One wonders if you could drop a battery operated GPS beacon reporting by satellite on these things to report back their position once a day once it has been abandoned. Something like that should be able to run for a couple of years at least.
Maritime salvage law is always interesting as it feels like it was mostly written in the 1600 and 1700's :-)
I think you're underestimating the harsh nature of the ocean. Few things last for a decade on the ocean without frequent maintenance, high up-front costs, or both - and often not even then.
There's very little intersection between hardware that would last in those conditions and would be cheap enough that coast guards would be willing to just leave it on a ship. Or maybe I'm underestimating the budget of the Coast Guard, but leaving this thing adrift in the first place seems to indicate otherwise...
> One wonders if you could drop a battery operated GPS beacon reporting by satellite on these things to report back their position once a day once it has been abandoned. Something like that should be able to run for a couple of years at least.
>> Yep, exactly what I was thinking. Add a small solar panel and it could probably function for a decade.
> I think you're underestimating the harsh nature of the ocean. Few things last for a decade on the ocean without frequent maintenance, high up-front costs, or both - and often not even then.
A solar powered GPS beacon may be an exception to that rule.
Couldn't you just encase the beacon electronics and the solar panel in a hunk of clear epoxy potting [1], and then secure the thing to the deck with stainless steel screws? For an application like this, it's probably sufficient that the beacon only operate during daylight hours, so you probably don't even need a battery.
I don't imagine the electronics would cost much more than that for a PLB [2], so we're talking somewhere in the ballpark of $500. The main expense would be the receiving satellite and sending a helicopter to the ship for installation.
Even stainless steel will probably fail in the ocean. The sea is an absurdly harsh environment. Look up sacrificial anodes or ultra high corrosion resistant alloys to get an idea of what you need to keep stuff going even for just a few years.
We had a monitoring unit in a heavy aluminum box on a buoy a couple km off Biscay (the HARSHLab, heh...) that lasted half a year, until the stainless bolts corroded against the aluminum and the lid flew right off. Polycarbonate boxes have worked better for us.
I agree with you that ocean beacons are treated harshly. That said, we have an interesting exemplar of a battery powered beacon that reports in daily in the NOAA sea buoy transponder package.
Tuna radar buoys are dropped regularly in the sea, and are quite a bit north of $500, I believe. They are not expected to be recovered, work completely off solar, and are closed solid. You need a magnet to turn them on through a reed switch, they don't even have a hole for a button to prevent water ingress.
In addition to that, it feels like the navy / coast guard could drop that GPS beacon off when they rescue the crew and have a live map that shows the vessels set adrift so that others can avoid hitting them, especially in a storm. Vessel ID and size, GPS coordinates and notify the owner to go pick it up.
Interesting idea, it sounds like it would certainly be technically possible. But what about the legality? If an owner can't be readily identified, would there be any legal problem with a foreign government placing a GPS beacon on a derelict ship? As others have pointed out, maritime law can be somewhat antiquated in ways, perhaps this is a legal grey zone?
I don't know maritime law, but it looks like the law of salvage kicks in? [1] Hopefully one of the surviving rescued crew could offer hints as to the owner or shipping company.
The crew are (were) paid by a crewing agency, typically providing a crew to the charterer, who finds a ship from some shipowner or other to offer freight services to commercial clients.
The shipowner is invariably located in a PO Box in a jurisdiction which makes Swiss banks seem downright extrovert; however, this is just a shell company controlled by an opaque holding company, &c.
Global shipping is a rather murky business, designed to facilitate tax and responsibility avoidance.
If this sounds interesting, investigative journalist Ian Urbina published a most informative (and scary) book on the subject last year - Outlaw Ocean.
That book does sound interesting, thanks for the recommendation. Though the global shipping industry is not usually what I read about in my leisure time, this sounds like a worthwhile venture.
Indeed it is; he looks into various shady aspects of the marine industry - rogue fisheries, shipping, waste dumping, slavery &c - a grim read by anyone's standards.
On a related, but lighter note, the memoirs of Max Hardberger (Marine repo man, more or less) is an excellent collection of sea stories of the "Improvised ingenuity and brazenness while under fire" kind. I believe it was called "Seized!"
