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20% increase in the world's trading inventory and working capital tied up to get a 0.7% reduction (24% x 3%) in emissions. Yeah makes complete sense to pursue v

by sfifs 7y ago

20% increase in the world's trading inventory and working capital tied up to get a 0.7% reduction (24% x 3%) in emissions. Yeah makes complete sense to pursue vs. other avenues! </sarcastic>

paganel 7y ago
> 20% increase in the world's trading inventory Which will most probably cause the producers to want to reduce that inventory by not producing that much anymore, which will further ease the pressure on the environment. Yeah, that will most probably raise some prices, but as a species we can't have our cake and eat it at the same time, at some point we do have to price in the externalities.
- Camas 7y ago
  Speed limits wouldn't price in any externalities.
  - paganel 7y ago
    As I tried to explain earlier, speed limits will most probably reduce the rate at which products are sold, which will most probably cause the price of said products to increase. That's the "price in" element I had in mind.
    - Camas 7y ago
      That's not pricing in an externality though, it's just raising the cost.
- xondono 7y ago
  How do you get to the conclusion that producers will want to reduce their output? If anything they will increase it, since the feedback loop that tells them when to cut back is now way slower, and most consumer facing would rather overproduce than lose sales.
  - paganel 7y ago
    > How do you get to the conclusion that producers will want to reduce their output? An output that just sits as additional inventory doesn't actually produce any revenues, at some point it becomes economically rational to reduce said output to levels that make sense again (i.e. that don't sit in deposits collecting dust instead of being in customers' hands half a world away).
- MuffinFlavored 7y ago
  > Which will most probably cause the producers to want to reduce that inventory by not producing that much anymore I don't think that's how that works. I'm pretty sure producers produce because there is demand and they are selling their product. They aren't producing for the fun of it.
  - paganel 7y ago
    > there is demand and they are selling their product. I agree with this, but reducing the ships' speed will reduce the rate and the price at which you can potentially deliver said products to the consumers, which in effect will reduce the effective demand. As an example, I bet there's lots of people that would want to have rocks delivered to them from the Moon, i.e. there is a notional demand for Moon rocks, but because transporting rocks from the Moon to said customers is prohibitively expensive the effective demand for such an item is close to 0. Making trans-oceanic transport more expensive works the same way.
    - MuffinFlavored 7y ago
      Wouldn't this just move more goods that need to be delivered time-sensitively to the air, which pollutes even more?
      - paganel 7y ago
        Some of them probably, yeah, but it will make them more expensive by at least an order of magnitude so that demand will certainly fell. Measures like these are in effect additional taxes.
    - xondono 7y ago
      That's when I'm getting lost >but reducing the ships' speed will reduce the rate and the price at which you can potentially deliver said products (Emphasis mine) The moon rock argument would be solid if the prices were to rise, but by your own admission, it would lower them. The regulation just bans "high-speed" expensive shipping. As another commenter has stated, this will just make time-sensitive shipments to switch to the cheapest alternative, and for non-time-sensitive items like consumer goods, this will just mean higher stockpiling in origin. As anyone who has work on In-demand manufacturing will tell you, the slower the transport the higher the waste.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Alternatively couldn't that easily cause a rise in the number of ships at sea instead? Less supply for the demand means that it would pay to get into it even with reduced yield. And building around 20% more ships isn't exactly trivial environmentally.
Richard_East 7y ago
Plus increase in labour costs due to slower transit times, longer shipping times pushing more companies to use air transport... a whole lot of unintended consequences. I think its still best to focus our political willpower on accelerating the transition to electric vehicles. There is the obvious human health benefit of not having hundreds of millions of tiny engines exhausting fumes at the ground level of cities.
- dragontamer 7y ago
