Ocean shipping rates have plunged 60% this year
wsj.com
wsj.com
This seems like a non-story. Rates were insane due to Covid. Things are now normalizing. The rate is still incredibly expensive and should fall more.
For almost all other readers of the WSJ shipping costs are just seen as a tax that makes their products more expensive.
Local firms can compete better if cost of imports are higher .
Similarly less goods will be imported if costs are high , therefore less emissions.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/253987/international-sea...
Few ports now are providing power supply so they don’t have to burn bunker oil while berthed and can also shutdown power systems to do maintenance, but connectors are not standard etc. IMO has reduced the % of sulfur allowed recently and so on . Still it is a problem.
Sulfur content is especially high and is estimated to cause 150,000 deaths/year and, 13% of SOx emissions is attributed to shipping[1]
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02774-9#ref-link-...
The percentage is even more significant if you look at it from the point of view of relatively clean part of the world like the EU. Shipping is 4% of our emission.
Something will definitely have to be done with shipping if countries want to hit their emission targets.
I don't think that means much.
Changes would be long-term, there is a lot of inflexibility short-term, you can't just create new suppliers locally overnight. It also depends on expectations of where the price will go. If it is expected to be a local maximum and that prices will sink again then few will take the price as signal to move production locally.
Nope. Every .1% reduction counts. That’s how we got here, ever so slightly increasing, and that’s how we must fix it.
Also, coal-fueled power plants have clear alternatives (nuclear, solar, etc). What is the alternative to transporting containers by ships?
I just read 'The dawn of everything' and it seems that knowledge about the past has been evolving quite a bit in the past few decades. Societies still cling to the old myths of progress and premeditated development from hunter-gatherers in small bands over cities to kingdoms to states, but this a) not based on facts and never was at all (the ones putting out these ideas basically invented them over coffee) and b) not what happened.
The way the common narrative is accepted now can really hold us back.
I highly doubt that even per capita medieval folks were trading more than today.
Some methods for reducing the impact of transporting containers by ship:
* optimize (logistically, more efficient motors, capture wind energy)
* substitute (produce / consume more locally)
* reduce (consume less / differently)
.. of course all of those are more expensive and less practical.
I feel this is something that is often forgotten in public debate. Mass consumption, abundance and middle-class comfort are not a human right. Having a non-messed up planet, is. Behind your question is an implicit suggestion that you are willing to compromise, but only if it does not impact you, and that in the end, your and my children's future is subservient to our generation being able to consume cheaply and easily. This notion has already reached the German high courts, that have ruled that the state is currently failing to protect the safety of future generations.
I have been reading a lot lately on distributed and generational guilt, specifically how Germans and Japanese were not able to collectively act when their respective governments derailed and people where being beat up in the streets. And how their children regarded them.
And I am starting to think that we in the same position. We, society at large, know that what we are doing is endangering our collective future, and have known now for 20 or 30 years (the intellectual elite has known so since the 70's). Some of us are speaking out, but we sit back while our governments are inactive and empirical proof of a grim future is piling up.
My oldest son (10) was crying the other week, because this last hot summer has driven home for him, and many others with him, how life will inexorably change in the coming decades. How will his generation and their children remember us? Like the Germans that knew, but didn't act? Or like responsible adults that did not act in a selfish manner.
Ships are not going anywhere as there are no other/better solutions. Using ships that are powered by something other than engines using the dirtiest form of oil allowed would be the best solution, and it could be a combination of alt sources of go juice on the same ship
reducing, repairing, buying laptops every 15 years instead of every 2 years, etc.. that's what we need, there's no miracle solution, just limiting our carbon impact under 2T per year for each of us
As an approach I don't agree - I think it's only keeping carbon in the ground that matters. Burning it 50 years later isn't a meaningful improvement.
If it's going to be kept in the ground, that's the place to start - the markets will do the rest.
Efficiency first/alone (as policy) is flawed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
>That’s how we got here, ever so slightly increasing, and that’s how we must fix it
We got here by non-renewable fuel extraction being profitable, not by variations in demand - that only affects the timescale of extraction. We didn't tax the polluters enough to break the economics driving climate change. We still don't.
My argument is that shipping usage doesn't appear sensitive to price signals (based on the data we see from changes in prices).
This means that regulation is probably a better approach to reducing emissions here. This is what was done for cars and is shown to work there.
