with flags of convenience, or even just ones flying flags from countries that don't ratify the maritime treaties.
And like with climate change, the solution is hampered not because of technical difficulties or cost, it's hampered by lack of will to spend a relatively small amount of money on something that only has a social good and not an economic good.
I think we need to understand and take advantage of GREED to make a difference here. Two possible aspects: 1.) Companies want more sales, and want to take sales away from their competitors. 2.) Consumers like to brag when they do good things
What if there was a new organization created that grants a branded and trademarked "stamp of approval" for specific products. Similar to the green "Certified Organic" stamp of approval we've all learned to trust and seek out. The organization would be responsible for digging into the specifics. I'm aware other organizations like this exist, but none that I can think of have become mainstream...could probably learn from their shortcomings.
If consumers start purchasing more products with this stamp of approval, it would naturally lead to individual organizations having an incentive to change their ways - therefore taking advantage of their greed to make more $.
To take advantage of the consumer greed, what if a system was established to keep track of how much "stamp of approval" purchasing they do? The consumers would naturally find ways to make subtle social cues about all the good they are doing.
But in the end most consumers just choose the cheapest thing, or these schemes would the norm rather than exceptions.
Do you think it's easier for a consumer to discover and vet certification organisations than it is for them to discover and vet transportation organisations?
The price signal you mention is the strongest one, which is why pigovian taxes are often the most effective approach to tackling negative externalities. It's a good example of the sort of government regulation that is many orders of magnitude more effective than individual action.
The call to feel-good individual consumer action has been a Siren Song for the last twenty or thirty years while the various large scale pollution disasters simply continue. I'd agree with what is now older-school economics - you need direct regulation specifically to handle those cases the market can't handle. And the moves based on consumer action and market-driven regulation have visibly (and invisibly) failed.
So I hope you understand the appeal of giving people this bitter pill. I mean, think people want to hear "just add a little more of this to what you're doing" and what we're saying is more like, "sorry, I know you meant well but you need to stop what you're doing and this instead". But I don't know, don't know how to balance "I understand you're not the enemy and you mean well" with "what you're is basically counter-productive, in the sense that it gets other people to also do something ineffective".
Any of the big salvage companies, Titan or Smit or Mammoet, can deal with such a wreck if paid to do so. It's expensive, but routine. Ireland has local salvage companies, too. Once it's decided who pays the bill, one of them will probably be brought into deal with the mess.
It might conceivably matter that the wreck is now in a somewhat more convenient place rather than the middle of the ocean, but probably it's just too low value for it to be economic to volunteer. Somebody will have to get paid explicitly to tidy this up.
I wonder if the mythological archetype of the "ghost ship" originated from cases like this: unidentified, unmanned ships roaming the seas on their own, in a time before there was a global record of abandoned ships. Doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to assume they're crewed by ghosts.
Sounds like that was written on behalf of public companies who imagined they'd always want to assert their ownership rights. It was not written while mindful of the possibility of anonymous LLCs who have a salvage bill, an environmental problem, and rescue operations expenses tied to the ship and would rather it sank in the middle of the ocean...
[Interviewer:] So what do you do to protect the environment in cases like this?
[Senator Collins:] Well, the ship was towed outside the environment.
[Interviewer:] Into another environment….
[Senator Collins:] No, no, no. it’s been towed beyond the environment, it’s not in the environment
[Interviewer:] Yeah, but from one environment to another environment.
[Senator Collins:] No, it’s beyond the environment, it’s not in an environment. It has been towed beyond the environment.
[Interviewer:] Well, what’s out there?
[Senator Collins:] Nothing’s out there…
[Interviewer:] Well there must be something out there
[Senator Collins:] There is nothing out there… all there is …. is sea …and birds ….and fish
[Interviewer:] And?
[Senator Collins:] And 20,000 tons of crude oil
[Interviewer:] And what else?
[Senator Collins:] And a fire
[Interviewer:] And anything else?
[Senator Collins:] And the part of the ship that the front fell off, but there’s nothing else out there.
I did not know that. What a shame. These two did brilliant work together. "The Front Fell Off" was my introduction to them, and I have to say, I don't know if I've ever laughed that hard before, or since.
And you only need one country not to, so you can register there. You'll never get every country to sign up to anything like that, because it makes being the one that doesn't too valuable.
You don’t need every country to implement this. There can be bond havens just like there are tax havens. It’s not ideal but it’s still a huge improvement over making every country a haven. And anyway, there are lots of things a country can do to devalue havens, such as prohibiting businesses operating within said country from doing business via ships that are registered in these havens, including transitive. No system is perfect, but why would we reject imperfect solutions that still do a ton of good?
> environmental debt
Oh great, it's the 2020 meme. First I've seen it, but I just know I'm gonna be reading this bs phrase everywhere now.
See the second sentence of the post you replied to.
> Oh great, it's the 2020 meme. First I've seen it, but I just know I'm gonna be reading this bs phrase everywhere now.
Look, I'm not a lefty, I'm a moderate independent, and I'm probably fiscally conservative, which is precisely why I hold this position (it's "personal responsibility" applied to macroeconomics). So put away any notions of partisanship you might have had. "environmental debt" is exactly what this is (by all indicators, anyway), and if you disagree feel free to substantiate.
> money being extracted from local economies
> the coffers of the ultra-rich
For someone complaining about "environmental debt", a term I have never seen before, you do use a lot of tired phrases.
I also don't quite believe that international shipping is quite as amendable to scrappy little startups with little money as you make it out to be?
> other than ostensibly environmental protection
Yes, the benefit of the proposed scheme is environmental protection, and therefore it is no surprise that you identify it as it's primary benefit ("ostensibly" being a meaningless qualifier used to vaguely dismiss the idea without feeling the need to argue the point).
Both the principle as well as the mechanisms are well established. Car insurance comes to mind, or really any liability insurance.
An insurance scheme would, in fact, significantly lower the capital requirements compared to straight-up bonds, in the same way that you don't have to put up a million $ to get that amount of coverage for your car.
> actual implementation in practice
Require insurance against environmental damage caused by any vessel. Deny entry to foreign vessels not complying.
Requiring insurance is not the same as requiring the money to be put aside up front like a bond, which was what was being suggested earlier in the thread. I have no issue with insurance requirements if you think it's possible to run an insurance business profitably that (a) doesn't charge so much that we still have the same problem and (b) actually has the money and will actually pay out when a billion dollar environmental disaster happens.
I don't think the economics of that work.
As for
> a lot of tired phrases
complaining about the ultra-rich establishing barriers to entry that keeps the little guy out is never going to be "tired" until it stops being the default operating mode of these organizations.
The suggestion you're referring to was mine, and I suggested either insurance or a bond.
> I don't think the economics of that work.
The current economics only "work" now because the books are cooked. No one is accounting for pollution. Like I've said before, we can address the environment and keep the barrier of entry to entrepreneurship low: subsidies and tax breaks for small businesses to offset the regulatory burden.
Lastly, I'm mostly fixating on the environment/pollution for convenience, but we should really be doing this anywhere that we are externalizing costs.
1. Climb onto ship 2. Fire up blowtorch 3. Profit
https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/greenpeace-regret...
Edit: turns out there are more places doing this in Europe than I realised (and in Turkey). There's a map here: https://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/ships/list.htm
Whether they keep any promises they make about how they handle oil, asbestos, worker safety, of course that's another question.
Really - it is quite common for mariners not to know who the owner is.
So what's the story behind this mysterious ship without a crew?
This is actually the meaning of the term "ghost ship".