Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Yale, companies are re-discovering keeping a component inventory and supply chain redundancy, but there are fears this will increase costs.
How Climate Change Is Disrupting the Global Supply Chain
The impact of the Covid pandemic on the global supply chain has been widely reported. But extreme weather, from floods to wildfires, is increasingly hammering ports, highways, and factories worldwide, and experts warn these climate-induced disruptions will only get worse.
BY JACQUES LESLIE • MARCH 10, 2022
The Covid pandemic has rightly received most of the blame for global supply chain upheavals in the last two years. But the less publicized threat to supply chains from climate change poses a far more serious threat and is already being felt, scholars and experts say.
…
Scientists say that such climate-related disruptions are bound to intensify in coming years as the world warms. In addition, ports, rail lines, highways, and other transportation and supply infrastructure will be threatened by increases in sea level of an estimated 2 to 6 feet — and perhaps more — by 2100. Around 90 percentof the world’s freight moves by ship, and, according to Becker, inundations eventually will threaten most of the world’s 2,738 coastal ports, whose wharves generally lie just a few feet to 15 feet above sea level. But to most port managers, the threat still feels remote. The rate of future sea level rise is so uncertain and solutions so elusive that only a few port managers have taken action to counter the threat, and only a fraction have tried to assess it.
As the ripple effects of what are likely to be ever-increasing and intensifying climate-related disruptions spread through the global economy, price increases and shortages of all kinds of goods— from agricultural commodities to cutting-edge electronics— are probable consequences, Mims said. The leap in the cost of shipping a container across the Pacific Ocean as a result of the pandemic — from $2,000 to $15,000 or $20,000 — may suggest what’s in store.
A 2020 paper in Maritime Policy and Management even asserted that if current climate science is correct, “global supply chains will be massively disrupted, beyond what can be adapted to while maintaining current systems.” The paper argues that supply chain managers should accept the inevitability of economic upheaval by the end of this century and embrace practices that support rebuilding afterwards.
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Supply chains are, in essence, strings of potential bottlenecks. Each stopping point is a node in a tree-like system that conveys raw materials from the system’s farthest tendrils to sub-assemblers along its roots to manufacturers, who are the system’s trunk. Products like smartphones possess hundreds of components whose raw materials are transported from all over the world; the cumulative mileage traveled by all those parts would “probably reach to the moon,” Mims said. These supply chains are so complicated and opaque that smartphone manufacturers don’t even know the identity of all their suppliers — getting all of them to adapt to climate change would mark a colossal achievement. Yet each node is a point of vulnerability whose breakdown could send damaging ripples up and down the chain and beyond it.
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In response to the threat of increasing supply chain disruption, manufacturers are considering enlarging their inventories or developing “dual supply chains” — supply chains that deliver the same goods via two different routes, so that if one breaks down, the other will prevent shortages. But both solutions would increase production costs, and would contradict the still-predominant “just in time” manufacturing approach, which relies on robust supply chains to eliminate the need for companies to keep extensive parts inventories in stock. American companies could shorten their supply chains, shifting production facilities back to the U.S. or a nearby country, but in many cases they would be removing their factories from the constellation of suppliers that grew up around them in countries such as China and Vietnam.
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Read more: https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-climate-change-is-disrupting-the-global-supply-chain
There is no need to invoke climate hobgoblins to explain what has gone wrong. And there are other problems with the US supply chain, which can be summed up by the words “California” and “Biden”. But lets explore the issues raised by Yale 360.
Go back a century, and supply chain disruption of non-perishable goods, at least in peacetime, would never have been such a serious issue. People were used to supply chains being disrupted, so they kept large inventories onsite, and a large address book of alternative suppliers, to ensure resilience.
Then computers came along, and people started using computers to create just in time delivery systems.
I’ll never forget the head of IT in an Australian heavy manufacturing plant showing me through an empty warehouse, explaining that he was the reason the warehouse was empty. By identifying exactly what component parts were needed for each order, his company no longer needed to keep large inventories of components, they knew ahead of time exactly what would be needed and when.
Holding component inventory also potentially creates significant taxation issues. Tax law is complex, so I might be wrong, but my understanding is the US warehouse tax prevents companies from deducting the cost of purchasing component inventory from their taxable profits. This is potentially a potent Federal incentive to keep component inventories small, and keep contingency and resilience to an absolute minimum.