1: https://williamliggett.com/2018/05/28/bunker-fuel-sounds-bad-its-worse-than-it-sounds/
2: https://wolfstreet.com/2018/06/03/bunker-the-fuel-for-the-giant-engines-in-large-cargo-ships/
3: https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/20/11399/2020/
4: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S026974912101280X
5: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2018.00139/fullAlso a good example of why, for such a topic, I want to see well done graphs over time. And the graphs should be as good as needed for, say, lab reports in freshman college physics.
And I want quality at least up to that of common high school standards for term papers, e.g., references to credible, hopefully primary, sources. As in a popular high school literature short story, I want to be able to "look it up".
The Internet is permitting new sources including some with some good reporting.
For the WSJ and MSM, for me, on paper they can't compete with Charmin and on the Internet are useless for wrapping dead fish heads. They want to grab me, by the heart, the gut, and below the belt, always below the shoulders, and as soon as I start reading their work I feel their fingers on me.
I do care, a lot, about the economy and news about business, but this WSJ article is a good example of why, still, I won't read the WSJ.
> So where do you get that kind of analytical journalism then if not in MaiNsTReAm mEDiA?
Part of my discussion was to explain that
"that kind of analytical journalism"
is not available in the MSM. Soooo, can't get such journalism from the MSM. So, get it elsewhere or don't get it at all.
For a little more depth, the MSM has been in business for 100+ years, paper, radio, TV, and now the Internet. My view is that in this time they have found some techniques they believe in. In simple terms, they discovered long ago that they didn't know how to get many readers for
"that kind of analytical journalism".
And the MSM publishers are astoundingly similar in the "techniques" they use. Indeed, when one publisher gets a hot headline, many of the others will copy it, content, terminology, etc.
In particular, for numerical data presented as I outlined, apparently the MSM hates that: (A) They concluded 100 years ago and have not changed their mind since that such numerical data presentations will cause the eyes of their audience to glaze over and the readers to move on. (B) As can suspect in the subject of this thread, presenting the data as I outlined, especially graphed over time, and as already observed in this thread, as is obvious, would make the alarmism of their story disappear. That is, one of the reasons for sloppy, incomplete reporting is that this is an easy way to get what we now call click bait. And one of the main reasons I want the
"that kind of analytical journalism"
is to reduce the amount of click bait.
And, sure, there is the remark that, following what I am asking for, the MSM "would publish monthly" -- extra credit for knowing the source.
That's not true, of course, since there is nearly no end of content to be reported, but, again, the MSM has treasured techniques, e.g.,
If it bleeds, it leads.
I wrote:
> The Internet is permitting new sources including some with some good reporting.
I didn't say the sources exist yet!
Such sources will appeal to fractions of the current MSM audience. Right: I am predicting that the audience will fracture into many small audiences. In a different sense from the MSM audience, this prediction of fracture is an assumption of my startup.
But for your question of where to get
"that kind of analytical journalism"
one source is
http://themusingsofthebigredcar.com/
I suspect that there are more and as time goes on will be many more.
Well, there are more:
(1) YouTube is becoming a single source for essentially all video content. Some of the content is "analytical". There promises to be more content, i.e., there are YouTubers.
(2) There are the math/science sites
https://simonsfoundation.org/category/features/science-news/
https://www.quantamagazine.org/
(3) For space, astronomy, and related physics, there is
Uh, it is easy to notice reports of financial problems at CNN, WaPo, and the NYT. Since these are all ad supported, the problems are audience problems -- audience too small. Soooo, the MSM is changing, maybe just slowly going out of business.
A lot of the content creators and publishers I've mentioned are essentially one person efforts. This means that, with the fraction I mentioned, the MSM is facing some severe pressure on cost of doing business.
Why is it that I am totally unsuprised that someone who is anti "main stream media" thinks that that steaming pile of dogshit is "journalism".
They are fucking musings - its in the title.
Besides, the site is nearly all
"that kind of analytical journalism"
I outlined.
That was some really good information, e.g., the street revenue is providing money enough to buy off likely some politicians.
There was more analytical content there, right, however no partial differential equations, than I saw anywhere else.
Sources? The common high school term paper writing standards want references to credible sources, hopefully primary. In this case, fentanyl from the Mexican drug cartels, the information is terrific and publishing sources might be dangerous.
For the article on the recession, there was good data that clearly established that, according to the usual definition of a recession, we are in one. As I recall, the data presented was detailed and proved the point. I'm not returning to read the piece again, but I was thrilled with how solid was the case made when I did read it.