  > I think its still best to focus our political willpower on accelerating the transition to electric vehicles. Electric vehicles, for the near term, remain a toy of rich people. Apartments will NOT have electrified parking lots, outside of a select few spaces. Tesla's "Supercharger" requires 150 kW of power-delivery per parking space. (Average american household uses ~30 kW-hrs per day, or roughly 1.25 kW on the average). The real solution is public transportation. Electrifying public transportation (ex: monorail, trams, electric busses, etc. etc.) forces the ENTIRE car-less class to go electric. We're talking about 20%+ of America will be "forced into electric" if public transit were upgraded. Pushing more Americans onto public transit will only make those numbers better. Tax incentives to Amtrak / Busses and other such programs should make public transit more popular.
  - nickfromseattle 7y ago
    >Apartments will NOT have electrified parking lots, outside of a select few spaces Why not? Are you sure that won't happen as demand increases? Is it too expensive? How much does it cost? I was in London recently and they had electrified lamp posts. None of the houses had garages so this enabled the residents to buy electric.
    - dragontamer 7y ago
      > Why not? Are you sure that won't happen as demand increases? Is it too expensive? How much does it cost? I don't have the real numbers. But I can run some estimates in my head to see what is or isn't reasonable. I'm thinking on the scale of my neighborhood. I have ~5000 housing units in my neighborhood (Mixed-housing development: single-family, townhomes, condos, and rental properties such as apartments). We have a bit over 12,000 humans living in my neighborhood. The neighborhood design is currently scaled at maybe 20MW of power or less. I don't know for sure, but 6MW (average daily load), x3 because summer has higher loads (air conditioning)... just for a rough estimate for the power-infrastructure of my neighborhood. Again, I don't have precise numbers. But 20MW capacity is probably the capacity of my neighborhood covering 12,000 people. ----------- 20MW will cover 133 Tesla Superchargers (150kW per). That is to say, to provide 3% of the homes in my neighborhood with a supercharger, the power-capacity needs to be doubled for the entire neighborhood. A more reasonable estimate is for 22kW chargers (much slower, but 3-phase power and more easily supported for sure). In this case, roughly 900 chargers can be installed if my neighborhood doubles its electric capacity (18% of homes can have an electric vehicle). And many homes are 2x or 3x car households. So really we're aiming at 200% or 300% cars-to-homes ratio if you want to go "all electric vehicles" across the whole neighborhood. To get there, my neighborhood needs to deploy something on the order of 200MW of power-capacity. -------- So now, ask yourself. What is approximately the cost of providing 10x more electricity to every single neighborhood in the country? Its not going to be cheap, that's for sure.
danw1979 7y ago
Are you implying that most of the world's trading inventory and working capital is, at any given moment, afloat on cargo ships ?
- cascom 7y ago
  no, but the value is staggering given that commercial vessels may have hundreds of millions of dollars of product aboard at any given time [1] Check out the the number of commercial ships on this map - tell me slowing them all down is a good idea for world trade. [2] [1] https://cdn.ihs.com/www/pdf/Vessel-Accumulation-Cargo-Value-Estimation.pdf https://cdn.ihs.com/www/pdf/Vessel-Accumulation-Cargo-Value-... [2] https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-15.5/centery:42.4/zoom:2 https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-15.5/cent...
jellicle 7y ago
That's a huge reduction in world emissions for a rather tiny cost.
- hackeraccount 7y ago
  How confident are you in the estimate of cost? Heck, I'm not even confident in the estimation of emission reduction - this seems very much like something that might have weird knock on effects that causes surprising results.
jonstewart 7y ago
Other commentators are pointing out your gross flippancy about world capital and whatnot. I will say, when optimizing code, I take every 0.7% improvement I can get. As the world shifts to optimizing for CO2 emissions, every 0.7% that can be done soon and without capital investment is a no-brainer. The fast ships are likely operating at inefficient speeds, which is only made possible by transporting premium cargo where the increased costs are absorbed by the ultimate higher prices of the goods. In a real sense, the world is paying too much by a psychological need for instant gratification. Note that cargo ships have all sorts of negative externalities beyond CO2 emissions. For example, the studies that are coming out now on the impact of fine particulates... well, I’d short the Diesel engine all the way to $0. So while a carbon tax might be the best global win for all industries, this sounds like one that could be implemented tomorrow and have a real impact.

