Repeal the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906 | Hacker News Reader

Repeal the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906

thezvi.substack.com

106 pointsbarry-cotter89 comments

It turned out that the guy with the Youtube video complaining that the US didn't have a dredge big enough for the job had calculated wrong. Donjon-Smit, out of Houston TX, brought in dredges and cranes, unloaded about 500 containers in a few days, did enough dredging to free up the now-lightened ship, and towed it out.

The Ever Forward spent a few days in Baltimore being unloaded and repaired, and then went on to Norfolk, then New York, and is now waiting to transit the Panama Canal.

The US doesn't have huge dredging capacity because it has good deepwater ports. Compare the Port of Shanghai, where 32 km of bridges, artificial islands, and extensive dredging were needed just to get to deep water.

> The US doesn't have huge dredging capacity because it has good deepwater ports.

I suggest reading the article. Dredging the Mississippi five inches deeper would increase profits of the soybean industry alone by over $2 billion a year, IIRC. There’s a lot more than soybeans that travels on the Mississippi and reducing carrying costs would make all kinds of freight cheaper.

Five feet deeper.[1]

The big holdup on that was a deal which exempted Louisiana from the usual requirement that the state pay half the cost. Now, the Federal government is paying three-quarters of the cost.

There's a big barge lobby. Barges don't pay for US waterway use. There's a tax on fuel, but it pays maybe 10% of the cost of maintaining waterways.

[1] https://garretgraves.house.gov/media-center/in-the-news/dred...

Thank you for the correction. Re:barges and paying for infrastructure. Who cares? User pays is nice in principle but if there are massive positive externalities of doing something the government should do it. That’s what taxes and the idea of the public good are for. The benefits of cheaper transport do not accrue mostly to barge companies.

Command economies are simply inefficient. The US overuses highways for long haul trucking because trucks pay a lower percentage of infrastructure and externalities costs than trains do.

Barges are just another way to move cargo, if lower shipping costs are worth the investment they can pay for the majority of it.

Also because of the little-known Jones Act from 1920 which states that any shipping between US ports must be shipped solely aboard vessels that are U.S.-built, U.S.-citizen owned, and, registered in the U.S., which means crewed by Americans. It's incredibly expensive to ship anything domestically in the US even though the geography is quite good for it.

The Registered in the US bit seems like it would place it on an even footing with other forms of transportation which is definitely a good thing economically. U.S.-built and U.S.-citizen owned are presumably good to get rid of economically, though it has some national defense implications.

To complete the triangle, if barges are subsidized more heavily than trains, some cargo will, as with your truck comparison, overuse the less-efficient transport, at cost to the general taxpayers.

> The US overuses highways for long haul trucking because trucks pay a lower percentage of infrastructure and externalities costs than trains do.

Source? The US has a massive freight train industry. We have more railroad than any other country - and almost double second place (China). I guess "overuses" is subjective, but we use commercial freight way more than anyone else.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tr...

Depending on metrics, Canada, China, Latvia, Estonia, Switzerland and or Russia all make better use of rail than the US which makes the total number of rail lines actually look worse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usag...

We don’t rank #1 by total freight, total fright miles, either of those per citizen, or percentage of fright carried by rail. We rank much worse in terms of passenger rail, or electrified rail.

Number of rail miles only really shows the size of the US not the utility of it’s rail network as we also have the largest road network. The relative lack of electrified rail demonstrates the issue, the US network is mostly single tracked which causes a lot of problems even with the total number of miles the utility of any given mile of track tends to be low.

"User pays is nice in principle but if there are massive positive externalities of doing something the government should do it. That’s what taxes and the idea of the public good are for."

That's always the big question though - where are we going to get the tax from. When we have a deficit and increasing debt, there using exactly extra money laying around to pay for this. Taxes need to be increased somewhere, but where depends on who you talk to.

> Barges don't pay for US waterway use. There's a tax on fuel, but it pays maybe 10% of the cost of maintaining waterways.

Do you have a citation for this 10%?

I operate a tugboat company. We move barges. We currently pay an excise tax of $0.29/gallon of fuel burned on inland routes. There is no good tracking or enforcement, but the tax is there.