And slavery, you say? How does this manifest? Are we talking about Somalian pirates conscripting poor people in third world countries or something? I have read that following the collapse of Libya after Qaddafi's overthrow, things degenerated so badly that slaves began to be bought and sold and are even sold there today - but I suppose I've never dug too deep into who's buying them and for what purpose.
And I love a good memoir, especially of a seafarer! That'll be going straight on my Amazon wishlist, thanks!
-The slavery bit I referred to is perhaps more accurately described as forced labour; the concept being that crewing agencies of the unscrupulous type trawl the countryside recruiting crew for offshore fisheries; the crew then have their ID papers confiscated and are put on vessels doing long stints offshore without any option of leaving, often for years on end, as the vessels they crew are more like rafts, being resupplied from shore rather than going back ashore themselves.
This is often 'legal' in the sense that the (more often than not illiterate) crew have signed contracts stating that they need to repay a sign-on fee equating years worth of wages.
The US and Russian navies have maritime surveillance satellites; for them, it has presumably never been “lost”.
The Chinese have some too, but I guess they only bother with their back yard. ESA were doing something commercial too, but I haven’t been following details.
This came ashore only a few miles from where I live, apparently there is a lot of confusion over who even owns the boat, media is saying it was stolen twice, US coast guard tried to identify owner when the crew was initially rescued.
this was resolved mostly after the PRESTIGE incident and now shipping is no more or less as shady as all other major industries.
The Flag Administrations have records of the beneficiary Owners and you can go to http://www.equasis.org/ and get plenty of information about the Owners of the vessel.
> shipping is no more or less as shady as all other major industries.
The more I think about this the worse it sounds. Big oil, car manufacturing, aviation, big tech companies, big pharma and agricultural companies. As soon as you think of a big industry you recall a recent or ongoing scandal. It’s grim.
AIS transmits much more frequently usually between 3 minutes and 2 seconds depending on speed. [0] AIS is also supplemental and basically every large vessel will have radar available that will spot these kinds of dead drifting ships.
True ... but there are thousands of us that sail (sailed) small yachts which have a more limited range if they have radar at all (power consumption and antenna height cause certain restrictions). AIS on the other hand works great and also integrates with chart plotters for collision alarm with relatively small amounts of power. Small yacht sailors generally assume that cargo vessels will NOT try to avoid them, so having the ship continue on its (drifting) course wouldn't be too surprising.
I realize I half finished my thought the main issue with adding AIS is the increased frequency increases power draw means you need a larger battery for this beacon. Either that or a solar panel which is more expensive and would get grimy over time and eventually fail.
I don't think that ships are abandoned and properly lost at sea very often. It's uncommon enough that it was on the front page of the BBC news website, and it's on the front page of HN.
When the crew is rescued from a ship I can imagine they see the ship as lost and it is probably going to sink. Because that's why they rescued the crew in the first place.
So GPS won't help much.
But I can imagine an other kind of beacon could be useful to recover things from the sunken ship.
My company [1] is developing a solution just like this one, with added inertial monitoring. It is meant for studying a vessel's or a platform's maximals movements at sea remotely, for fuel consumption optimization in principle, but it is also useful for black box purposes.
It does not use AIS but Iridium, so the device can relay custom information. In this case, it could have been useful to know about the vessel's health from how it was moving: it would have been very easy to know if it was going to sink if it would have begun to list to one side permanently, for example. It would have been just a matter of dropping our box and a big solar panel on deck.
Ships are often full of asbestos, hydraulic fluid, poisonous bilge etc., not to mention this one has been floating around without upkeep so might be structurally dubious. It's not as simple as
Sure, but there's an industry which does this. Although whether their price would pay for towing it from Ireland to Bangladesh or wherever, I have no idea.
Should only need to tow it to Turkey (I know for a fact there are marine salvage yards there) or maybe Libya (they probably have a few as well). There's no lack of more local (than the far east) places to scrap a ship, probably environmentally cleaner to do it locally too.
No, there's an industry that claims to do this, just like there was an industry for global plastic until the Chinese government shut it down because it was essentially a scam.
