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.
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.
The big problem would be an unplanned, extended shutdown. The locks are currently shut down between January and March.
I wonder how much slack there is in steel consumption. 2/3 of US steel production is already from recycled material, I can see the volume of recycled material increasing with higher scrap prices (so steel production would be able to stay at 65+ percent of current levels), and low value producers would be the first ones to shut down (so probably consumer products like low quality chain or fencing, things that people can pretty well do without). I think it's an easy strategic decision to build a second larger lock, but the probability of catastrophe seems overblown.
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.
I'm with you on this. Especially because of the fuel these ships use[1]:
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