Richard Heinberg, Making the most of a global depression

Making the most of a global depression
Richard Heinberg, HopeDance
The problem is not just financial mismanagement; there is a deeper instability: the global economy is based on a fundamentally unsustainable exploitation of depleting natural resources.

And from EB:

How shipping containers shortened the life span of petro-civilization
Alice Friedemann, Culture Change
Book Review:
Mark Levinson: The Box. How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. Princeton University Press, 2006.

Mark Levinson has written a book that shows how containers made global trade possible. In the preface of the paperback edition, he notes other aspects of containerization he became aware of later, such as the potential for containers to harbor atomic weapons, how they’ve become homes, and so on.

To me, what Levinson leaves out is how this global distribution system will make it very difficult to go back to local production as energy declines. He doesn’t mention that containerization was the fastest way yet for capitalism to loot the planet and strip Mother Earth down to her hard dry skin.

In 2005, roughly 18 million containers worldwide made over 200 million trips (wikipedia). Containers come in many sizes, an average one is 40 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 8 feet high, the size of three 10 by 10 foot bedrooms. There are 1,300 foot-long ships now that can carry 7,250 of them.

It’s mind boggling to think about how different the world is now. My grandparents ate what was in season, an orange was a precious Christmas gift. Today, the Japanese are eating Wyoming beef and we’re driving Japanese cars.

Before containers were used to move cargo, port cities had long piers where boxes and bales were moved by sweat and muscle onto ships. Longshoremen lived within two miles of the docks in cheap housing. Now the piers are gone and the only sweat comes from yuppies on treadmills in luxury apartments.

The cost of moving products by any means, whether truck, train, or ship, was often so high most goods were made locally. Factories were often located near ports to shorten the distance of getting products to ships.
(23 February 2008)