Meanwhile I've seen a lot of words about recession in other media with never any actual definition given or actual data from good sources and responding to the definition. E.g., as I recall, some economists are quoted as predicting that we WILL be in a recession (suggesting that we are not yet, when the economist was quoted which was still after the article). To me, the other media just toss around recession while omitting any meaningful content.
You seriously read that "piece" and thought - here is some "analytical journalism"
Where is the analysis? Where is the journalism? [This is sarcasm.]
Unfortunately, some people will always conflate comfort with credibility. If they prefer certain conclusions, they'll overlook how those conclusions were reached. It's called confirmation bias, and GP seriously needs to look it up.
And the article is written in the most neutral tone possible, pretty clearly targeting a business audience that wants information about shipping rates because of their importance for the economy and financial markets.
Costas Paris, "Ocean Shipping Rates Have Plunged 60% This Year", WSJ, Sept. 5, 2022 7:03 am ET, https://www.wsj.com/articles/ocean-shipping-rates-have-plung...
For
> There's a graph, starting in Feb 2020
I saw no graph.
For
> And the article is written in the most neutral tone possible,
I disagree: Instead the article is written with lots of adjectives instead of numerical quantities.
E.g., in the title of the article, there is "Plunged".
I object to "Plunged": When I was in college in math and physics, in grad school for my Ph.D. in pure/applied math, and taught optimization in an MBA program, I never used plunged. When I taught college calculus, I did a lot with derivatives that showed quantities increasing or decreasing but never used plunged. In my opinion, that word is intended to give the article, say, an emotional kick instead of
> the most neutral tone possible.
Other uses of adjectives I don't like include
"sinking, surging, easing, shrinking",
etc. When I pleased the highly concerned BoD and, thus, saved FedEx with some revenue projections from the differential equation
y'(t) = k y(t) (b - y(t))
I presented a clear graph with clear numerical quantities and never used any adjectives, e.g., surged. Uh, here t was time, in days, y(t) was revenue at time t, b was the maximum revenue from earlier estimates of the market size, and k was, as is common in calculus, a constant of proportionality, and y'(t) is the calculus first derivative, that is, the rate of growth of revenue in revenue per day. So, the assumption is that at each time t revenue will grow directly proportional to current number of happy customers and also the current number target customers not yet customers. Then, sure, the growth curve will be a lazy S approaching the maximum market size b asymptotically from below. The BoD cared.
I can't get anything meaningful from those adjectives. Instead I want to see numerical data, and for those uses of those adjective, the numerical data graphed over time.
Such uses of adjectives remind me of short stories in high school English class and a children's movie where a teacher assures that class
"adjectives are important in ANY writing".
The article has
> In 2019, the average cost to send a container across the Pacific to the U.S. West Coast was $1,500.
I doubt that anyone can do much with that one number $1,500. But a graph of the rates, or even the average rates in some version of average, from 2019, or some years before, to the present should be good progress understanding how rates have changed.
And still better would be, say, a good fitting regression model with independent variables from promising, common macro economic variables and variables particular to the container shipping industry -- that might let us make more sense out of rate variations, that is, identify causes (for a loose definition of cause) and make some progress predicting rates in the future. Gee, last time I heard, even Microsoft's spreadsheet software Excel would do the arithmetic for regression models!
Once a world class mathematician specializing in stochastic processes reviewed my work predicting the expected number of surviving US missile firing submarines in a scenario of global nuclear war limited to sea. So, I had a model and some real data and gave expected values over time, including in a graph. The mathematician had an objection and I reminded him of how to make an application of the strong law of large numbers for bounded, independent, identically distributed (i.i.d.) random variables, and he agreed with me with "that's a good way to look at it". So, with some more analysis, it should be possible to make some useful predictions of shipping rates over time -- the article could be improved by doing such.
For the "uncertainty" mentioned in the article, my Ph.D. dissertation was in best decision making over time under uncertainty, stochastic optimal control, and that might be relevant to customers of the container shipping industry. The application I made at the time had to do with varying oil prices -- hmm ...! So, the article could be improved not just mentioning uncertainty but making progress on doing something about it.
But yes, when they have to pay a premium to win the auction, it's truly heartbreaking
Somebody light a candle for the suffering american consumer
Yes, but that doesn't apply here. Straight up matter of fact statements, like the one used in this title, is as mundane and uninteresting as is possible. The only thing that could garner less interest would be to permanently cut off all communication with others. The topic itself carries some interest, but the headline doesn't add to it.