Those same computers also run massive accounting programmes to search who the cheapest suppliers are, and recommend placing all the orders for key components with the same low cost supplier. Since everyone runs similar software driven searches, using the same data, which all produce similar conclusions, the entire manufacturing world now depends on single points of failure.
These computer models lowered capital costs, for sure. From an accounting point of view, parts and components sitting on shelves are dead capital, which impact the return on shareholders’ investment. But parts inventory is also resilience against supply chain disruption.
This insane concentration of vulnerability, and razor thin contingency, was always going to come unstuck, as soon as the practice became widespread enough to start causing problems.
Companies got away with extreme zero inventory practices, so long as OTHER companies held inventory.
The inventory held by others camouflaged the downside of zero inventory practices, allowing zero inventory companies to behave like vampires, allowing them to feed off the resilience of others, the capital and inventory holdings of companies which did not practice strict zero inventory.
But now the practice of zero inventory is almost universal, now almost everyone is a vampire, there are no longer any buffers or contingency left in the system on which to feed. The entire supply chain system is brittle, like a fragile glass sculpture. The slightest disruption sends painful ripples and cracks throughout the global manufacturing and production system.
Unwinding will be painful – building component inventory unequivocally means accepting lower profits, maybe paying more tax, until the next disaster strikes. There is going to be a lot of management opposition to anything which threatens the size of their annual bonus. Managers will need the courage to defy their own accounting software, and the self confidence to face down their model obsessed accounting departments. But companies putting all their eggs in one basket was never a good idea, nor was assuming delivery at the exact agreed time, with near zero contingency for delay or failure.
Good analysis, Eric. Holding inventory during times of economic uncertainty is poor risk management as money has gone out the door (inventory purchase) and it is unknown and uncertain when money (customers) comes in the door. The idiots behind Biden pushed so hard to the left that there wasn’t any resiliency in the system when Putin invaded Ukraine.
Thanks Ron.
Putin has reminded us of the importance of the military.
So, what if Xi invades Taiwan? If we, and particularly our military, can’t do without Chinese goods, we’re stuffed aren’t we.
When I was young and versed in the ways of MIL-SPEC, there was a rule that there had to be redundant suppliers. In other words, if you wanted to sell radios to the army, there had to be at least two suppliers for each transistor, resistor, capacitor, and inductor. And those suppliers shouldn’t be in the same city.
The idea was that the enemy couldn’t cripple your war effort with just one well placed bomb.
There is the idea that interdependence creates peace. Putin has demonstrated that doesn’t work. Maybe he thought Europe wouldn’t rise to the challenge because it depends on Russian gas. A similar idea may be lurking in the back of Xi’s fevered brain.
Apparently the Ukrainians were well prepared. We should take a lesson from that. Strategic goods should be manufactured on our side of the pond.
I used to not worry about China’s military because they rely on Chinese made products. Now I wonder how much our military depends on Chinese made products and start to worry.
I also worry about what the hell are the future leaders of the world learning in college if this sort of drivel is passed off as a serious article from Yale, no less.
JACQUES LESLIE You should ask for your tuition money back.
“Jacques Leslie is a regular Los Angeles Times op-ed contributor.”
Jacques image below. Paid to pontificate and bloviate.
Many of Eric’s points about Lean management are correct, mainly because most US companies only grabbed elements of the management philosophy; JIT, kanban, 5S etc. It does not wok piecemeal.
Tiachi Shingo the Toyota senior engineer and Sensi who developed many of the operational techniques was asked if he was worried that he handed over those techniques (as a result of the George Bush “faceplant in the soup” meeting in Japan) his reply was:
“No; the Toyota Production System is like a suit, and the US corporations are too fat to wear it.”
He was partially correct as I mentioned above but some corporations did understand including the non union US factories (admittedly most are foreign owned: BMW, Toyota USA, Mercedes). Stanley Tool and Danhauer (who made Craftsman tools for Sears) were also successful. Efforts by the “Big 3” were initially doing well until the auto unions re-entered those plants and the system fell apart. (The infamous Freemont plant that GM had abandoned because of union troubles, was selected as the non union joint venture GM -Toyota demonstration project. GM again had to abandon it when the union returned. I understand that has been converted toa Tesla site.)
I introduced “Lean Thinking” to a (formerly) major corporation that I worked for. About 1/4 of the divisions I worked with “got it” (especially the notion that the very top leader had to personally drive the effort – not “consultants”.) The company lost its high position not because of operational problems but rather they did not exploit their own inventions soon enough thinking they could milk their old technology a decade longer.