I did not know that. What a shame. These two did brilliant work together. "The Front Fell Off" was my introduction to them, and I have to say, I don't know if I've ever laughed that hard before, or since.
I never understood why governments don't require companies to put down cleanup expenses upfront or purchase insurance or similar so they can't externalize these costs. Same with virtually any commercial building, etc.
Right, that's the feature. If you can't afford to go into business without polluting (or otherwise externalizing costs), you can't afford to go into business. If we want to keep the barrier to entrepreneurship low, we can subsidize it, but we don't get to pretend that pollution/etc is free. It feels more expensive because we either raise the barrier to entrepreneurship or we raise taxes, but the reality is that we've been subsidized by a whole bunch of environmental debt.
Great intention but this is no different than big companies lobbying for more regulation in their sector to "pull the ladder up" because they are the only company who can pay the costs. The result is companies get bigger and smaller players lose out. Everyone ends up working for minimum wage except very few rich people.
I'm starting to believe this meme was really concocted by some of those "big companies". It's quite brilliant, actually: using the public's hatred of big corporation to actively protect them against any changes.
That's not a feature. You're basically pointing to a world where only established multinational corporations are going to be able to afford to do anything at all. This results in more money being extracted from local economies into the coffers of the ultra-rich for no gain to us other than ostensibly environmental protection, which clearly others can just pay to get around (since nowhere in the discussion was any real suggestion that the actual implementation in practice was going to be any different, just the bond money up front).
> environmental debt
Oh great, it's the 2020 meme. First I've seen it, but I just know I'm gonna be reading this bs phrase everywhere now.
> That's not a feature. You're basically pointing to a world where only established multinational corporations are going to be able to afford to do anything at all.
See the second sentence of the post you replied to.
> Oh great, it's the 2020 meme. First I've seen it, but I just know I'm gonna be reading this bs phrase everywhere now.
Look, I'm not a lefty, I'm a moderate independent, and I'm probably fiscally conservative, which is precisely why I hold this position (it's "personal responsibility" applied to macroeconomics). So put away any notions of partisanship you might have had. "environmental debt" is exactly what this is (by all indicators, anyway), and if you disagree feel free to substantiate.
For someone complaining about "environmental debt", a term I have never seen before, you do use a lot of tired phrases.
I also don't quite believe that international shipping is quite as amendable to scrappy little startups with little money as you make it out to be?
> other than ostensibly environmental protection
Yes, the benefit of the proposed scheme is environmental protection, and therefore it is no surprise that you identify it as it's primary benefit ("ostensibly" being a meaningless qualifier used to vaguely dismiss the idea without feeling the need to argue the point).
Both the principle as well as the mechanisms are well established. Car insurance comes to mind, or really any liability insurance.
An insurance scheme would, in fact, significantly lower the capital requirements compared to straight-up bonds, in the same way that you don't have to put up a million $ to get that amount of coverage for your car.
> actual implementation in practice
Require insurance against environmental damage caused by any vessel. Deny entry to foreign vessels not complying.
> Require insurance against environmental damage caused by any vessel.
Requiring insurance is not the same as requiring the money to be put aside up front like a bond, which was what was being suggested earlier in the thread. I have no issue with insurance requirements if you think it's possible to run an insurance business profitably that (a) doesn't charge so much that we still have the same problem and (b) actually has the money and will actually pay out when a billion dollar environmental disaster happens.
I don't think the economics of that work.
As for
> a lot of tired phrases
complaining about the ultra-rich establishing barriers to entry that keeps the little guy out is never going to be "tired" until it stops being the default operating mode of these organizations.
> Requiring insurance is not the same as requiring the money to be put aside up front like a bond, which was what was being suggested earlier in the thread.
The suggestion you're referring to was mine, and I suggested either insurance or a bond.
> I don't think the economics of that work.
The current economics only "work" now because the books are cooked. No one is accounting for pollution. Like I've said before, we can address the environment and keep the barrier of entry to entrepreneurship low: subsidies and tax breaks for small businesses to offset the regulatory burden.
Lastly, I'm mostly fixating on the environment/pollution for convenience, but we should really be doing this anywhere that we are externalizing costs.
