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Let's put externalities (CO2, etc) aside... The only reason that things like canals get built is because people can charge money to recoup their costs. Many i

Let's put externalities (CO2, etc) aside... The only reason that things like canals get built is because people can charge money to recoup their costs. Many infrastructure projects get built and don't earn their capital investment back. (One might argue most) The reason people still build them is a few are enormously profitable. Once "going the long way" gets significantly cheaper, the folks in charge of the canal will lower their price so that equilibrium still means going through them.

rosser 11y ago
No, let's not put externalities aside. That's the whole problem with externalities: putting them aside. However negligible the contribution to global CO₂ concentrations these 100-odd ships over the last couple of quarters have made, they still made it, and it was done to the world I have to live in without consulting anyone or anything but their owner's own bottom line. That's why there needs to be something like a carbon tax (however poorly designed so many of the proposals thus far have been). Because those externalized costs aren't free, and they should be borne by the people who impose them on everyone else. There is absolutely no penalty for pissing in the pool the rest of us happen to be swimming in, and I call bullshit on that. EDIT: And the canal wasn't built so its owners could charge for the privilege of using it. It was built because it took weeks off transit times. Charging for its use is how it was paid for, not why it was built. That is some serious cart-before-the-horse action, right there.
- gus_massa 11y ago
  Building and maintaining a channel also has a cost in CO2 emission. How many tons of CO2 do saves a ship in fuel using the channel? How many tons of CO2 is the prorated cost of each ship traveling though the channel? I think that the Suez channel has no recent upgrades, but the Panama channel is currently being expanded, and the expansion cost a los of money and a lot of CO2. And there are some projects to build a channel in Nicaragua ...
  - rosser 11y ago
    With a quick search, it looks like container ship emissions are about ~.04kg of CO₂ per ton-mile. Let's ballpark the capacity of a container ship at around 15000 TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit, or a single 20' container). That seems to be a pretty good median, based on the numbers I'm seeing. It's hard to find reliable numbers for the weight of a TEU, but I'm seeing references to a "maximum gross mass" of 21 and change metric tons, and an empty weight of 2.4 mt. Let's make the math easy and suppose each of the 15k TEUs on a single ship are filled to half capacity, netting a little under 140000 mt. The "long way" is some 3500 extra miles, which, at .04kg/ton-mile, is 1.96 million kg, or 19.6 thousand (metric) tons of CO₂. Per ship. Per trip. And that's just the extra emissions for going the "long way". For sake of comparison, the notional "average" car emits about 4 metric tons of CO₂ per year. I have no idea what the maintenance costs of the canals are in terms of emissions, but they'd have to be amortized across every ship that traverses them. Per another poster, almost 17.5k ships sailed through the Suez Canal in 2015, so you're looking, with very back-of-the-envelope math at a little under 20000 metric tons versus 1/17500th of the annual maintenance emissions for a ~200km long canal. For a single ship's passage through the canal. The construction costs of a canal, on the other hand, have to be amortized across every ship that has ever traversed it. The fractions get ludicrously small there (though they are, admittedly, of a rather larger number). Without knowing the actual emissions numbers for construction or maintenance, I can't be sure, but I'm going to go ahead and predict a clear winner... EDIT: Corrected some bad inputs to my math. Please, someone double-check my calculations. It is, after all, the end of the day on a Friday. My brain may be a smidge soft...
    - ak4g 11y ago
      You'd be wrong to pick a clear winner based on the numbers you have (which, apologies, I didn't check, also because Friday). The construction emissions will be astronomical - or maybe it'd be more appropriate to characterize them as "geological" :P. It's far from obvious that CO2 emissions from excavating millions of tons of sand and earth would be dwarfed by the savings in the transit emissions of high-tonnage freight ships, which, unless I'm much mistaken, represent by far the most efficient means of transportation humanity has ever come up with. OTOH, I assume there weren't many bulldozers in the mid 19th-century (I actually have no idea how suez was built). But, it's not really reasonable to just throw human power at something and declare it CO2-friendly. And here's the bottom line. For better or for worse, externalities don't actually count. You can piss in the pool. People banding together and deciding otherwise - when their ancestors have gotten most of the pissing their hemisphere will ever need to do out of the way, and the rest of the world is still clawing their way out of abject poverty - is... maybe well-intentioned, but don't hold your breath. Poverty is really fucking awful. People on their way out of it will not tolerate if their governments try to put on the brakes because they watched an Al Gore movie. It's just not going to happen. The good news is that the consequences likely aren't going to be too severe. We're not facing extinction (that many other species are is irrelevant, that ship sailed a long time ago). Florida goes away, sure. Indonesia loses a lot of it's land area. It's not going to happen overnight, people are not going to drown. They will move to higher ground. And at the end of it all, you have a world population that's not poor. That's a good trade, and I have every confidence in humanity's ability to manage whatever other consequences follow, we're pretty damn good at making tough decisions once we have something to lose. But right now, that's just not the case, except in the developed world.
- PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  No, let's not put externalities aside. I'm with you on this. Especially because of the fuel these ships use[1]: bunker oil is literally the bottom of the barrel; in oil distilling, the only things more dense than bunker fuel are carbon black feedstock and bituminous residue which is used for paving roads (asphalt) and sealing roofs Those ships are basically running on sludge. It's full of sulfur and other pollutants. That's not good for the environment. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil#Bunker_fuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil#Bunker_fuel
  - rosser 11y ago
    To be fair, the massive diesel engines container ships use can have thermal efficiencies of over 50%, which is, frankly, pretty remarkable. Yes, they're burning the thickest, nastiest shit that will still actually burn, but they're doing it about as well as can be done.
    - freehunter 11y ago
      And if that cargo was going over land with trucks or trains, we would see a huge uptick in pollution compared to how much ships can haul compared to their consumption. In fact I recently saw an article [1] talking about the Soo Locks in the Great Lakes and how devastating it would be if they shut down because there would be no way that much cargo is getting sent over land by trucks or trains. So much that the US government is afraid the national economy would crash if these "no one has ever heard of them" locks stopped for any amount of time. Sure ships burn nasty shit and spew a ton of pollutants, but compared to other forms of transportation, they's so vastly superior in almost every way. [1] http://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2016/03/03/us-michigan-face-dire-consequences-if-soo-locks-fail/81261608/ http://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2016/03/03/us-michi...
      - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        Does that math stack up? Because ships produce something like 20% of the world's air pollution. And there are around 6000 seagoing ships total. That's a lot of cargo; but that's a lot of pollution too.
- moistgorilla 11y ago
  >However negligible the contribution to global CO₂ concentrations these 100-odd ships over the last couple of quarters have made, they still made it, and it was done to the world I have to live in without consulting anyone or anything but their owner's own bottom line. You are consulted every time you purchase something created via the global economy. We had our chance to say something and we said "We want iphones"
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - rosser 11y ago
    Consenting to the fact of global shipping does not imply consenting to radically less efficient shipping, just because it happens, through a fluke of market pricing, to be cheaper. One does not follow from the other.
  - aninhumer 11y ago
    It's completely unreasonable to expect consumers to research the entire supply chains of everything they purchase in order to factor in all their social costs.
    - vacri 11y ago
      It's pretty bloody obvious where iPhones physically come from. And it's hardly a secret that western democracies have had their manufacturing bases implode because consumers prefer cheaper to local; few consumer-targeted things are built in the west these days.
    - piceas 11y ago
      It would be awesome if someone did it on their behalf though. I would love a metric that let me evaluate the energy, water, pesticide, units of child labour needed to get a product to the store/my door just as I can compare the fat and sugar content of my lunch or the efficiency of a new car if I were to tape all the sharp edges and drive carefully.
cfcef 11y ago
> The only reason that things like canals get built is because people can charge money to recoup their costs. In the case of the Suez Canal, though, it wasn't finished in 1869 for the income it could deliver in 2016, since discounted at 7%, even the headline figure of $350000 would've been worth in 1869 ~$17. (Which is just as well for the French investors in 1869, since they and the later UK investors would eventually be expropriated by Nasser in 1956 and would see nothing of any revenue after that.)
- vacri 11y ago
  It was, however, expanded recently at great expense, for the income it could deliver. It's not like the 2016 canal is the same as the 19th C canal.
  - mdpopescu 11y ago
    Someone really doesn't like you...
    - vacri 11y ago
      I was being a bit confrontational upthread. The downvotes there are fine, but the 'overflow' downvoting on this comment was a bit amusing - given the very next comment on the page (from slyall) was saying the same thing :)
  - cfcef 11y ago
    And that expansion was done for the revenue it could deliver now, not in 2108. If the original Suez Canal had not been constructed in 1869, then this new one could still have been constructed now and it would be for the short-run gains, not gains a century-plus away.
scurvy 11y ago
Toll prices never come down. They only go up. When was the last time a government lowered a toll on a bridge or road? Same thing applies here.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  [ re: Richmond I-95 tolls .... ] Tolls were eliminated on the Turnpike on July 1, 1992. Coincidentally, that was the same day that Interstate 295 to the east was opened to traffic.14 There are no plans to restore the tolls to the Turnpike. http://www.interstate-guide.com/i-095.html http://www.interstate-guide.com/i-095.html

