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There is a lot to be said of the environmental costs of shipping massive loads of product across the world.
by atomi 7y ago
There is a lot to be said of the environmental costs of shipping massive loads of product across the world.
- missedthecue 7y agoAnd it would be unimaginably more pollutant for each country to manufacture its own everything.
- Dylan16807 7y agoPoorly-regulated sulfur emissions aside, container ships are very efficient per ton.
- ironmagma 7y agoEfficiency is not the issue, it’s energy being used that wouldn’t need to be if the items were produced locally.
- Dylan16807 7y agoIf you can get all the ingredients locally. And the bigger your facility is, the more efficiently you can transport things in and out. Very local production means work trucks running around wasting fuel all over.
- jlokier 7y agoThat comparative advantage thing isn't just about cheap labour in a country supplying the avarice of another country. It can reflect underlying advantages in other respects, such as location of source materials, and availability of energy for production in relevant quantities. Below some threshold of energy use to transport, it will use less energy overall to produce some goods far away and transport them, than to produce them locally. I'm not sure if shipping on the oceans is below that threshold, but I wouldn't be surprised because it's pretty energy efficient for the amount transported.
- RhodesianHunter 7y agoLet's stop pretending this has anything to do with natural resources or energy costs. This is 100% about the cost of labor, and the fact that China is moving poor rice farmers out of the country and into these jobs and giving them exactly zero labor benefits or protections
- jlokier 7y agoThat's certainly a factor, perhaps the largest factor. But it's not the only factor, and not everything is about China.
- Dylan16807 7y agoEven if we moved it out of China, production for this kind of thing would still rarely be local. And factory wages in China are rising. The money saved isn't that big. The huge and currently enduring advantages areas of China have are in supply chain availability.