In this specific case, which government? The ship was sailing from Greece to Haiti, on a Tanzanian flag, when it was abandoned. Which government should've required a cleanup bond or insurance, the Greek, Haitian, Tanzanian, or the Irish?
And what, Ireland claims it from whichever it was paid to?
And you only need one country not to, so you can register there. You'll never get every country to sign up to anything like that, because it makes being the one that doesn't too valuable.
We have mechanisms to deal with stuff like this. You write a treaty where each member country pledges to implement this scheme, and then member countries refuse to let commercial ships from countries outside the treaty to dock.
The entity to whom the bond was payed then pays for the ship’s salvage.
You don’t need every country to implement this. There can be bond havens just like there are tax havens. It’s not ideal but it’s still a huge improvement over making every country a haven. And anyway, there are lots of things a country can do to devalue havens, such as prohibiting businesses operating within said country from doing business via ships that are registered in these havens, including transitive. No system is perfect, but why would we reject imperfect solutions that still do a ton of good?
> Normally, damaged or sunken ships remain the property of their owners, who are responsible for securing a solution...
Sounds like that was written on behalf of public companies who imagined they'd always want to assert their ownership rights. It was not written while mindful of the possibility of anonymous LLCs who have a salvage bill, an environmental problem, and rescue operations expenses tied to the ship and would rather it sank in the middle of the ocean...
Well, Ireland still has a Receiver of Wrecks. It's their problem now.
Any of the big salvage companies, Titan or Smit or Mammoet, can deal with such a wreck if paid to do so. It's expensive, but routine. Ireland has local salvage companies, too. Once it's decided who pays the bill, one of them will probably be brought into deal with the mess.
Probably not, if it made commercial sense the law of salvage already makes that option available.
It might conceivably matter that the wreck is now in a somewhat more convenient place rather than the middle of the ocean, but probably it's just too low value for it to be economic to volunteer. Somebody will have to get paid explicitly to tidy this up.
The ship probably has value, the potential lawsuits regarding how it came and went probably eclipse that. Once you touch it whoever feels wronged is gonna try and lay claim to any money you made scrapping it and whether or not you win you get tied up in court doesn't really matter, it's still the last thing you want to do in a low margin industry. This is one ship, you're not gonna make a ton of money off it, not worth screwing with for most entities capable of scrapping it. Whatever town this washed up on is gonna have to pay to get rid of it. I'm sure some teenagers will find the time to steal some souvenirs before that happens though.
Salvage law isn't gonna stop some locals who don't like the particulars of how you scrapped it from bogging you down in a court room for a year. There's more parties involved here than just the owners (whoever they may be).
Basically, it's a race-to-the-bottom as far as responsibility for the externalities [1] of ship-based transportation goes. Why does Bolivia, a land-locked, third world nations "have one of the largest commercial fleets in the world"[2]. If responsibility for the negative parts of shipping can be shifted indefinitely, it means it never goes into costs, which facilitates trade and "wage arbitrage" [3].
I used to work in the supply-chain industry setting up the trucking end of cross-ocean shipments (mostly full truckloads of electric toothbrushes coming from China). I'm trying to think of ways to push back on this behavior but it's tough in such a low margin industry. The best approach is probably to threaten their revenue source --- I know that the transportation departments setting up these shipments (and therefore approving payment to the shipping company) don't even think/care about this(they are pressured to get all their loads covered by the end of the day by the toothbrush company)...so it's probably on the consumer (who pays for the electric toothbrush) to hold companies more accountable for the vendors they choose to work with.
If I had access to a list of companies who held their entire supply chain to a certain set of standards, I'd be willing to pay a little more for my toothbrush.
It's practically speaking impossible for consumers to discover and act on this information.
We buy our toothbrushes from a retail store, many transactions removed from the manufacture of the toothbrush, and every organisation in that chain would have to voluntarily agree to honestly report its transportation details. This is unlikely.
Even if it did happen, the onus would then be on consumers to interpret these details, perform a comparison between a number of available brands, and determine the most conscientious choice. And then review this decision periodically, because transportation contracts come and go. This is a substantial amount of work.
Even if consumers were able to do that amount of work, they'd then have to replicate that work for every single product, because everything goes through a similar transportation process. There is absolutely no way that any individual has enough time in their lives to research the transportation details of even a reasonable sampling of products used.
