Europe & USA Sailing Against Tide, Asia Sails With It In Decarbonizing Shipping

ChatGPT & DALL-E generated panoramic image illustrating the USA with its domestic waterways and coast routes, featuring exaggeratedly large vessels with prominent American flags.

This chart from my scenario captures the end state. I assembled statistics on inland, short sea, and deep water shipping from 1990 to 2021, including the COVID-19 dip. My scenario respects that 40% of bulk shipping is of coal, oil, and gas and assumes that we will be reducing significantly shipping of those substances, in alignment with the International Energy Agency’s projection of declining demand, but contrary to the beliefs of the fossil fuel industry.

Let’s now cast our minds back to 1920. World War I had just ended. As with World War II, where Japan’s deep strategic mistake of attacking Pearl Harbor led to the US entering the war as a decisive force, the US had remained neutral through the first three years of World War I, supplying goods, materials, and ammunitions to both sides equally in the early part of the war.

The thread we want to pull on is the merchant marines and their decisive role as a logistics arm of the US navy. At least from the US perspective, without the merchant marines, the war would have been much harder to execute. After the war, discussions around it led to the creation of the Jones Act, formally the Merchant Marine Act of 1920.

There are 299 active significant US naval warships in active service. The US maintains hundreds of military bases around the world, far out of reach of Jones Act registered ships. The world’s logistical supply chain has matured radically since 1920 and post-World War II. Ships are much bigger, ports are incredibly efficient loaders and off-loaders of goods, and globalization means that the US’ merchant marine ships are a rounding error.

The United States doesn’t make the top 15. Outside of occasional aircraft carriers, destroyers, and frigates, the United States doesn’t build ships any more. To be clear, the transformation of maritime shipping to greater and greater electrification is going to start small and grow. Ferries and tugboats are obvious vessels for electrification. But there are a lot of them and very few organizations which can transform them in the US, never mind build new ones.

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