"This one weird trick allows you to save 60% on ocean freight. International shippers hate him." would have been clickbait-y.
That you might be able to make it even more clickbait-y does not make the current headline not-clickbait.
No. The word has a well defined meaning in an economic context and is used regularly per that definition. You can't get any more matter of fact. If it was something like "Ocean shipping rates have jumped off a cliff without a parachute towards its impending fiery death this year" you'd have a stronger case.
> and connotes that the decrease is faster and/or greater than would normally be expected.
No. It only connotes that it happened quickly. There is no association to expectation colloquially or by definition. A 60% decline in eight months is fast compared to historical norms regardless of whether or not it was expected. That the decline was fast is worthwhile information to communicate.
> Again, nuclear fireball is a perfectly accurate description of the sun
Accurate, but abnormal usage. This is incomparable to the common usage of plunge. A better analogy would be the headline: "Sun to light up San Francisco tomorrow". To "light up" could mean to set on fire. But, given the clear context and regular usage of the words, it's a stretch to think people would be tricked into clicking the link because they think SF will be ablaze.
> "Shipping rates decreased 60% year over year as industry moves past pandemic"
Thing is, had you been compelled to read the article you would have known that shipping rates decreased by more than 73% year over year. Given that the headline didn't compel you to read the article we have further evidence of it not being clickbait.
Keyword: normalizING. Those inflated prices are continuing to result in supply shortages around the world. I still cannot acquire certain plastic items because they are ridiculously high at the moment. These shortages are also contributing to inflation. There are a lot of people who are closely watching this situation to it's resolution
it's assumed that the shortage here meant supply at (the previously) low prices. Some people are making do without whatever that they originally intended, or found a substitution that was cheaper (and likely at a lower quality).
That markets were 100% fine and one day someone was like, "nah fuckit, let's make shipping cost $30k instead of $3k, why not!" and bam, the supply issues started?
Because if not, then you probably agree with me that increased/changed demand due to WFH combined with supply shortages (caused by China and others locking down), caused supply shortages, which naturally caused price to increase.
> By that definition if everyone else died of starvation because there was one container food left and elon musk bought it there's no famine.
This isn't even tangentially related to what I said. Like.... my brother in Christ... what. How did you even make this up?
In your weird fake world where there is 1 food container, that's called a food shortage. A food shortage can lead to increased prices, which it would in your case. You're then saying that a rich person buys the one food. My sister in satan, there is still a shortage after Elon buys it. You see that, right? The shortage continues even though the limited supply was used. When people's food demand can't be met, it causes famine no matter where the strike price of food falls (if the food container cost just $0.01, but everyone was destitute, it would still be a famine!)
Even at current prices it adds perhaps 20 cents to the cost of a single, 250g package.
Considering it was less than 4 cents previously it made economic sense to ship it for packaging in a country with cheaper labour.
Can you share your math?
containers vary a lot in their construction and materials, right? open-top railway car containers are not the same as common trans-continental containers, and refrigerated units are different again. All of those and more are in daily use in vast numbers, worldwide.
A shipping container full of raw cotton is indeed quite different than one full of "iron ore" but actually, consumer electronics and various car parts, their load limits, are more commonly restricted in the way they are loaded and handled.
https://freightfinders.com/container-transport/40-feet-iso-c...
Assuming two trips the lengths of which are in the same order of magnitude as the one mentioned: $10 522 * 2 = $21 044.
That's $0.7869 per kg, so $0.1967 per 250g package. At $2k per container it's $0.0373.
That's all of $1 of realized cost. It's not accounting for negative externalities to the environment, depletion of non-renewable natural resources that future people may rely on, or poor living conditions/wage slavery/etc. Though some of that would certainly be offset by economies of scale so there's some number greater than $1 that would reflect the true "global cost" of doing that. It's just unknown and not measured.
And then when you add in both reasonable and unreasonable disagreement, you just get stuck... and if the problem is real and is going to cause big problems, well you're really betting the farm that you'll be able to come up with a planetary level solution in short order or else you're just hopelessly stuck with whatever happens to you.
As I look at the situation what I see are a few scenarios:
1. It's not bad and there won't be any long term effects. 2. It's pretty bad but the long term effects won't be that bad. 3. It's very bad and the long term effects will be quite bad. 4. (some combination including small/medium impact, etc.).