And that's not even considering the transportation issues in the supply chain!
As you observe, individual organisations also cannot act, because doing so makes them less competitive.
This is basically the same reason why individuals can't effectively tackle climate change. There is far too much information that's hidden, and far too much time required to effectively assess information, for individuals to influence anything.
Like with climate change, there is a solution, and it's regulation. The problem would vanish overnight if the EU, the US, and I guess now the UK all refused to allow docking of ships with flags of convenience, or even just ones flying flags from countries that don't ratify the maritime treaties.
And like with climate change, the solution is hampered not because of technical difficulties or cost, it's hampered by lack of will to spend a relatively small amount of money on something that only has a social good and not an economic good.
you know, as much as I concur with some of this.. if you just tempered your language a bit to allow for some kind of effective interaction between like-minded people, instead of making the walls preventing action impenetrable by definition, it would make for a stronger statement.. Big changes do happen, and will again, one way or another !
I'm more or less in the same camp as the parent and I'm sure what the best way to communicate is.
The call to feel-good individual consumer action has been a Siren Song for the last twenty or thirty years while the various large scale pollution disasters simply continue. I'd agree with what is now older-school economics - you need direct regulation specifically to handle those cases the market can't handle. And the moves based on consumer action and market-driven regulation have visibly (and invisibly) failed.
So I hope you understand the appeal of giving people this bitter pill. I mean, think people want to hear "just add a little more of this to what you're doing" and what we're saying is more like, "sorry, I know you meant well but you need to stop what you're doing and this instead". But I don't know, don't know how to balance "I understand you're not the enemy and you mean well" with "what you're is basically counter-productive, in the sense that it gets other people to also do something ineffective".
Thanks for the reply and the feedback. Do you mean that my comment is worded in a way that describes the situation as hopeless, or that it's worded in a way that discourages discussing the ideas presented - or something else entirely?
There are many examples of third-party certifications that allow consumers to make more ethical product choices by outsourcing all the interpretation and verification to an independent organization - see Fairtrade, UTZ, FSC, MSC, various organic certification schemes, etc.
But in the end most consumers just choose the cheapest thing, or these schemes would the norm rather than exceptions.
The existence of these bodies reduces the scope of the problem to merely one of first identifying an appropriate organisation that certifies the product type in question, and then ensuring the organisation is legitimate.
Do you think it's easier for a consumer to discover and vet certification organisations than it is for them to discover and vet transportation organisations?
The price signal you mention is the strongest one, which is why pigovian taxes are often the most effective approach to tackling negative externalities. It's a good example of the sort of government regulation that is many orders of magnitude more effective than individual action.
I agree it's way too much work for individuals to do this kind of research on their own. Most of this data isn't even accessible in the first place.
I think we need to understand and take advantage of GREED to make a difference here. Two possible aspects: 1.) Companies want more sales, and want to take sales away from their competitors. 2.) Consumers like to brag when they do good things
What if there was a new organization created that grants a branded and trademarked "stamp of approval" for specific products. Similar to the green "Certified Organic" stamp of approval we've all learned to trust and seek out. The organization would be responsible for digging into the specifics. I'm aware other organizations like this exist, but none that I can think of have become mainstream...could probably learn from their shortcomings.
If consumers start purchasing more products with this stamp of approval, it would naturally lead to individual organizations having an incentive to change their ways - therefore taking advantage of their greed to make more $.
To take advantage of the consumer greed, what if a system was established to keep track of how much "stamp of approval" purchasing they do? The consumers would naturally find ways to make subtle social cues about all the good they are doing.
if anyone is interested in this topic of how these things happen and the general lawlessness of the seas due to tragedy of the commons I highly recommend Outlaw Ocean by Ian Urbina
> Various authorities had become aware of its aimless drift around the world. It was last spotted in September 2019 by a British Royal Navy ship.