BTW, for many companies lager inventories would not have made a difference under today’s extraordinary conditions. They would have been as effective as Biden’s release of the US strategic reserve.
Interesting comments about Toyota, and it brings to mind the necessity of modifying your business thinking and subsequent strategy when in the presence of a very different culture. This introduces a bigger problem, in that the culture may change rapidly after you adapted your business to the original culture. The current tendency to mass (illegal?) immigration is producing unintended consequences in many previously countries with strong economies.
The encouraging news was that the Japanese felt the American worker was not “equipped” to make the TPS work by virtue of the difference between the two cultures. Both the GM/Toyota joint venture and the still thriving Toyota USA (with US workforce and managers) proved that idea wrong.
The common denominator in the failures was the reentry of automobile unions.
(What Shiego Shingo missed was the the Toyota Production System (TPS) was named in honor of the Ford Production System (FPS) which was a prototype for them. They gobbled up every one of Henry’s innovations.)
As noted, TPS is a management philosophy and the techniques are tools to implement that philosophy. As many US companies demonstrated, the tools cannot drive the management philosophy. The failure is not in the workers’ culture but in how many top managers think!
Live local, know where your food comes from. Rough times ahead.
Yep. No accident I live in a place of abundant reef fishing, fruit growing, and lots of farming.
Same here, local farms and fresh seafood.
I sometimes can’t believe that fish is such now a high priced ‘special’ meal.
Growing up around the foreshores of Moreton Bay, a pleasant 3-hour fishing session would always bring home a great meal for a family of 5.
All for the cost of pumping some yabbies.
(Of course, we had to gut, clean, scale and cook our own fish, which would be beyond most urban households these days).
Yabbies: “burrowing Australian crayfish”. Thanks, Mr., now that I have my New Word For The Day I can relax. Here’s one for you (my Uncle came back from WW2 with a wife from some part of London) “Bubbles and Squeaks”, which means left-overs for the next meal.
‘Bubble and Squeak’ is a British dish made from leftovers usually with whatever came to hand. I remember my Grandmother keeping whatever was left from the evening meal for cooking the next day – either fried potatoes for breakfast or anything else in a bubble and squeak.
B&S was a regular breakfast dish at our army mess. Chopped up fried egg was also an inclusion.
“return on shareholders’ investment.”
There is rarely any such thing any more. Almost no companies pay out dividends, and if they do, they are a tiny, tiny fraction of profit. The profit goes into the bank for the CEO and board to play with, usually on things which are actually detrimental to shareholder value.
Shares in a company no longer entitle you to a share of their profits. They are simply betting chips. Betting on stock value which often has very little to do with dirty, mundane things like profit.
Return can occur in the form of capital growth, I was speaking in general terms.
There are 468 companies on U.S. exchanges paying out over 5% in dividends. 282 over 7%.
https://www.marketbeat.com/dividends/screener/
Wonderful article. Clear, succinct, a clarion call warning we all need to heed.
I just have two little quibbles with the situation as stated.
1)”But extreme weather, from floods to wildfires, is increasingly hammering ports, highways, and factories worldwide,”
Assumes Facts Not In Evidence. Just not happening. Note that “Assumes Facts” is a polite way of saying “lying through their teeth“.
2) The usual collection of “Maybe” + “might be” + “could be” + “in the future”. All the usual weasel-wording *after* they just get done explaining how their disaster is real, it is here, it is happening now.
The most unforgivable part of this all is the boring predictability of it all.Every climate change disaster article I have read in the last 15 years has used these two stupid, predictable ploys in the same order.
People who are this boring should *never* be forgiven. Indeed, they should be hectored and heckled over it for forever until Hell itself freezes over.
Hey and don’t forget that:
experts warn these climate-induced disruptions will only get worse
Yawn
I could write two or three pieces a day of made-up dross like this, probably at the pub too. Is the pay good?
“I could write two or three pieces a day of made-up dross like this”
You need to have the proper approach. Write a very simple computer program (*not AI*), loaded up with all the buzzwords and catch-phrases.
Now, all you do is supply the topic, and your program fleshes it out with all the made-up dross. Fast and efficient, you should be able to produce 10-20 per hour, even faster than the New York Times can publish garbage.
Make a list of topics:
Arctic ice dissapears
Species extinction
The poor Poley Bears
Coral reefs
Ocean acidification
Tipping Points
and on, and on, and on.