The thing is that it doesn't really cost much to address 1. and 2. and we get some nice benefits anyway like lower levels of pollution, maintenance of resources like fisheries or forests or whatever. But if it's 3. and we don't do anything we are mega fucked or we will need a very lucky and well-timed solution. Elon said something to the effect of "let's not find out if we get lucky or find a solution" and to that I wholeheartedly agree.
Like when we were supposed to run out of Europium, or the population was supposed to exceed the food supply, or any number of doomsday scenarios.
I’m not saying the climate/resource predictions aren’t true based on what we know, I’m saying they aren’t true based on what we don’t yet know.
It’s certainly possible you’re right, but you’re not giving any attention to the possibility that you’re wrong.
What you’re saying here is that the most likely scenario is that we’ll have global climate change but the effects won’t be that bad because we’ll invent technology to address those effects.
Sure that’s certainly possible.
What I don’t understand is the desire to roll the dice that we will invent technology to mitigate the effects of climate change versus just not having climate change and thus not leaving to chance that we will create technology to mitigate these effects?
Certainly I think you’re overestimating that this is a pure technology problem to be solved versus a political and cultural problem of which technology is but just another actor on the stage.
You’re also discounting short and intermediate term instability which will lead to increased human suffering while we attempt to resolve political and cultural problems and invent new technology. How many future wars may be fought over resources because we said “eh someone will figure it out”? It’s a quasi-religious faith in technology as universal problem solver.
Alternatively we could just start working on the problem now and not explore a path that bets civilization for no real gain.
And for those of you who debate my conclusion up there about the impact, consider this breakdown [https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...] and;
Every part of the worlds economy is currently dependent on fossil fuels. Global trade (aka China and the US's economy, and most others too), International and most Domestic Travel, National Energy Grids (including heating in cold countries and literally keeping the lights on for large swaths of the year), and every major Army, Navy, and Air Forces basic operations.
Some countries or regions in countries have made progress towards zero carbon on SOME of those fronts. NONE of them are not reliant on fossil fuels at least some part of the year for something critical. As in, people will die, sometimes a lot of people (10-100k+).
And that isn't counting things like nitrogen fertilizer production, which have knock on effects everywhere.
To 'stop' global warming, we'd need to stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere essentially now, and start pulling CO2 out, correct?
So: 1) That currently is impossible for anyone to do without people dying.
2) It's likely to be a decade or more before the earliest adopters and wealthiest countries could get there (not counting Military, which is likely even longer - 50+ unless there is a major war first).
3) The BRICs on the list are relatively poor, and don't have as much ability to capitalize such a change. Most of the other countries struggle to keep their lights on as-is, with cheap oil. They aren't going to be able to capitalize converting their entire grid to solar, they can't even capitalize their current grid!
So, we essentially have two choices if we want to actually stop it now:
1) Figure out a way to fix our current situation, knowing that the majority of the worlds population isn't going to change what they are doing in time.
2) Go to war, and destroy anyone who won't stop doing what they're doing that causes CO2 release (and other GHG).
Which #2 would currently require even MORE expenditure of CO2 with current technology, assuming it's even winnable. China is a nuclear power after all, and the #1 global CO2 emitter (and one of the largest beneficiaries of global trade, which largely don't count in that number).
That's also of course putting aside ethical concerns about 'killing them to save them', and pre-emptive war to stop a problem that so far people are only feeling the barest twinge of issues from.
My gut feeling for what is going to happen is a lot of hand wringing, a lot of natural disasters that steadily build up pressure to actually do something, and a gradual transition and mitigation at great expense over a century+. This will likely completely screw the poor countries, and moderately screw the wealthy ones.
We're going to get these wars anyway because countries with a military will just start conflicts over resources and where nations break down many will just resort to anarchy and suffering there. We're already seeing this with Russia invading Ukraine where there are fascist goals but also geographic goals with control the fertile Donbas region and then also the subsequent usage of gas as a weapon against Europe. This is just the beginning.
It's hard to see how technology will solve this problem because it's a political and social problem and not a technology problem. No amount of carbon capture technology can build solar power in India while they're at war with China over water from the Himalayas ya know? No amount of technology can stop (at this time) Republican governments from banning EV installations or using government money to incentivize oil and gas industry development for donors.