I wonder if the mythological archetype of the "ghost ship" originated from cases like this: unidentified, unmanned ships roaming the seas on their own, in a time before there was a global record of abandoned ships. Doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to assume they're crewed by ghosts.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadMaritime salvage law is always interesting as it feels like it was mostly written in the 1600 and 1700's :-)
There's very little intersection between hardware that would last in those conditions and would be cheap enough that coast guards would be willing to just leave it on a ship. Or maybe I'm underestimating the budget of the Coast Guard, but leaving this thing adrift in the first place seems to indicate otherwise...
>> Yep, exactly what I was thinking. Add a small solar panel and it could probably function for a decade.
> I think you're underestimating the harsh nature of the ocean. Few things last for a decade on the ocean without frequent maintenance, high up-front costs, or both - and often not even then.
A solar powered GPS beacon may be an exception to that rule.
Couldn't you just encase the beacon electronics and the solar panel in a hunk of clear epoxy potting [1], and then secure the thing to the deck with stainless steel screws? For an application like this, it's probably sufficient that the beacon only operate during daylight hours, so you probably don't even need a battery.
I don't imagine the electronics would cost much more than that for a PLB [2], so we're talking somewhere in the ballpark of $500. The main expense would be the receiving satellite and sending a helicopter to the ship for installation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potting_(electronics)
[2] https://www.rei.com/c/personal-locator-beacons
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_salvage
The shipowner is invariably located in a PO Box in a jurisdiction which makes Swiss banks seem downright extrovert; however, this is just a shell company controlled by an opaque holding company, &c.
Global shipping is a rather murky business, designed to facilitate tax and responsibility avoidance.
If this sounds interesting, investigative journalist Ian Urbina published a most informative (and scary) book on the subject last year - Outlaw Ocean.
On a related, but lighter note, the memoirs of Max Hardberger (Marine repo man, more or less) is an excellent collection of sea stories of the "Improvised ingenuity and brazenness while under fire" kind. I believe it was called "Seized!"
And slavery, you say? How does this manifest? Are we talking about Somalian pirates conscripting poor people in third world countries or something? I have read that following the collapse of Libya after Qaddafi's overthrow, things degenerated so badly that slaves began to be bought and sold and are even sold there today - but I suppose I've never dug too deep into who's buying them and for what purpose.
And I love a good memoir, especially of a seafarer! That'll be going straight on my Amazon wishlist, thanks!
This is often 'legal' in the sense that the (more often than not illiterate) crew have signed contracts stating that they need to repay a sign-on fee equating years worth of wages.
The Chinese have some too, but I guess they only bother with their back yard. ESA were doing something commercial too, but I haven’t been following details.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9HW5361bBs
There were rumors the Air Force got to use a water-landed SpaceX booster for target practice back in 2018, too. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/18343/did-the-u-s-air-...
The more I think about this the worse it sounds. Big oil, car manufacturing, aviation, big tech companies, big pharma and agricultural companies. As soon as you think of a big industry you recall a recent or ongoing scandal. It’s grim.
[0] Large 300 ton+ ships are type A: https://help.marinetraffic.com/hc/en-us/articles/217631867-H...
What do you mean by GPS beacon? It gets a GPS-position and transmits it... where? Using what carrier?
You do have AIS already, and it is absolutely battery-operable, but I’m not sure to what extent the equipment is battery operated in the real world.
A typical aid transmitter
So GPS won't help much.
But I can imagine an other kind of beacon could be useful to recover things from the sunken ship.
It does not use AIS but Iridium, so the device can relay custom information. In this case, it could have been useful to know about the vessel's health from how it was moving: it would have been very easy to know if it was going to sink if it would have begun to list to one side permanently, for example. It would have been just a matter of dropping our box and a big solar panel on deck.
[1] http://core-marine.com
1. Climb onto ship 2. Fire up blowtorch 3. Profit
Edit: turns out there are more places doing this in Europe than I realised (and in Turkey). There's a map here: https://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/ships/list.htm
Whether they keep any promises they make about how they handle oil, asbestos, worker safety, of course that's another question.
https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/greenpeace-regret...
[Interviewer:] So what do you do to protect the environment in cases like this?
[Senator Collins:] Well, the ship was towed outside the environment.
[Interviewer:] Into another environment….
[Senator Collins:] No, no, no. it’s been towed beyond the environment, it’s not in the environment
[Interviewer:] Yeah, but from one environment to another environment.
