Comment by tekknik
14 days ago
crazy thought, maybe a $1 item shouldn’t be shipped from overseas at great expense to the environment? 5 years ago all anybody would talk about is the environment and now people are burning down EVs and complaining that they’ll have to pay more for a cheap $1 shirt they don’t need to be moved 6000 or more miles? make this make sense.
> make this make sense.
Sure. Modern Chinese RoRo vessels fit more than 1 shirt on them. The average shipping manifest to America looks more like 125,000 shirts, 10,000 tons displacement of natural gas, 40,000 sex toys, 20,000 Macbooks and a few dozen merchant marines making the trip. The "great cost to the environment" was manufacturing these products. The carbon footprint for shipping linens around the world is negligible, and cheaper than buying American-made.
It doesn't take a genius to see that this isn't an environmental issue, China will fuel up their boats regardless and take their surplus elsewhere. This is about American businesses outright failing to compete in the free market in places that matter, like car manufacturing and $1 tee shirt factories.
A RoRo freighter is designed for vehicles to "roll on, roll off". They don't haul regular freight.
I agree that it's very unlikely that near shoring simple electronics and T-shirts will be the big needle mover for emissions. What's much worse is the human rights violations but that's a totally different conversation from what the GP said.