This is a long-standing political issue. Much has been written on waterway cost recovery, but most of it is old. Congressional Budget Office study from the 1980s says "User fees now in effect recover approximately 10 percent of the Corps of Engineers costs of operating and maintaining the inland waterway system."[1]

The Waterways Council (the barge industry's lobby) talks a lot about cost-benefit ratios of barge operations and why their infrastructure should be subsidized.[2] They argue that lower pollution and less infrastructure cost per ton mile justifies Federal spending. They're probably not wrong.

[1] https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/98th-congress-1983-1...

[2] https://waterwayscouncil.org/media/press-releases

Thanks for that CBO document. Yeah, I wish I knew what the percentage was now. Certainly the tax is higher than in the 80s.

There are some perverse outcomes. In South Florida, I see boats doing nothing but advertising, floating billboards, causing drawbridges to open. I have no idea if they are paying the excise tax.

Unless I missed something, the article said $461 million per year (See below). So if it’s going to make that much money per year and that’s “independent of supply and demand” then why should the U.S tax payer help fund the project? (I believe you said that gov would find 75% of the cost…edit: it was another responder actually). And if it reduces carrying costs for other goods then that seems like more reason for companies to cover the costs (imo) > Digging the depth of the lower Mississippi from 45' to 50' could generate $461 million annually for the U.S. soybean industry — independent of supply and demand.

> So if it’s going to make that much money per year and that’s “independent of supply and demand” then why should the U.S tax payer help fund the project?

Because growing the economy by $461 million a year grows the economy and hence tax receipts, which then can be spent on good things or on reducing taxes. Note that that’s $461 million for one industry. Reducing shipping costs has benefits that accrue to everyone who uses goods that are shipped on internal waterways or sells them, i.e. everybody. Doing things that benefit everyone is very much in the bailiwick of the government.

> Because growing the economy by $461 million a year grows the economy and hence tax receipts

Growing the economy by $461M grows tax receipts by significantly less than $461M.

If this were true, couldnt the soy bean industry order from a us shipmaker to build one for like 1 billion?

Coordination is hard. The overwhelming majority of traffic on the Mississippi is not soybeans. The soybean industry is not terribly concentrated. Why should they pay all the costs only to receive a small portion of the benefits? This kind of problem with large positive or negative externalities and myriad actors is usually the province of governments to solve. For another example see climate change.

The US soy bean industry isn’t one entity that can make a decision like that, it’s presumably thousands of discrete farms, each of which would have to pitch some in and then presumably endlessly bikeshed about precisely what needs to be done.

Considering the soybean industry is a massive environmental and health disaster, I am glad they aren’t able to profit more and would oppose anything that encouraged its expansion.

I wonder how Donjon-Smit happened. (Smit is a famous real world International Rescue, headquartered in Rotterdam)

As a bit of a tangent, the Jones Act also has a very negative impact on Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is an incredible US asset that’s undermined by parochial special interests.

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy-and-politics/2017/9/...

The Odd Lots podcast from Bloomberg just did an episode on the Foreign Dredge Act.

As a Houstonian, I was shocked to learn that the Port of Houston is being hobbled by our inability to dredge properly, limiting container vessels to once a week, and slowing down oil tanker shipments. There is currently only one narrow lane that is dredged, and opening a second lane would improve traffic flow quadratically.

Theory: a huge dredge would save $500 million in a contract.

Fact: a huge dredge ship might cost $250-300 million or more.

Problem: then buying one to do the project and then throwing it away would save money. But this isn’t being done.

I have my suspicions about how much money would actively be saved, and note a bunch of “remove any and all safeguards”.

> Problem: then buying one to do the project and then throwing it away would save money. But this isn’t being done.

I suggest reading the article. Under the Act all US dredges must be built in the US. A US entity buying one doesn’t make using it in the US legal.

So build one in the US. Unless the argument is such as ship is literally impossible to build in the US, the numbers don’t add up.

If the savings would really be so high someone would do it.

I suspect that even with a max size dredger the savings would be minimal, if any.

The cost of building a dredge also involves the cost of labor hours required to build it.

American labor hours are more expensive. You can’t just import the Belgian and Dutch workers building the world class dredges at their salaries for the purpose of supplanting domestic workers.

I do agree that labor hours can be costly, but if we're looking at Western Europe as a competitor to America, then surely we're looking at a situation where labor costs should be lower? Surely? Like Belgian and Dutch workers aren't going to be cheap either, right?