[Senator Collins:] No, it’s beyond the environment, it’s not in an environment. It has been towed beyond the environment.
[Interviewer:] Well, what’s out there?
[Senator Collins:] Nothing’s out there…
[Interviewer:] Well there must be something out there
[Senator Collins:] There is nothing out there… all there is …. is sea …and birds ….and fish
[Interviewer:] And?
[Senator Collins:] And 20,000 tons of crude oil
[Interviewer:] And what else?
[Senator Collins:] And a fire
[Interviewer:] And anything else?
[Senator Collins:] And the part of the ship that the front fell off, but there’s nothing else out there.
I did not know that. What a shame. These two did brilliant work together. "The Front Fell Off" was my introduction to them, and I have to say, I don't know if I've ever laughed that hard before, or since.
> environmental debt
Oh great, it's the 2020 meme. First I've seen it, but I just know I'm gonna be reading this bs phrase everywhere now.
See the second sentence of the post you replied to.
> Oh great, it's the 2020 meme. First I've seen it, but I just know I'm gonna be reading this bs phrase everywhere now.
Look, I'm not a lefty, I'm a moderate independent, and I'm probably fiscally conservative, which is precisely why I hold this position (it's "personal responsibility" applied to macroeconomics). So put away any notions of partisanship you might have had. "environmental debt" is exactly what this is (by all indicators, anyway), and if you disagree feel free to substantiate.
> money being extracted from local economies
> the coffers of the ultra-rich
For someone complaining about "environmental debt", a term I have never seen before, you do use a lot of tired phrases.
I also don't quite believe that international shipping is quite as amendable to scrappy little startups with little money as you make it out to be?
> other than ostensibly environmental protection
Yes, the benefit of the proposed scheme is environmental protection, and therefore it is no surprise that you identify it as it's primary benefit ("ostensibly" being a meaningless qualifier used to vaguely dismiss the idea without feeling the need to argue the point).
Both the principle as well as the mechanisms are well established. Car insurance comes to mind, or really any liability insurance.
An insurance scheme would, in fact, significantly lower the capital requirements compared to straight-up bonds, in the same way that you don't have to put up a million $ to get that amount of coverage for your car.
> actual implementation in practice
Require insurance against environmental damage caused by any vessel. Deny entry to foreign vessels not complying.
Requiring insurance is not the same as requiring the money to be put aside up front like a bond, which was what was being suggested earlier in the thread. I have no issue with insurance requirements if you think it's possible to run an insurance business profitably that (a) doesn't charge so much that we still have the same problem and (b) actually has the money and will actually pay out when a billion dollar environmental disaster happens.
I don't think the economics of that work.
As for
> a lot of tired phrases
complaining about the ultra-rich establishing barriers to entry that keeps the little guy out is never going to be "tired" until it stops being the default operating mode of these organizations.
The suggestion you're referring to was mine, and I suggested either insurance or a bond.
> I don't think the economics of that work.
The current economics only "work" now because the books are cooked. No one is accounting for pollution. Like I've said before, we can address the environment and keep the barrier of entry to entrepreneurship low: subsidies and tax breaks for small businesses to offset the regulatory burden.
Lastly, I'm mostly fixating on the environment/pollution for convenience, but we should really be doing this anywhere that we are externalizing costs.
And you only need one country not to, so you can register there. You'll never get every country to sign up to anything like that, because it makes being the one that doesn't too valuable.
You don’t need every country to implement this. There can be bond havens just like there are tax havens. It’s not ideal but it’s still a huge improvement over making every country a haven. And anyway, there are lots of things a country can do to devalue havens, such as prohibiting businesses operating within said country from doing business via ships that are registered in these havens, including transitive. No system is perfect, but why would we reject imperfect solutions that still do a ton of good?
Sounds like that was written on behalf of public companies who imagined they'd always want to assert their ownership rights. It was not written while mindful of the possibility of anonymous LLCs who have a salvage bill, an environmental problem, and rescue operations expenses tied to the ship and would rather it sank in the middle of the ocean...
Any of the big salvage companies, Titan or Smit or Mammoet, can deal with such a wreck if paid to do so. It's expensive, but routine. Ireland has local salvage companies, too. Once it's decided who pays the bill, one of them will probably be brought into deal with the mess.
