this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
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Its a step in the right direction. I can't help but wonder if ports should be moving away from tugboats entirely though. They weren't strictly necessary for thousands of years of ocean shipping. Why do we need powered ships at all? Is it because we need container shipping? Because that might just be a feature of the highly globalized fossil fuel era.
Ships are a lot bigger and we expect a lot more reliability from them than we did in the wind-only era. This makes tugs necessary to enable safe maneuvering in harbor.
Bigger and containerization have the effect of making shipping cheaper on a per-unit basis, which is why they're used.
Yes but producing things locally improves resilience and allows for decentralization. Large container shipping is a feature of free market capitalism and highly centralized industries. In a decentralized economy there wouldn't be anywhere near as much demand for container shipping.
The Baltimore bridge collapse could’ve been prevented if there had been a tug helping maneuver the ship after it had lost power. There’s probably a higher demand for them now and having an electric option should be good.