I can only explain three posts in one month with the fact that (one) I have a lot of ideas for posts stuck in different parts of my brain (I know that’s not how the brain works) that may be pushed back to the forefront by breaking news, (two) I have to write an exam, and I am procrastinating, and (three) Odd Lots routinely does this for me.
As you likely know, a container ship crashed into the Key Bridge in Baltimore on Tuesday morning (March 25, 2024), causing all kinds of physical and economic damage. After the bridge collapsed, 8 people fell into the river; 2 were rescued, 2 have been confirmed dead, and 4 more are presumed to have died. The economic damage has implications close to home – the bridge served many many commuters, who are stuck waiting for alternate routes to be provided – and far afield – though relatively small, the Baltimore port handles lots of auto exports and imports; it is the primary port for exporting US coal; and it is apparently also important for coffee and sugar trade. The close-to-home consequences had an odd resonance for me – I grew up in Maryland, and my memories of many traffic reports on the Key Bridge over a childhood of listening to the radio have surfaced in the past two days, and the Key Bridge’s closure dovetails with recent bridge drama in the state I now live in, which created massive traffic turmoil in December and lasting traffic delays as the state has determined that the Washington Bridge has structural failings and must be rebuilt. The bigger national and international effects are mind-boggling in their scope. In a moment where global trade is in a heightened state of uncertainty with physical supply shocks to key commodities (oil, gas, grain) as well as attacks on trading vessels in the Red Sea, any physical damage to key port infrastructure will add to delays facing producers, retailers, and consumers, as well as costs for goods, materials, and time.
Of course, Odd Lots was right on it. Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal had an interview with Sal Mercogliano ready within hours of the news of the crash, which is astounding turnaround. I only got around to listening to it yesterday, but learned a ton in the process. Among other things, Tracy and Joe asked Mercogliano about the physical elements of the crash, the legal elements of assigning liability in the wake of a crash like this one, the economic consequences for Baltimore commuters port workers, and both importers and exporters, and the likely lengthy timeline of reconstruction of a massive feat of engineering with no plans at hand for its redesign and construction in a moment of ever rising costs. You should listen! I learned a ton, despite having missed a lot of recent reporting in the past few years on container ship mishaps like the Ever Given’s mishap in the Suez Canal in 2021 and the grounding of the Evergreen in the Chesapeake Bay in 2022. This was largely by design; I had to hustle to publish a bunch since I was on the tenure clock and had had some unfortunately timed rejections/delays, and couldn’t indulge the schadenfreude impulses of a lot of left-ish Twitter to note how these developments were inevitable in late stage capitalism.
However… one of the things that Mercogliano brought up when the hosts asked him about why all of these recent container ship accidents have been coming to light struck me. He noted that the speeding up and massive increase in scale of trade over the past decades, compounded with the chronic under investment in infrastructure in recent decades renders many of these accidents practically inevitable. It makes sense. When a port serves increasing numbers of ships, which have increased in size to match demand for trade and technological advancements, and when that traffic has to move faster to meet consumers’ and businesses’ for ever more rapid fulfillment of orders to maintain status quo, more mistakes will be made, more crashes will happen, and infrastructure will fail more catastrophically. Biden’s announcement that the US’s federal government would pay the full bill for rebuilding the bridge is reassuring (though it will require Congress’s participation), given the physical costs, as well as the effects on the livelihood of the many port workers, but it also highlights the likely need for infrastructural improvement around the country for ports, bridges, roads, subway and train lines, and so much else.
At the same time, I can’t stop thinking about the demand side of that equation Mercogliano identified, and it’s made me think about a recent favorite book, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future. I took a long time to read that one, too (blame the pandemic and everything else), but I finally finished it last summer, and one of the more striking developments KSR describes is the development of fast ships as an alternative to trans-oceanic flights when eco-terrorists begin to systematically take out private and commercial planes. To be clear: I don’t want eco-terrorists to start taking out planes, but I think this was a realistic assessment of what it would take to ground large numbers of airplanes and jets at the global level, and also what would prompt a move back to reviving fast ship technology. This wasn’t the first time I’d thought about KSR’s fast ships in the month of March, either; this story in NPR about the struggle to find a new home for the SS United States, which used to be the fastest ship in the world, and is currently hanging out in disrepair in Philadelphia, made me think about it back in early March. The US government helped pay for the ship, with the reasoning that the technology could be used for military purposes in the Cold War, though the ship was apparently mainly used for classy transit across the Atlantic in unprecedentedly short order (3 days, 10 hours, 40 minutes).
KSR’s protagonist Mary takes a new fast ship across the Atlantic when she has to go to the States to keep pestering central bankers to do more to facilitate the global transition from carbon, and she is amazed at how pleasant the voyage is. She can do work, she can enjoy the views, and the problem of jet lag disappears. She also realizes the central sin (if I may presume) of capitalism: the notion that everything had to be done as quickly as possible begat the creation of technology to enable ever faster fulfillment of wants and needs, and the environmental cost of that was what looked like an imminent global collapse. I think about this so often! Obviously there are certain services we want to complete as quickly as possible – medical interventions, provision of aid (food, water, electricity, fuel) etc. But so many of my wants are just that; I’m certainly guilty of ordering a lot of crap from Amazon at much faster speeds than could really be justified. At the same time, my tendency to drive (and so many others’), and to drive too fast, is related in major part to other demands on our time. What would it take to reduce people’s fears of punishment if they did not complete everything as quickly as technology allows, in favor of a more sustainably paced completion of tasks?
There’s no immediate solution to this. Institutional change is slow, and even for those with the luxury of jobs that allow for more time off and periods of working from home, it’s hard to resist generations of pressure to work as hard as possible. Changing consumption patterns is also a third rail of environmental policy. I know that we live in a second-best world at best (it’s usually more like we’re on our 10th best or worse) in terms of compromise and optimality of choices being debated, and I am generally on ‘team build more’ to deal with climate change. But those positive incentives to do the right thing are best matched with incentives not to do the bad things too; it’s part of what I really appreciate about the Inflation Reduction Act, every time I dig into its details. These are complicated tradeoffs, and I don’t have any answers, but these are some things I am often thinking about. But if anyone at the Department of Transportation, or the Biden administration, is reading, could you find a place to house the SS United States, and maybe put a few dollars into researching a revival of ocean liners? I would love that.
Nina Quinn Eichacker 