So, not an expert in shipbuilding, but from research I've seen on transit costs (which are also subject to provisions regarding American-made content) it is generally also a theme of labor productivity. American companies and workers are generally unfamiliar with best practices elsewhere, and workers are also generally not supportive of increasing labor productivity. In that same vein, no American company has actually built a dredger like this before, so I doubt they'd be able to go about building one in the best way possible.

---

According to Reuters, the ports of Rotterdam & Shanghai use 5 workers to do what 20 do in US ports, which is a contributing factor to American supply chain disruption. [1] Automation & productivity gain is an increasing source of labor strife at US ports.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-ports-labor/analysis-...

Very often the issue with regulatory traps like this is nobody will risk the massive investment, when their entire business could be wiped out by the repeal of a little known law. Without the dredge act the investors on such a project would be out hundreds of millions, and left with a completely uncompetitive business. Who would risk that when there are people actively lobbying for repeal and doing so is such an obviously good idea?

Meanwhile the current US dredging companies are raking in fat profits from operating cheap low capacity ships, so they have no incentive. If you want to get in on the business the low risk high reward approach is to build a low capacity dredger, or adapt an existing vessel, so that’s what people do.

Belgian and Dutch workers have a domestic shipbuilding industry of note which the US doesn’t really. They have the benefit of many, many decades of expertise so they’re far more productive than some hypothetical US shipbuilding industry. And US workers are paid more in every industry than foreign equivalents in every industry I’m aware of. The US is much richer per capita than every other independent state. It’s worth it to pay those labour costs if they’re far more productive but in this industry they’re really, really not.

Why can't you? That's exactly what the wind farms did - brought in Spanish workers after the initial contract period to replace the more expensive US labor.

Edit: why disagree without a response? I never said it was right. I'm saying it's not impossible and has been done in the past.

The US and Spain have approximately the same median household income.

The US guys were making around $50/hr and the replacements were making around $35/hr. Neither of those are close to median wage, but one is much cheaper.

A fitting reply to an entire thread of armchair shipyard workers.

FACT: I make $66K as the Assistant Foreman of the Inside Machine Shop.

I run a busy shipyard repair yard shop for Tugs and larger.

6 employees and my boss.

I make $31 dollars an hour in Norfolk Virginia USA. My salary is similar to most all shipyards in the region. I have 37 years experience in the marine environment.

Ok...?

I.e. Us. Shipbuilders were likely grossing less than your replacement figure. You seem to be working off of inflated or distorted figures.

My example was only that - an example. There's nothing to say that the ship builders need to come from Spain. Additionally, pay is only one aspect. It's possible that it's easier to hire globally, than to train domestically during these times.

Here's some more info.

https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Industry=Ship_Building/...

On what visa can you currently do that?

What's remarkable to me that the Wikipedia page for such an impactful law wasn't created until 3 days ago.

It'll be pretty cool if an online group of observant people manage to change this law.

Evidently the Wikipedia entry is part of a lobbying effort, and it's working.

I live near a system of lakes, connected by locks and rivers.

A few years ago there was strong rain, and they started to flood.

The city usually opens a lock, to let a larger lake drain into a smaller lake.

Only, there was so much sediment, it clogged up the lock!

Now the city needs to spend 10s of millions on dollars to drudge the lakes.

The argument focuses on US made dredges being uncompetitive and dirty (makes sense), but then the proposed changes to the law would prevent the EPA from performing environmental reviews!

My understanding is that, currently, both the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and the EPA share jurisdiction over US federal environmental reviews for dredging. (I think other agencies may play some role in that process too, such as NOAA Fisheries.) Senator Mike Lee's "DEEP Act" proposal would remove the EPA's jurisdiction, but USACE would still be legally required to perform an environmental review. So it is not completely removing federal environmental reviews for dredging projects, just removing (or reducing) one federal regulatory agency's role in them.

That does seem likely to reduce bureaucracy, with likely reductions in project approval costs and potential speed-ups in environmental approval timelines. Would it have an environmental cost? I don't know. I suppose, it is possible (maybe) that USACE is more lenient than the EPA, and hence giving USACE exclusive federal environmental jurisdiction would result in more lenient environmental protection conditions and mitigations for dredging projects, resulting in greater environmental harm overall. But I don't know if that is actually true. And even if it is actually true, I'm not sure how big the quantum of additional environmental harm is going to be, or even how one could go about estimating that.

