given the terrible dangers to aquatic ecosystems associated with dredging, I don't know if citing the feet per hour is going to win a lot of fans to the cause -

given the terrible dangers to aquatic ecosystems associated with dredging, I don't know if citing the feet per hour is going to win a lot of fans to the cause -- which is then further compounded by this defense > That doesn’t rule out a position of roughly ‘yes this is a no-good-very-bad way of limiting how much we dredge but it does limit it and that is what matters.’ > I don’t know how to engage with that perspective as anything but opposition to civilization. If you don’t think we should maintain or create ports, make it possible to navigate rivers or free ships that get stuck - which are the primary reasons people dredge - then that’s not compatible with having a technological civilization. Perhaps there are other ways to work around that and still have a technological civilization, but they are orders of magnitude worse in terms of their consequences for the Earth. I'm of the opinion that we should learn to use our sprawling ports in the United States more efficiently rather than stacking more inefficient ports[0] across all of our coast -- especially given the tremendous ecological cost of what we already have -- and apparently that stance is defined by the author as 'opposition to civilization' and not even worthy of rebuttal. Hard disagree. Look around the U.S. ports and identify the bottlenecks mentioned; it's rarely marine-space related -- it's almost entirely logistical or occupational related -- bigger ports will require more employees that don't even exist in large enough quantity now to fill the roles needed even today -- and this is aside from the additional employees needed for the larger dredging operations. "jobs created" means precisely zero in skilled trades without a captive and waiting audience -- these people will need to be trained and placed -- it can't just be spun from nothing over-night. (I have lived in Wilmington, the number one port in the U.S. in commerce value) tl;dr : let's fix ports rather than making more broken ports and ruining our seas. [0]: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-ports-key-us-supply-chain-among-worlds-least-efficient-2021-10-20/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-ports-key-us-sup...