by sfifs 7y ago

20% increase in the world's trading inventory and working capital tied up to get a 0.7% reduction (24% x 3%) in emissions. Yeah makes complete sense to pursue vs. other avenues! </sarcastic>

paganel 7y ago

> 20% increase in the world's trading inventory Which will most probably cause the producers to want to reduce that inventory by not producing that much anymore, which will further ease the pressure on the environment. Yeah, that will most probably raise some prices, but as a species we can't have our cake and eat it at the same time, at some point we do have to price in the externalities.

Camas 7y ago
Speed limits wouldn't price in any externalities.
- paganel 7y ago
  As I tried to explain earlier, speed limits will most probably reduce the rate at which products are sold, which will most probably cause the price of said products to increase. That's the "price in" element I had in mind.
  - Camas 7y ago
    That's not pricing in an externality though, it's just raising the cost.
xondono 7y ago
How do you get to the conclusion that producers will want to reduce their output? If anything they will increase it, since the feedback loop that tells them when to cut back is now way slower, and most consumer facing would rather overproduce than lose sales.
- paganel 7y ago
  > How do you get to the conclusion that producers will want to reduce their output? An output that just sits as additional inventory doesn't actually produce any revenues, at some point it becomes economically rational to reduce said output to levels that make sense again (i.e. that don't sit in deposits collecting dust instead of being in customers' hands half a world away).
MuffinFlavored 7y ago
> Which will most probably cause the producers to want to reduce that inventory by not producing that much anymore I don't think that's how that works. I'm pretty sure producers produce because there is demand and they are selling their product. They aren't producing for the fun of it.
- paganel 7y ago
  > there is demand and they are selling their product. I agree with this, but reducing the ships' speed will reduce the rate and the price at which you can potentially deliver said products to the consumers, which in effect will reduce the effective demand. As an example, I bet there's lots of people that would want to have rocks delivered to them from the Moon, i.e. there is a notional demand for Moon rocks, but because transporting rocks from the Moon to said customers is prohibitively expensive the effective demand for such an item is close to 0. Making trans-oceanic transport more expensive works the same way.
  - MuffinFlavored 7y ago
    Wouldn't this just move more goods that need to be delivered time-sensitively to the air, which pollutes even more?
    - paganel 7y ago
      Some of them probably, yeah, but it will make them more expensive by at least an order of magnitude so that demand will certainly fell. Measures like these are in effect additional taxes.
  - xondono 7y ago
    That's when I'm getting lost >but reducing the ships' speed will reduce the rate and the price at which you can potentially deliver said products (Emphasis mine) The moon rock argument would be solid if the prices were to rise, but by your own admission, it would lower them. The regulation just bans "high-speed" expensive shipping. As another commenter has stated, this will just make time-sensitive shipments to switch to the cheapest alternative, and for non-time-sensitive items like consumer goods, this will just mean higher stockpiling in origin. As anyone who has work on In-demand manufacturing will tell you, the slower the transport the higher the waste.
Nasrudith 7y ago
Alternatively couldn't that easily cause a rise in the number of ships at sea instead? Less supply for the demand means that it would pay to get into it even with reduced yield. And building around 20% more ships isn't exactly trivial environmentally.

Richard_East 7y ago

Plus increase in labour costs due to slower transit times, longer shipping times pushing more companies to use air transport... a whole lot of unintended consequences. I think its still best to focus our political willpower on accelerating the transition to electric vehicles. There is the obvious human health benefit of not having hundreds of millions of tiny engines exhausting fumes at the ground level of cities.