>90% of global dredging contracts are currently won by one of four Belgian and Dutch dredging companies Jan De Nul, Van Oord, Boskalis, and DEME

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Dredge_Act_of_1906

That means only 10% of worldwide dredging is done in China and US combined, which surprises me. I wonder how much of the total is maintenance versus digging to a certain depth for the first time.

The take away would be there is a lot of the "rest of the world" depending on silty River mouths. China and the US depend on a small number of massive ports and the RoW depends on lots and lots of silty ports.

(The OP notes very early on that that Wikipedia page came into existence four days ago because of the investigations that led to the article.)

Sounds like the Army Corps of Engineers should get themselves a big dredger.

Army Corps had a whole fleet of dredges. Then politics. Now they have just a few.

It was deliberately farmed out to private companies.

On the East Coast We keep the dredge McFarland for the crucial work. That is it..

I hear the Mississippi River has quite a few still.

Haha no. The international market is not a competitive market. It’s a syndicate, funded by zero percent loans of countries that accept US Aid. Also that syndicate does not follow US laws, such as the definition of fraud and bribery. It’s no different from the chip industry, if we let foreign competitors it will lower the cost of domestic work. they’d price the US out of business. Then they’d have the ability to control the rate of US port expansion or even function (Natl Sec. issue). Any study of the Panama Canal work will show this. We cannot chase this illusive low cost solution, we need a holistic approach that pays a living local wage to run a functioning society.

> if I had to pick one policy that was the Platonic ideal of stupid, the thing that has almost zero upside and also has the best ratio of 'amount of damage this is doing to America’ versus ‘reasons why we can’t stop being idiots about this’ there is (so far) a clear winner.

> We must repeal the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906. It says, to paraphrase, no underwater digging - to repair ports, or build bigger ones, or fix waterways - unless the boat doing the digging was built in the US, and is owned and operated by Americans.

…

> The direct cost savings (as in, if we did the current set of jobs cheaper and faster) depends on the current size of the market. If we take the 5% at face value and the 11 billion worldwide size estimate here, and assume roughly 50% cost savings, we get $250 million/year. At a 5% discount rate we can value that at about $5 billion, plus the benefits of getting projects done faster, and doing more projects. Already this seems to be approaching the 1000:1 ratio where economic interventions make sense, but the real benefits are in what you do with the jobs you wouldn’t have otherwise done.

> If the estimate of 1.6 million jobs checks out, we are already talking about single digit costs per job created, which should already compare favorably with third-world interventions even without any of the additional indirect benefits, of which there are many. The impact on inflation could be substantial even within a few years.

Tragedy of the commons, the lobbying edition: Everyone pays a little more, so that a small group can enjoy a nicer life.

This is a recurring pattern, and once you start paying attention, you see it everywhere. Everyone pays more for goods, so that longshoremen can enjoy union rates. Everyone commutes 10 minutes more, so that the lucky few get to live in a non-densified neighborhood next to downtown core.

This is once again a very good example of why laws/regulations should always have a sunset clause.

> “Remove EPA’s enforcement and oversight over the Section 404 permitting process under the NWP“

I don’t ever see that happening unless Republicans control both houses of Congress and the Presidency.

This alone tends to make the rest of the article irrelevant. Not that it’s wrong, just that this is a major blocker that turns the rest of the discussion into a thought experiment instead of an action plan.

If he actually did any research how could he get it that wrong? Nothing about being built in America, just that the owner and charterer must be Americans, the actual operating crew can be whoever. The coastwise endorsement further defines American ownership with if the owner is a corporation then "must be American" means incorporated in US's legal jurisdiction and voting majority of the board is US citizens.

The dredge act (as linked to by the author) is short enough I will quote it here[1]:

§55109. Dredging

(a) In General.-Except as provided in subsection (b), a vessel may engage in dredging in the navigable waters of the United States only if-

(1) the vessel is wholly owned by citizens of the United States for purposes of engaging in the coastwise trade;

(2) the charterer, if any, is a citizen of the United States for purposes of engaging in the coastwise trade; and

(3) the vessel has been issued a certificate of documentation with a coastwise endorsement under chapter 121 of this title or is exempt from documentation but would otherwise be eligible for such a certificate and endorsement.

(b) Dredging of Gold in Alaska.-A documented vessel with a registry endorsement may engage in the dredging of gold in Alaska.