Use the list to drive the dross generator program.
KEWL!
(what a horrible misuse of technology).
Respectfully, I’d rather go down the pub with my mates and have a laugh at these twerps over a beer or three.
When I was teaching at UCLA in the 70’s through the 90’s the joke was that an “expert” was someone 50 miles from home with a box of slides (now probably powerpoint.
+10
Everything has been worse than we thought, impending doom for ~ 30 years now.
Honestly, if Alfred Hitchcock had tried to sustain a suspenseful plot for this long, we’d all now be asking –
Alfred who?
Let me guess. All this modeling is based on RCP 8.5 and the assumption we won’t do anything to mitigate the impact of sea level rise.
Nothing to mitigate, as there is no sea level rise to speak of… There may be land level rise and fall, here and there, but it has no relationship to sea level.
I believe it was Thomas Sowell who remarked that economic decisions are all about trade-offs, not absolutes. I will augment that with a idiom from software development: every pattern can potentially become an anti-pattern when requirements change. Well, it appears that just-in-time (JIT) was a good trade-off but when the pandemic came through, the good trade-off ended up being an “anti-pattern”.
I imagine if and when nation economies settle down again– assuming Not Our Lord and Not Our Savior Klaus “Anal Swab” Schwab doesn’t destroy the world first– JIT will once again be a good trade-off.
Very simple really.
Deaths from natural disasters at all time low.
Re insurance rates around globe flat or falling, natural disaster risk is not changing.
The risks related to “just in time management” have now to be adjusted, all the chat about buy local is rubbish designed to build on xenophobia and general inward looking principles.
Buying from say China should only be done if the supply chain risks are covered by the cost savings, we now have a new set of variables for that calculation, we need to focus on the stupidity of the claim that AGW is impacting the supply chain. It is not!
Nor did the “pandemic” impact the “supply chain”. The virus itself caused an increased death rate among the least productive members of society, whom we mourn. The unnecessary and political totalitarian response to the virus upset the entire economic structure of Western society, the results of which we are currently witnessing.
Yes, it’s the pandemic policy response that caused shortage, same as its climate change policy that is causing negative effects.
Well there were:
CoVid factory and worker shutdowns.
Big shortage in shipping containers , all having left China laden with N9.5 masks, ventilators, etc.
The Texas freeze caused plastics shortages and specialty chemical shortages.
Specialty chemicals shortages caused electronic chip shortages.
Electronic chip shortages affected auto production.
Huge drop in air travel contributed to late deliveries in other “Just-In-Time” factory inventories.
So it isn’t totally fair to blame it on JIT….Benjamin Franklin “For want of a nail….”
Deliveries are extremely fluid right now, the companies I deal with guarantee nothing these days.
All about government action, Covid response is only part of it.
Transformer deliveries have doubled because of EV mandates, steel makers have switched much production to the grades EVs use instead of transformers.
So if a major hurricane hammers the American grid somewhere and destroys a bunch of transformers be prepared for 2+ years delivery
…increases in sea level of an estimated 2 to 6 feet — and perhaps more — by 2100.
__________________________________________________________
78 years from now, that’s perhaps as much as 5 to 15 times the rate of sea level rise for the last 78 years. Where do people come up with this bullshit?
No mention of consignment stock? Inventory that is in the retailer’s [or fabricator’s] possession but is still legally owned by the supplier? Maybe it makes the situation worse. The advent of accounting software, and ease of ordering over the internet rather than by post or phone reduced the problem of unused inventory, and heralded “just in time” supply which sometimes manifested as “too damn late”. Industrial clients of mine operate on consignment stock, eg the steel fabricator does not own the huge roll of Colorbond sheeting until he starts to use it.The once empty warehouse has got more in it, but that is no indication of an intensification of use. I think Bunnings Hardware [Oz and NZ] runs the same way.
Ask a tax lawyer :-). But I’m guessing so long as the stock has not been converted to product, someone carries the baby in tax terms.
I believe its called ad valorem taxes. Similar to property taxes. They are assessed on the capital value of the property.
But, in economic terms, the cost of inventory depends on the cost of money and the rate of inflation. Under today’s conditions, with ZIRP and rising inflation, buying supply with cheap borrowed money today to sell at higher prices months from now makes sense.
I love the embedded jokes in alarmist drivel:
“…supply infrastructure will be threatened by increases in sea level of an estimated 2 to 6 feet — and perhaps more — by 2100… But to most port managers, the threat still feels remote.”