dragontamer 7y ago
> I think its still best to focus our political willpower on accelerating the transition to electric vehicles. Electric vehicles, for the near term, remain a toy of rich people. Apartments will NOT have electrified parking lots, outside of a select few spaces. Tesla's "Supercharger" requires 150 kW of power-delivery per parking space. (Average american household uses ~30 kW-hrs per day, or roughly 1.25 kW on the average). The real solution is public transportation. Electrifying public transportation (ex: monorail, trams, electric busses, etc. etc.) forces the ENTIRE car-less class to go electric. We're talking about 20%+ of America will be "forced into electric" if public transit were upgraded. Pushing more Americans onto public transit will only make those numbers better. Tax incentives to Amtrak / Busses and other such programs should make public transit more popular.
- nickfromseattle 7y ago
  >Apartments will NOT have electrified parking lots, outside of a select few spaces Why not? Are you sure that won't happen as demand increases? Is it too expensive? How much does it cost? I was in London recently and they had electrified lamp posts. None of the houses had garages so this enabled the residents to buy electric.
  - dragontamer 7y ago
    > Why not? Are you sure that won't happen as demand increases? Is it too expensive? How much does it cost? I don't have the real numbers. But I can run some estimates in my head to see what is or isn't reasonable. I'm thinking on the scale of my neighborhood. I have ~5000 housing units in my neighborhood (Mixed-housing development: single-family, townhomes, condos, and rental properties such as apartments). We have a bit over 12,000 humans living in my neighborhood. The neighborhood design is currently scaled at maybe 20MW of power or less. I don't know for sure, but 6MW (average daily load), x3 because summer has higher loads (air conditioning)... just for a rough estimate for the power-infrastructure of my neighborhood. Again, I don't have precise numbers. But 20MW capacity is probably the capacity of my neighborhood covering 12,000 people. ----------- 20MW will cover 133 Tesla Superchargers (150kW per). That is to say, to provide 3% of the homes in my neighborhood with a supercharger, the power-capacity needs to be doubled for the entire neighborhood. A more reasonable estimate is for 22kW chargers (much slower, but 3-phase power and more easily supported for sure). In this case, roughly 900 chargers can be installed if my neighborhood doubles its electric capacity (18% of homes can have an electric vehicle). And many homes are 2x or 3x car households. So really we're aiming at 200% or 300% cars-to-homes ratio if you want to go "all electric vehicles" across the whole neighborhood. To get there, my neighborhood needs to deploy something on the order of 200MW of power-capacity. -------- So now, ask yourself. What is approximately the cost of providing 10x more electricity to every single neighborhood in the country? Its not going to be cheap, that's for sure.

danw1979 7y ago

Are you implying that most of the world's trading inventory and working capital is, at any given moment, afloat on cargo ships ?

cascom 7y ago
no, but the value is staggering given that commercial vessels may have hundreds of millions of dollars of product aboard at any given time [1] Check out the the number of commercial ships on this map - tell me slowing them all down is a good idea for world trade. [2] [1] https://cdn.ihs.com/www/pdf/Vessel-Accumulation-Cargo-Value-Estimation.pdf https://cdn.ihs.com/www/pdf/Vessel-Accumulation-Cargo-Value-... [2] https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-15.5/centery:42.4/zoom:2 https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-15.5/cent...

jellicle 7y ago

That's a huge reduction in world emissions for a rather tiny cost.

hackeraccount 7y ago
How confident are you in the estimate of cost? Heck, I'm not even confident in the estimation of emission reduction - this seems very much like something that might have weird knock on effects that causes surprising results.

jonstewart 7y ago

Other commentators are pointing out your gross flippancy about world capital and whatnot. I will say, when optimizing code, I take every 0.7% improvement I can get. As the world shifts to optimizing for CO2 emissions, every 0.7% that can be done soon and without capital investment is a no-brainer. The fast ships are likely operating at inefficient speeds, which is only made possible by transporting premium cargo where the increased costs are absorbed by the ultimate higher prices of the goods. In a real sense, the world is paying too much by a psychological need for instant gratification. Note that cargo ships have all sorts of negative externalities beyond CO2 emissions. For example, the studies that are coming out now on the impact of fine particulates... well, I’d short the Diesel engine all the way to $0. So while a carbon tax might be the best global win for all industries, this sounds like one that could be implemented tomorrow and have a real impact.