(c) Penalty.-If a vessel is operated in knowing violation of this section, the vessel and its equipment are liable to seizure by and forfeiture to the United States Government.

[1]:https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...

> Section 883 also requires that the vessel be built in and documented under the laws of the United States. Those latter two requirements are covered by subsection (a)(3). Note that the build requirement is a requirement for a coastwise endorsement.

Taken from the page you linked. Emphasis not in original but you’re still wrong.

>>>>Dredging is a bottleneck to the expansion and maintenance of ports,<<<<

Nowhere in the article does he prove this. It is just a guess from somebody who has ZERO marine experience.

He thinks he can change the world. Please work in a field before posting stupid opinions.

You don't have to have worked in a field to write about it, though it helps. A good reporter would talk to some people who worked in the field to get their opinions.

This article is more confident than seems warranted, but that's more tone than substance. It does seem to be based on a lot of reading, which isn't a bad way to get started at learning about new things.

(Talking excessively confidently about things you just learned something about is very common on the social media. It's kind of the house style.)

Don't get me wrong. The Jones Act is terrible.

It has nothing to do with 'Labor Costs'.

Jones Act is used very liberally in lawsuits to protect ship owners against worker injury.

Dredging is not a bottleneck. Money is. You can't throw a bigger dredge at the problem. Dredges rotate between contracts. Some cities might need deeper channels other might want a wider beach.

Sand shifts on the sea floor. It is highly unpredictable. Mother nature will put sand where she wants.

Most people have no idea how abrasive sand is. Imagine sandblasting the inside of your dredge pump while its running.

That is what happens. The thing is most dredge pumps have an impeller casing of 8 foot diameter. It is a huge pump on the scale of hydroelectric pumps. But it pumps a slurry of sand. Very maintenance intensive even with hardfacing interior surfaces..

>Most people have no idea how abrasive sand is. Imagine sandblasting...

Sorry, I can't imagine sandblasting because I have no idea how abrasive sand is.

It's weird that this and the Jones act don't come under NAFTA

It’s not like the US was dealing with anything resembling equals in setting up NAFTA. Canada and Mexico had much more to gain than the US so they had very little negotiating leverage.

Most Favoured Nation status should apply. Or what's called the BOOT: better off overall test.

Exclusion of the US from the AsiaPac trade round made everyone else better off! The US basically screws everyone: no Australian US trade agreement in recent history has been BOOT for Australia, US states also apply random rules which nullify much Australian trade advantages: BHP was blocked from building some minerals processing in California IIRC.

A rather anti US subtext in "love actually" is based on populist common belief: in trade negotiations cross administration the US is a 900lb gorilla bully.

The push back by farming lobbies in the UK to US chicken is an unusual example of holding ground. Consumer sentiment lined-up for once. Undoubtedly ammonia rinsed chicken would be cheaper.

Any agreement that does not make the parties better off overall is rejected because it is quite literally worse than nothing. That an agreement does not split gains equally between participants because they don’t have equal leverage in no way means that trade agreements freely entered into make the participants worse off.

The lived experience for most Australian trading is that bilats and multilats with the US are net negative. You have to take a view that things are only better if cheaper, even if you drive your own food security to the floor. It destroyed the Australian car parts sector, and ultimately Ford and GMH left Australia.

I’m not going to comment on lined experience as I understand Australia has the longest unbroken run without a recession of any country.

On food security

> not everything that Australians like to eat is produced here. So we import about 11% of the food and beverages we consume by value.

> The imports are mainly processed products (including coffee beans, frozen vegetables, seafood products, and beverages), along with small amounts of out-of-season fresh food.

https://theconversation.com/dont-panic-australia-has-truly-e...

Those seafood products imported destroyed our prawn fisheries on the east coast because of white spot disease. They entered the animal production food chain.

We had local canneries for pineapple and tinned fruit, we now import delmonte and dole pineapple and soft fruit in tins. It's a significant issue. The dairy sector is concerned over concentration on the China market has meant they ignored the local market and were now importing some dairy. Potato deregulation has caused significant worsening in the sector. We do supply an awful lot of Macca's chips so there's that. Most bacon is Canadian, however we export a huge amount of pork meat to the world. Ironically we produce the wrong ratio of fat to meat for bacon and cured meat products.

That conversation article is not wrong, but it's not impartial. ABERE's main focus is food export and industrial scale agriculture, we supply a huge amount of millet and soy to worldwide markets, as well as cattle and sheep meat.

