Global Cargo Shipping

An old friend asks, “Given the extreme carbon footprint associated with transoceanic cargo shipping, wouldn’t it be better if we built our products here, rather than import them?”

The answer is yes, and such a change would also enable us to get a grip on the terrible trade imbalances that endanger the U.S. (and world) economy. But the realities of the world economy cannot be changed with the wave of a hand.  The reason we import everything from steel to apparel to solar panels from China (and other Asian nations) is that they can be made so much less expensively there, due to cheap labor, government subsidies, and economies of scale.

The most reasonable answer to this is either:

Synthetic fuels, in which point sources of CO2 are brought together with large amounts of off-peak energy to build synthetic hydrocarbons in the form of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, and/or

Hydrogen, in which water is electrolyzed using clean energy, or biomass is gasified.

Expect one or both of these solutions to roll through here sometime in the next 20 years.

That’s the good news.  The bad news is that this planet could be a considerable hellhole 20 years hence if a business-as-usual course is kept.