The technology would have to be similarly transformative as nitrogen fertilizer was - which is what avoided the whole Malthusian population trap in the first place.
We don’t know what we don’t know there, frankly, so hard to say if it exists or not.
Co2 capture and most GHG emissions though have a serious thermodynamic challenge which says ‘not easily’. Once the clock spring is unwound, it’s really hard to wind it back again.
Or do you mean all negative externalities? To me, that seems akin to the coastline paradox.
For externalities, it seems like there fundamentally is a correct cost -- doing all the accounting might be a real pain though.
You can never price in all externalities, but you sure as hell can improve your pricing of externalities from what it is (in the same way a 1km resolution of coastline is better than a 100,000km resolution)
We're only accounting for a very small percentage of externalities.
Let's not build up strawmen.
The building and refueling of gas stations.
Shipping replacement parts.
The trip to the store is not their only impact.
You’re cherry picking a stat that represents the smallest part you want to take responsibility for but demand for all of it as resource costs.
This was pointed out on a freakanomics episode.
Furthermore last I checked the academic analysis I could find found that Amazon prime delivery has smaller footprint than driving to the store unless you’re getting like 14 items at once for similar reasons.
I'd like to know if it's true. It sounds like one of those things that are "to good to be true".
Is it possible that you're conflating the total of transportation pollution per capita with the part of it that has to do with driving to the grocery store for that?
Take the cargo ship for instance. In looking up the numbers, a single large cargo ship can carry upwards of 20,000 20-foot long cargo containers each with a volume of ~1200 cubic feet. So that's 24 million cubic feet of storage. Break that down into pollution per item, it's going to be some value that's effectively zero.
And the same is going to be true for most other transportation and movement along the overall pipeline, which is all going to be done at a large scale to reduce costs. And then you enter the picture. You drive 15 miles there, and 15 miles back in your vehicle - to pick up 6 limes, a few sprigs of mint, and a bottle of rum. The cost of transport/mile/unit there is easily going to be orders of magnitude greater than any other part of the trip, and it's not hard to imagine it exceeds the entire cost of the rest combined.
Also, I wasn't comparing the cost of shipping lime from south america to europe, but I was comparing it with the cost of shipping limie from south america to vietnam to do the packaging and then back to europe to do the consuming which is more than double the pollution. You need to unload the ships, move the trucks to the places where people do the packaging, move the goods back into a ship, unload the stuff again, drive it all the way to other warehouses etc etc
When you think about it, most populated areas in the US are rural, sparsely populated areas. It may be 20 miles to the nearest store, and that store may only be a 7-11. I feel lucky to have found a nice spot in a rural area that is only 8 miles to the Walmart, and that really hurt recently with gas prices, still does.
But most population, isn't in rural areas. I've got a local specialty grocery store literally downstairs next to my condo, and a full grocery store three blocks away. "The average household traveled 3.79 miles to their primary grocery, even though the closest store was 2.14 miles way." (https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/04/10/5-things-the-usda-lea...)
I often have to make a 20 mile round trip just to get a gallon of milk.
i know this is completly off-topic, but commercial lime juice is made by mulching whole limes finer and finer until they essentially liquefy, not squeezing the juice, so they get much higher yields.
Or to add industrial citric acid and water to a 2% of lime juice so you can sell it by 1$.
To me it isn't nearly as bad as the dark scenarios some conjured.
It costs about $600 to remove a ton of carbon from the atmosphere the hard way, rather than messing about with tree credits and other stuff that's too easy to game. So we'd want to add another $.001 to the price to account for the cost of the carbon involved in transporting it. Bulk container ships are very energy efficient compared to other sorts of transportation.
However, they do use bunker fuel and the above doesn't take account of all the sulfur and particulates that gets emitted.
I think I found the source you used to get that number[0] (or [1]) it says:
> Atmospheric carbon removal can be as simple (and relatively inexpensive) as planting trees. But to remove sufficient carbon to meet the target, new technologies will be needed. Some are currently being piloted, including potentially expensive and/or environmentally-invasive technologies. Costs are estimated to range up to $600 per tonne of sequestered CO2, although no one really knows for sure.
So I don't think we should be using hypothetical future tech (with a big question mark to boot) to put a dollar value on pollution emitted transporting goods today, particularly when it focuses on carbon and doesn't account for the other emissions.
[0] - https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-10-06-carbon-removal-will-cos...