Covid cost us migrant labour and we've (thankfully) had to stop ruinously bad piecework rates and moved to income guarantees to attract longterm labour from developing economies, replacing tourism and backpacker temporary labour. It's contributed to the huge CPI price increases we're now seeing.

It might be a good time, for the US agricultural sector to seek a bilat if they argue cheaper food, but the longterm consequences would make ABERE quake in their shoes.

25% of the Australian slaughterhouses are owned by JBS, a Brazilian company.

The other day I wanted to buy pickled cucumbers at the local Woolworths. They had a number of choices – but, interestingly, didn't matter what brand, almost every jar of them was made in India. They do normally stock one Australian-made brand (Westmont Pickles), but it was out of stock. Separate from the main section, they had a couple of other brands of pickles in the "international foods" section. Both were labelled as "Polish", and one was "Made in Poland", but the other one was made in India too.

They normally stock two different brands of Dolmades. I find it amusing that their cheap store brand is made in Greece, while the more expensive "named brand" is made in China.

I am going back tomorrow morning, to buy bacon. Now I feel the urge to check how true your "Most bacon is Canadian" statement is.

If it says 98% Australian, it's local. If it says 15% or 25% Australian, or "made from Australian and imported" then it's.. probably Canadian.

Yeah you are right. The highest Australian percentage I could find was 21% on Woolworths store brand. Interestingly, the more expensive “named brands” all had lower local content percentages than the cheaper store brand does.

Is the overseas content Canadian? Alas, the product packaging doesn’t say. I’d think, for something like bacon, they should have to state the country of origin of the major ingredient (which for bacon is obviously pork)

I know an ex-JDS employee who told me it's Canadian, and both because of cost of production and fat to meat ratio available from Australian pork production.

This article – https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2021-09-18/consumers-want-... – says it mostly comes from the US and Europe – Canada is not mentioned. Not that it really matters whether it comes from Canada or the US.

One other factor that article mentioned – Australian pork is more expensive than imported pork, in part due to tougher animal welfare standards driving up production costs. The article says Australian pork farmers hope the government might change the labelling laws, to make it harder to present foreign pork as being "Made in Australia". Maybe one day it will happen.

given the terrible dangers to aquatic ecosystems associated with dredging, I don't know if citing the feet per hour is going to win a lot of fans to the cause -- which is then further compounded by this defense

> That doesn’t rule out a position of roughly ‘yes this is a no-good-very-bad way of limiting how much we dredge but it does limit it and that is what matters.’

> I don’t know how to engage with that perspective as anything but opposition to civilization. If you don’t think we should maintain or create ports, make it possible to navigate rivers or free ships that get stuck - which are the primary reasons people dredge - then that’s not compatible with having a technological civilization. Perhaps there are other ways to work around that and still have a technological civilization, but they are orders of magnitude worse in terms of their consequences for the Earth.

I'm of the opinion that we should learn to use our sprawling ports in the United States more efficiently rather than stacking more inefficient ports[0] across all of our coast -- especially given the tremendous ecological cost of what we already have -- and apparently that stance is defined by the author as 'opposition to civilization' and not even worthy of rebuttal.

Hard disagree.

Look around the U.S. ports and identify the bottlenecks mentioned; it's rarely marine-space related -- it's almost entirely logistical or occupational related -- bigger ports will require more employees that don't even exist in large enough quantity now to fill the roles needed even today -- and this is aside from the additional employees needed for the larger dredging operations.

"jobs created" means precisely zero in skilled trades without a captive and waiting audience -- these people will need to be trained and placed -- it can't just be spun from nothing over-night.

(I have lived in Wilmington, the number one port in the U.S. in commerce value)

tl;dr : let's fix ports rather than making more broken ports and ruining our seas.

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-ports-key-us-sup...

Sand is becoming scarce these days. I would say no to allowing foreign owned vessels from dredging here. Its notable that lobbyists want to allow it. That article also says a larger dredge is being built in the US, though not AS large as the foreign ones.

TFA is probably just part of the campaign.

Unfortunately, even if the Dredge Act is repealed and everything got dredged, Climate Change will raise sea levels and change the course of rivers, probably making the investment in dredging worse than a wash.

