Comment by nobankai
14 days ago
> 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.