rosser 11y ago

No, let's not put externalities aside. That's the whole problem with externalities: putting them aside. However negligible the contribution to global CO₂ concentrations these 100-odd ships over the last couple of quarters have made, they still made it, and it was done to the world I have to live in without consulting anyone or anything but their owner's own bottom line. That's why there needs to be something like a carbon tax (however poorly designed so many of the proposals thus far have been). Because those externalized costs aren't free, and they should be borne by the people who impose them on everyone else. There is absolutely no penalty for pissing in the pool the rest of us happen to be swimming in, and I call bullshit on that. EDIT: And the canal wasn't built so its owners could charge for the privilege of using it. It was built because it took weeks off transit times. Charging for its use is how it was paid for, not why it was built. That is some serious cart-before-the-horse action, right there.

gus_massa 11y ago
Building and maintaining a channel also has a cost in CO2 emission. How many tons of CO2 do saves a ship in fuel using the channel? How many tons of CO2 is the prorated cost of each ship traveling though the channel? I think that the Suez channel has no recent upgrades, but the Panama channel is currently being expanded, and the expansion cost a los of money and a lot of CO2. And there are some projects to build a channel in Nicaragua ...
- rosser 11y ago
  With a quick search, it looks like container ship emissions are about ~.04kg of CO₂ per ton-mile. Let's ballpark the capacity of a container ship at around 15000 TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit, or a single 20' container). That seems to be a pretty good median, based on the numbers I'm seeing. It's hard to find reliable numbers for the weight of a TEU, but I'm seeing references to a "maximum gross mass" of 21 and change metric tons, and an empty weight of 2.4 mt. Let's make the math easy and suppose each of the 15k TEUs on a single ship are filled to half capacity, netting a little under 140000 mt. The "long way" is some 3500 extra miles, which, at .04kg/ton-mile, is 1.96 million kg, or 19.6 thousand (metric) tons of CO₂. Per ship. Per trip. And that's just the extra emissions for going the "long way". For sake of comparison, the notional "average" car emits about 4 metric tons of CO₂ per year. I have no idea what the maintenance costs of the canals are in terms of emissions, but they'd have to be amortized across every ship that traverses them. Per another poster, almost 17.5k ships sailed through the Suez Canal in 2015, so you're looking, with very back-of-the-envelope math at a little under 20000 metric tons versus 1/17500th of the annual maintenance emissions for a ~200km long canal. For a single ship's passage through the canal. The construction costs of a canal, on the other hand, have to be amortized across every ship that has ever traversed it. The fractions get ludicrously small there (though they are, admittedly, of a rather larger number). Without knowing the actual emissions numbers for construction or maintenance, I can't be sure, but I'm going to go ahead and predict a clear winner... EDIT: Corrected some bad inputs to my math. Please, someone double-check my calculations. It is, after all, the end of the day on a Friday. My brain may be a smidge soft...
  - ak4g 11y ago
    You'd be wrong to pick a clear winner based on the numbers you have (which, apologies, I didn't check, also because Friday). The construction emissions will be astronomical - or maybe it'd be more appropriate to characterize them as "geological" :P. It's far from obvious that CO2 emissions from excavating millions of tons of sand and earth would be dwarfed by the savings in the transit emissions of high-tonnage freight ships, which, unless I'm much mistaken, represent by far the most efficient means of transportation humanity has ever come up with. OTOH, I assume there weren't many bulldozers in the mid 19th-century (I actually have no idea how suez was built). But, it's not really reasonable to just throw human power at something and declare it CO2-friendly. And here's the bottom line. For better or for worse, externalities don't actually count. You can piss in the pool. People banding together and deciding otherwise - when their ancestors have gotten most of the pissing their hemisphere will ever need to do out of the way, and the rest of the world is still clawing their way out of abject poverty - is... maybe well-intentioned, but don't hold your breath. Poverty is really fucking awful. People on their way out of it will not tolerate if their governments try to put on the brakes because they watched an Al Gore movie. It's just not going to happen. The good news is that the consequences likely aren't going to be too severe. We're not facing extinction (that many other species are is irrelevant, that ship sailed a long time ago). Florida goes away, sure. Indonesia loses a lot of it's land area. It's not going to happen overnight, people are not going to drown. They will move to higher ground. And at the end of it all, you have a world population that's not poor. That's a good trade, and I have every confidence in humanity's ability to manage whatever other consequences follow, we're pretty damn good at making tough decisions once we have something to lose. But right now, that's just not the case, except in the developed world.
PhantomGremlin 11y ago
No, let's not put externalities aside. I'm with you on this. Especially because of the fuel these ships use[1]: bunker oil is literally the bottom of the barrel; in oil distilling, the only things more dense than bunker fuel are carbon black feedstock and bituminous residue which is used for paving roads (asphalt) and sealing roofs Those ships are basically running on sludge. It's full of sulfur and other pollutants. That's not good for the environment. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil#Bunker_fuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil#Bunker_fuel
- rosser 11y ago
  To be fair, the massive diesel engines container ships use can have thermal efficiencies of over 50%, which is, frankly, pretty remarkable. Yes, they're burning the thickest, nastiest shit that will still actually burn, but they're doing it about as well as can be done.
  - freehunter 11y ago
    And if that cargo was going over land with trucks or trains, we would see a huge uptick in pollution compared to how much ships can haul compared to their consumption. In fact I recently saw an article [1] talking about the Soo Locks in the Great Lakes and how devastating it would be if they shut down because there would be no way that much cargo is getting sent over land by trucks or trains. So much that the US government is afraid the national economy would crash if these "no one has ever heard of them" locks stopped for any amount of time. Sure ships burn nasty shit and spew a ton of pollutants, but compared to other forms of transportation, they's so vastly superior in almost every way. [1] http://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2016/03/03/us-michigan-face-dire-consequences-if-soo-locks-fail/81261608/ http://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2016/03/03/us-michi...
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Does that math stack up? Because ships produce something like 20% of the world's air pollution. And there are around 6000 seagoing ships total. That's a lot of cargo; but that's a lot of pollution too.
moistgorilla 11y ago
>However negligible the contribution to global CO₂ concentrations these 100-odd ships over the last couple of quarters have made, they still made it, and it was done to the world I have to live in without consulting anyone or anything but their owner's own bottom line. You are consulted every time you purchase something created via the global economy. We had our chance to say something and we said "We want iphones"
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- rosser 11y ago
  Consenting to the fact of global shipping does not imply consenting to radically less efficient shipping, just because it happens, through a fluke of market pricing, to be cheaper. One does not follow from the other.
- aninhumer 11y ago
  It's completely unreasonable to expect consumers to research the entire supply chains of everything they purchase in order to factor in all their social costs.
  - vacri 11y ago
    It's pretty bloody obvious where iPhones physically come from. And it's hardly a secret that western democracies have had their manufacturing bases implode because consumers prefer cheaper to local; few consumer-targeted things are built in the west these days.
  - piceas 11y ago
    It would be awesome if someone did it on their behalf though. I would love a metric that let me evaluate the energy, water, pesticide, units of child labour needed to get a product to the store/my door just as I can compare the fat and sugar content of my lunch or the efficiency of a new car if I were to tape all the sharp edges and drive carefully.