It might conceivably matter that the wreck is now in a somewhat more convenient place rather than the middle of the ocean, but probably it's just too low value for it to be economic to volunteer. Somebody will have to get paid explicitly to tidy this up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_salvage
Really - it is quite common for mariners not to know who the owner is.
So what's the story behind this mysterious ship without a crew?
This is actually the meaning of the term "ghost ship".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_convenience
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_labor_arbitrage
They would like to regain control of said coastline. In fact, they have a holiday to commemorate said loss: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%ADa_del_Mar
https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2015/05/09/beaches-of...
If I had access to a list of companies who held their entire supply chain to a certain set of standards, I'd be willing to pay a little more for my toothbrush.
We buy our toothbrushes from a retail store, many transactions removed from the manufacture of the toothbrush, and every organisation in that chain would have to voluntarily agree to honestly report its transportation details. This is unlikely.
Even if it did happen, the onus would then be on consumers to interpret these details, perform a comparison between a number of available brands, and determine the most conscientious choice. And then review this decision periodically, because transportation contracts come and go. This is a substantial amount of work.
Even if consumers were able to do that amount of work, they'd then have to replicate that work for every single product, because everything goes through a similar transportation process. There is absolutely no way that any individual has enough time in their lives to research the transportation details of even a reasonable sampling of products used.
And that's not even considering the transportation issues in the supply chain!
As you observe, individual organisations also cannot act, because doing so makes them less competitive.
This is basically the same reason why individuals can't effectively tackle climate change. There is far too much information that's hidden, and far too much time required to effectively assess information, for individuals to influence anything.
Like with climate change, there is a solution, and it's regulation. The problem would vanish overnight if the EU, the US, and I guess now the UK all refused to allow docking of ships with flags of convenience, or even just ones flying flags from countries that don't ratify the maritime treaties.
And like with climate change, the solution is hampered not because of technical difficulties or cost, it's hampered by lack of will to spend a relatively small amount of money on something that only has a social good and not an economic good.
The call to feel-good individual consumer action has been a Siren Song for the last twenty or thirty years while the various large scale pollution disasters simply continue. I'd agree with what is now older-school economics - you need direct regulation specifically to handle those cases the market can't handle. And the moves based on consumer action and market-driven regulation have visibly (and invisibly) failed.
So I hope you understand the appeal of giving people this bitter pill. I mean, think people want to hear "just add a little more of this to what you're doing" and what we're saying is more like, "sorry, I know you meant well but you need to stop what you're doing and this instead". But I don't know, don't know how to balance "I understand you're not the enemy and you mean well" with "what you're is basically counter-productive, in the sense that it gets other people to also do something ineffective".
But in the end most consumers just choose the cheapest thing, or these schemes would the norm rather than exceptions.
Do you think it's easier for a consumer to discover and vet certification organisations than it is for them to discover and vet transportation organisations?
The price signal you mention is the strongest one, which is why pigovian taxes are often the most effective approach to tackling negative externalities. It's a good example of the sort of government regulation that is many orders of magnitude more effective than individual action.
I think we need to understand and take advantage of GREED to make a difference here. Two possible aspects: 1.) Companies want more sales, and want to take sales away from their competitors. 2.) Consumers like to brag when they do good things
What if there was a new organization created that grants a branded and trademarked "stamp of approval" for specific products. Similar to the green "Certified Organic" stamp of approval we've all learned to trust and seek out. The organization would be responsible for digging into the specifics. I'm aware other organizations like this exist, but none that I can think of have become mainstream...could probably learn from their shortcomings.
If consumers start purchasing more products with this stamp of approval, it would naturally lead to individual organizations having an incentive to change their ways - therefore taking advantage of their greed to make more $.
To take advantage of the consumer greed, what if a system was established to keep track of how much "stamp of approval" purchasing they do? The consumers would naturally find ways to make subtle social cues about all the good they are doing.
I wonder if the mythological archetype of the "ghost ship" originated from cases like this: unidentified, unmanned ships roaming the seas on their own, in a time before there was a global record of abandoned ships. Doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to assume they're crewed by ghosts.