I apologize in advance for this rant. My alternative idea is going to be unpopular. How about we take what we've figured our about what's causing Climate Change, where all those things actually are, and stop it all immediately, by force if necessary, and just deal with the interruption in luxury. And then we immediately figure out another way for all the things. And make the uber rich pay for it all. I mean... would it take more than 10 years to get back to where we were without killing the planet and everything on it? I could go 10 years without electricity, nearly everybody could, but it wouldn't even be remotely like that, we'd just have a lot less power for a while. Really, I feel like if the air was right now actually smokey everywhere from pollution from burning bunker fuel, and temperatures were insane, shippers would still want to dredge because they are losing money. I think the author has great points, and I like his style, I just don't give a damn about... Goddamn ships. Oh, those poor shipping companies, and those poor poor consumers.

Makes you wonder why the elites who push climate change and rising sea levels are all buying premium beach front properties around the world!

I’m still waiting for the earth to freeze over according to the “agreed science” from the 1970s-80s.

> I’m still waiting for the earth to freeze over according to the “agreed science” from the 1970s-80s.

I think that occurs immediately after fresh water dilutes the oceans and shuts down the Thermohaline circulation. Europe freezes, then everything else freezes. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...

The uber rich decide the laws and control the government and security forces though so that will never happen.

Instead you end up with hypocritical rules against normal people like in the lockdowns where you could still travel abroad if owned multiple houses, etc. - like now how the EU has introduced fuel duty on airlines, but not on private jets.

And reducing supply lines leads to supply-side inflation like we're seeing in Europe now - 10+% inflation, interest rates going up, possible rationing coming in winter, etc. - no-one wants that.

I'd just try not to worry about it, we can't change anything anyway. Just focus on what you can do yourself, like trying to work remotely to buy a house in a less affected area, etc.

> I could go 10 years without electricity, nearly everybody could

During the power crisis in Texas in February 2021 some homes and businesses were without power for several days, resulting in at least 246 deaths, with some estimates as high as 702 killed as a result of the crisis.[1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power

False equivalency. I did not suggest waiting for extreme conditions of inclement weather before pulling the electricity out from under intensive care units without notice. We have this tool we can use to mitigate anything like that from happening. It's called a plan.

I replied to the wrong comment, but you found it anyways...

Ah, righteo, a plan. You did write immeidately and by force, which sounded less like a plan.

You should have assumed the opposite. How many successful military operations are you aware of that were not planned, and/or that waited around and took their sweet time?

All people need some form of energy every day, at least for cooking their food, and in most modern houses, also for preserving their food.

In my case, that energy must be provided as electricity, or else I would starve.

Other people might be able to substitute something else for electricity, e.g. they might have access to a forest, to collect wood and burn it for cooking, and they might make food reserves that can be kept at the ambient temperature, e.g. pemmican.

Those people might not need electricity, but they are not less dependent of an energy source for staying alive, than the people who need electricity every day.

I certainly use less electrical energy every day (less than 200 W average power for the entire house) than the energy that would be consumed by someone burning wood for the same purpose.

The people who do not cook at home and are not less dependent on electricity or another source of energy for staying alive, they just pay someone else to cook for them, while consuming the same energy elsewhere.

Yeah, again, you are imagining something like a Mad Max post apocalyptic scenario where everyone is left to fend for themselves or starve, but we can feed everyone very efficiently without any electricity or heat if we just planned it.

What? How would you cook the food without heat? How would you grow and harvest the food without Electricity. Sure it could be done in limited amounts, but to feed the worlds population without electricity, its not possible.

Even if you someone magically found a way to harvest all the food by hand, How would you distribute to everyone? Without electricity our highly efficient distributions systems don't work.

I could make a plan to launch myself into outer space. Doesn't mean my plan will work. It also doesn't mean that the people that my plan will inconvenience are just okay with it.

Sorry neighbors I need to build a launch tower here I'm taking over your backyards, you can have them back in a few years its okay, its part of the plan.

I guess astronauts don't eat, huh. The only thing that needs cooked is meat. No one at all needs to eat meat.

Actually climate change means more demand for dredgers, especially for things like sand suppletion.

Without sand suppletion some places (eg. parts of the netherlands below sea level) would not be able to protect their coastline, which can (worst case) lead to the loss of towns and cities.

A lot of operations involving the sea, coast, and sand are not one off operations. It's more a case of continuous maintenance and vigilence.

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