Maersk, MSC halt container shipping to and from Russia | Hacker News Reader

Maersk, MSC halt container shipping to and from Russia

ship-technology.com

96 pointsgeox16 comments

Important to note that they do have an exception for food and medicines:

> The company has confirmed that the suspension will not apply to foodstuffs or medical and humanitarian supplies.

then russia will treat guns as humanitarian aid [0]

[0] sarcasm of course, but during 2014 Crimean, Donetsk and Luhansk annexation in Ukraine, russia sent echelons of "humanitarian aid", most likely that part of that were munitions.

How big of an economic impact can we expect from this?

At least this way container-shipping companies from the non-Western world may be able to find and develop a lucrative niche for themselves, it has always bug me the very wrong way the way Denmark (the country) was branding itself as this environmental-heaven why one of its biggest companies (and I guess one of its biggest tax contributors, directly or indirectly) is one of the main culprits of climate change: directly, through the ships they use, indirectly, because cheaper transport means more stuff being actually made means more climate change.

At least Maersk ships are included in the ecological balance sheets of Denmark, whereas all the western companies that produce stuff in China just offload their carbon bill to China.

So yes, it is bad but that's how globalized capitalism works.

Sea freight is by far the most carbon efficient means of transporting goods.

Would you rather everything be air freighted?

I think the problem might be the volume of goods being transported; it is of course in their best interest to increase it. However, if we have to be sending stuff, might as well use sea freight.

You should probably qualify: it’s the most carbon efficient means of transporting goods across large bodies of water. Trains are substantially more efficient than freighters, when they can be used.

That in turn points to one of the problems with sea shipping: the true costs are massively externalized, and so companies will choose to ship trinkets around the world by boat twice rather than building them on the same continent (or even going across the continent by rail.)

There used to be a time, when the food we ate, came from the fields around us. I think that was be more efficient.

But I also enjoy tropical fruit at times and boats are indeed quite efficient, but trains will be probably more efficient, if you have electrified ones and a railroadconnection.

There was also a time when famines were a common occurrence.

No worries, 21st century got you covered!

Russia + Ukraine combined amount to some 25% of global wheat export alone, not to mention how global fertilizer prices will skyrocket in the months to come, causing prices to increase for a lot of food products down the line.

I guess there has never been a better time to switch to a keto diet!

> There was also a time when famines were a common occurrence.

People who downvoted this horribly missed the parent's point. It is the easy and frequent transportation of goods that prevents a local crop disaster to become a local famine,

The industrial world probably couldn't survive without ships. Here's an old story about places involved in making an electric toothbrush:

https://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/globalization-t...

A bigger version of the image https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Division-of-Labour-Sourc...

> Sea freight is by far the most carbon efficient means of transporting goods.

My idea is that we shouldn't see "transporting goods" over half of the world and in so great quantities for granted, not "transporting goods" over half of the world in so great quantities is a valid option if we really want to fight climate change. I mean, I can understand transporting basic food (wheat, rice) over water on great distances, of course, but I fail to see why we do this [1] while at the same time we keep lying to ourselves that fighting climate change is just one recycling away.

[1] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/BfMJqjoOIug/maxresdefault.jpg

Trains, even non-electric ones are drastically more efficient.

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