[1] - could actually have been this one, which starts by describing it as $600/ton and later clarifies that this is using experimental tech: https://www.science.org/content/article/cost-plunges-capturi...
Cherry picking data to fit your point is stats 101 for "journalists"
What "point"? Shipping rates are down 60% in a year. That is a fact.
I guess business reporting is too complicated for some people here.
Why not 1985? Why a 3 year window and not a decade window? or Century? Or how it has changed over the last 12 parsecs?
The Baltic Dry index is down 68% the last year to belew 1988 levels.
Things normalizing are important. Many things are still out of whack. Inflation is still 9%. Demand is decreasing. Why is that a "non-story"? It seems to me it's interesting in both directions.
> Rates were insane due to Covid
No they were insane due to the post covid boom, which also resulted in 9% inflation & write down the biggest number you can think of and we will pay it tech salaries.
It’s still very much a story. A big question has been whether recent inflation would be transitory. Ocean shipping rates coming back down means that at least this one facet of inflation will end up being transitory.
Costs peaked at 5x the pre-pandemic value, and are now down to 3x the pre-pandemic value.
This endless comparison between "this year" and "last year" seems both meaningless and ripe for headlines when comparing in-pandemic with out-pandemic years.
I get it. 2020 and 2021 messed up just about every statistic ever. In 2021 we get articles about massive rate hikes, in 2022 we get more articles about massive rate falls.
2020 was like an earthquake. Such a massive disruption will have second, third, fourth order effects for a while. But measuring "earth shaking has dropped by 90% since 5 minutes ago" isn't really information of any use.
On the other hand "all buildings are restored to pre-earthquake levels, please carry on as normal" is both highly useful, and won't make it to the front page.
I work for a food-2-go supplies business, we sell packaging to coffee shops and the like. Most of our products are UK made and although we don’t directly import anything a few of our suppliers do.
An example is one 40ft container will hold about 750 cases of 500 x 12oz double walled paper coffee cups, in 2019 would cost us about 30GBP per case wholesale delivered to our UK warehouse.
To ship a 40ft container from China into the UK pre COVID was around $1500-$2000. It started rising as COVID hit (for quite a wide number of reasons all combined) and last year it was peaking at $25,000, most of the year is seemed to be about $20,000. It has dropped over the recent few months,as the article says, but is still very high.
At $2,000 shipping per 750 cases out of the £30 cost that’s about $2.66 / £2.30 per case in container shipping costs. At the peak it worked out to be about $33 / £29 per case. You can see that doubled the UK landed price of the product and so our costs rocketed up.
Most people in the supply chain are doing the same, 'breathing in' and hoping we get through this mess.
This massively pulls demand forward puts stress on already stressed infrastructure and ultimately pushed shipping costs through the roof. As the supply chain stabilizes, suppliers will start building in less buffer for shipping problems and costs will ultimately go down.
Means we are going back to normal.
> The cost to ship a 40-foot container from China to the U.S. West Coast now stands around $5,400 a box, down 60% from January, according to the Freightos Baltic Index.
I got curious:
Year | Billions of tons
2020 | 10.65
2019 | 11.07
2018 | 11.02
~~~
2010 | 8.4
2009 | 7.86
2008 | 8.23
He's been talking to me about this for a little bit now it seems to me globalization is in a bit of a bear market for the first time in what 80 years?
I hadn't realized how much activity in the real world was linked to the financial excesses that were going on before the debt crisis.
Shorter route, more eco, as less fuel will be burned, if production is just around a corner it is easier to make sure manufacturing does not violate workers rights, does not abuse children, does not use slave workers. And we can stop feeding Chinese communistic regime, we see how dependence on country like Russia ends up.
These sources of cheap labor are already dried up. The managerial slumlords treating lower ranks like trash have troubles finding more subordinates, e.g. ask Musk how it's going hiring Poles and Ukrainians at his Branderburg's manufacture.
Clickbait
For example - invasive species, like Asian Carp. Would they be so prevalent fresh water bodies around the world if we shipped (by sea) as much as we have in the past?
Cost of labor. If it was cost prohibitive to ship across the world, wouldn't much more get manufactured locally? Wouldn't there be more attention to a living wage in developed countries?
How about other invasive species? How about zebra muscles: https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-are-zebra-mussels-and-why-sho...
https://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/HotTopics/Pages/BWM-defau...
However, to my point, is it possible that invasive species would be less infested in freshwater areas had we as a species done much less sea based transport because it was cost prohibitive?