cfcef 11y ago

> The only reason that things like canals get built is because people can charge money to recoup their costs. In the case of the Suez Canal, though, it wasn't finished in 1869 for the income it could deliver in 2016, since discounted at 7%, even the headline figure of $350000 would've been worth in 1869 ~$17. (Which is just as well for the French investors in 1869, since they and the later UK investors would eventually be expropriated by Nasser in 1956 and would see nothing of any revenue after that.)

vacri 11y ago
It was, however, expanded recently at great expense, for the income it could deliver. It's not like the 2016 canal is the same as the 19th C canal.
- mdpopescu 11y ago
  Someone really doesn't like you...
  - vacri 11y ago
    I was being a bit confrontational upthread. The downvotes there are fine, but the 'overflow' downvoting on this comment was a bit amusing - given the very next comment on the page (from slyall) was saying the same thing :)
- cfcef 11y ago
  And that expansion was done for the revenue it could deliver now, not in 2108. If the original Suez Canal had not been constructed in 1869, then this new one could still have been constructed now and it would be for the short-run gains, not gains a century-plus away.

scurvy 11y ago

Toll prices never come down. They only go up. When was the last time a government lowered a toll on a bridge or road? Same thing applies here.

tosseraccount 11y ago
[ re: Richmond I-95 tolls .... ] Tolls were eliminated on the Turnpike on July 1, 1992. Coincidentally, that was the same day that Interstate 295 to the east was opened to traffic.14 There are no plans to restore the tolls to the Turnpike. http://www.interstate-guide.com/i-095.html http://www.interstate-guide.com/i-095.html