3 ms·

This is a good example of advocacy journalism that almost fools me. Cato isn't my normal rag, but I'm libertarian-adjacent enough to agree with at least some o

• cr1895 3y ago
  >is the Jones Act really the thing standing in the way? It obliges some pretty ridiculous transport and installation methodologies to construct wind farms that just don't exist anywhere else on the planet. This adds significant cost, complexity, and risk and makes US offshore wind farms more difficult and more expensive to build. So much hinges on contorded legal interpretations of what counts as a "coastwise point" and how that relates to "trade" between two of those points in the US. In Europe, a specialized heavy lift crane ship or jack-up can sail into port and take on multiple foundations, transition pieces (the part between the foundation and turbine), or turbines and sail to the wind farm and install one after the other as fast as the weather permits. And to protect those foundations another specialized ship can come either before or after (or both) and place rock as efficient as possible. And a cable-lay vessel can come along and cut trenches and lay cable all with its own specialized subsea tooling. This is literal decades of development of best practice in terms of cost and efficiency. In the US that's not possible. The foreign heavy lift crane vessel can still do the lifting offshore - but, generally speaking, it can't go to port in the US and pick up anything to install offshore because, the US port is "coastwise point" A and the seabed offshore is point B and that counts as "coastwise transport." So that's where feeder barges come into play. The crane ship (or jack-up) sits offshore, more or less stationary (it's permitted to rotate, because that's technically not transport from point A to point B) and components are brought out by tug and barge. Not to mention the embarrasing physical state of & significant lack of fit-for-purpose cargo barges in the US... The foreign cable lay vessel can still lay cable between two US points (there's an exception), but it can only make the trench to do so by "jetting" or "fluidizing" the soil because "cutting" or mechanically doing so would be dredging, and that's not allowed by any foreign vessels. If the soil conditions don't allow that, then a 2nd US-flagged vessel has to come. Huge cost increase, and again more complex, multi-stage operations. The rock protection also gets a lot more complicated, depending whether it's US or non-US rock and depending on the foundation design needs to be installed before, or after, or both before & after the foundation itself is installed. It's a huge puzzle with potentially excessively expensive logistics. All of this is possible & reality, but it's so much more complex, costly, and difficult. It's many more puzzle pieces to fit together accounting for tight supply chains, high weather risk & impact, and global competition where it's just a lot easier to do things elsewhere.
• engineer_22 3y ago
  US shipyards aren't building enough ships for any sector. A 2023 report by US Congressional Research Service [1] concludes the global market is saturated, making it difficult for US industry to profitably re-enter the market. In the news there are ample reports that even the defense sector is not building ships at a rate to sustain the naval fleet. [1] https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/IF12534.pdf https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/IF12534.pdf
• jkaptur 3y ago
  To be fair, their "About" page says as much: "The Cato Institute is a public policy research organization — or think tank — that creates a presence for and promotes libertarian ideas in policy debates. Our mission is to originate, disseminate, and advance solutions based on the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace."
  • wredue 3y ago
    Imagine being alive in 2024 and still not understanding that “Individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace” Can demonstrably not all coexist. If we were pre-internet, pre global information exchange with excessively easy ways to tell if a source is good or bad, understandable. Ignorance is no longer an excuse. At this point, this is malicious.
    • MostlyStable 3y ago
      Whenever there are multiple metrics, it is true that it is impossible to fully maximize all of them at once. But it is not true that it is not possible to value all of them. These are not "binaries" that either can/cannot coexist together. They are a suite of priorities that must, at some frontier, be traded-off. However, it is also possible to not be at the pareto fronteir, and if one is not, then it is possible to increase all at once. I'm certainly of the opinion that we are not at the frontier for these and that all of them have room for improvement that does not necessarily sacrifice the others. But if we were, I (and almost certainly CATO) would be capable of making a decision as to which of the priorities was more important in a given situation and trading off against the others. You are arguing against a straw man. Your claim that these priorities are all fully incompatible with each other, is, in my opinion, much hotter of a take and less well supported than the idea that anyone could have a reasonable preference for the combination.
      • wredue 3y ago
        I am not the one arguing that, the libertarians (Cato) are. I fully acknowledge that these ideals must play some semblance of a role in creating laws where reasonable, with the possible exception of a “free market”, but that’s only because even regulated markets are horrible, evil institutions, so letting it be even more free is fundamentally idiotic. You can call it a “strawman” all you like. Grafton demonstrates that it’s not a strawman at all. Libertarians actually believe this, and they actually argue that the issue is that grafton wasn’t libertarian enough (narrator: that wasn’t the problem).
• whimsicalism 3y ago
  Correct me if I’m wrong but we wouldn’t bottlenecked by this one ship if not for the Jones act. Sounds to me like you saw Cato (certainly not a “rag”) and went in looking for a reason to disagree.
  • elil17 3y ago
    Perhaps not a “rag” since that implies it’s a newspaper. But it’s definitely a right-wing advocacy group, not an unbiased source.
    • whimsicalism 3y ago
      It is a RW think tank. I disagree that there is such thing as an unbiased source.
    • dylan604 3y ago
      When their about page clearly states they are libertarian and yet you claim they are right-wing just shows you're not really informed about the situation
      • elil17 3y ago
        In American politics, Libertarianism is used to refer to a flavor of right wing thinking focused on laissez-faire capitalism. I understand that the term has a different meaning in other contexts. I'll add that I more or less agree with the Cato Institute on this particular issue. I just think it's absolutely fair to highlight that this is an article coming from a source with an agenda.
      • whimsicalism 3y ago
        Libertarian is rw in US
  • redserk 3y ago
    I interpreted it as a mildly self-deprecating joke on the author's choice of usual reading materials. However, if we're going to be pedantic... the informal jab can work if the author doesn't respect the what is published by the CATO institute. If we're wanting to be true to the term, "rag" doesn't fit because the article is an opinion blog post, not published in a newspaper or magazine. > informal > a newspaper or magazine that is considered to be of bad quality: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rag https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rag > Informal. > ... > a newspaper or magazine regarded with contempt or distaste: Are you still subscribing to that rag? https://www.dictionary.com/browse/rags https://www.dictionary.com/browse/rags