Sorry, but a computer projected sea level rise in 80 years seems pretty remote to me.
I think because port managers work at the “port” and they see there has been no noticeable sea level rise even if they’ve been at their job for 30 years.
Hard to convince someone there is a problem when they are right there
No it isn’t.
Good analysis, Eric. Holding inventory during times of economic uncertainty is poor risk management as money has gone out the door (inventory purchase) and it is unknown and uncertain when money (customers) comes in the door. The idiots behind Biden pushed so hard to the left that there wasn’t any resiliency in the system when Putin invaded Ukraine.
Looks like a typical “very-scary” paper from the phony climate alarmists of academia.
“Blah blah blah… be very frightened…”
If all these false-alarm scam artists suddenly retired, the relative intelligence of academia would double or triple overnight!
I published in 2002 that global temperature was driven primarily by solar variation at the century-scale and global cooling would start circa 2020-2030. I refined that prediction in 2013 to correctly predict that cooling would start circa 2020. It is now certain that catastrophic global warming (“CAGW”) was a false crisis, a scam, since atmospheric CO2 continues to increase in a now-COOLING world. The alleged CAGW “crisis” is a decades-old scam perpetrated by the far-left for political and financial gain – this scam has cost humanity many trillions of dollars and many millions of lives.
It is also now certain that the Covid-19 lockdowns and “vaccines” were deliberate sabotages of our societies and our economies.
I published on wattsup on 21March2020 the correct approach for Covid-119 – 6 months before world experts published the same recommendations in their Great Barrington Declaration. I wrote:
LET’S CONSIDER AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH:
Isolate people over sixty-five and those with poor immune systems and return to business-as-usual for people under sixty-five.
This will allow “herd immunity” to develop much sooner and older people will thus be more protected AND THE ECONOMY WON’T CRASH.
For the record – I emailed the Alberta government , other politicians and Trudeau’s “mostly-bought” media on 8January2021:
SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS RE COVID-19
There is no real Covid-19 pandemic. Covid-19 was only dangerous to the very elderly and infirm, and is similar in average mortality to other seasonal flu’s of recent decades.
The Covid-19 PCR test is not fit-for-purpose and provides many false positives.
Routine testing of asymptomatic people is a waste of resources and drives erroneous policies including lockdowns.
The Covid-19 lockdowns were never effective or justified. Harm done by the lockdowns exceeds by 10 to 100 times the harm from Covid-19. End all lockdowns now and do not lockdown again.
Simple, inexpensive treatments are known to save lives – Vitamin D, Ivermectin etc. Why are these treatments not being widely recommended and implemented by Alberta authorities?
The increase in deaths of the elderly in Winter is a well-established seasonal phenomenon. “Excess Winter Deaths” in the four Winter months routinely average about 100,000 per year in the USA and about 10,000 per year in Canada, as described on our 2015 Summary of Excess Winter Mortality that includes the landmark Lancet study. …
The Covid-19 vaccine developments were rushed and are not proven safe or effective and should NOT be taken, especially by the low-risk population – those under-65 or recovered from Covid-19. The two experimental Covid-19 vaccines that contain mRNA (Pfizer and Moderna) are especially risky – due to unknown future side-effects, the risk-to-reward is far too high for the low-risk group.
In conclusion, good people, you have been scammed by the far-left for decades. and the weak-minded majority have been panicked and manipulated by false scares for most of your existence. My advice to you: Grow up and start thinking for yourselves – stop being idiot sheep and try being rational human beings – you will enjoy the improvement in your lives.
🙂
‘Extreme Weather”: Everybody talks about it, but nobody can provide any evidence of it….
Patience, patience…
Global cooling, which is happening now, will bring more wilder weather.
Wilder weather correlates much more with cooling than with warming.
The sad thing isn’t that some scientists would publish this lunacy, but that millions of leftwing economic illiterates would swallow it all, hook, line and sinker. Those millions are sitting there all primed to believe the next fantasy because they live and salivate for problems that government can solve.
They are the same ones who believe Biden when he says Putin caused the current US inflation, even though on an annualized basis inflation had tripled in the spring of 2021.
AGW has triggered some incredible imagination in our species.
“economic illiterates”
I suggest “innumerate – marked by an ignorance of mathematics and the scientific approach“.
Most people, including most academics (and all who believe in the catastrophic global warming “CAGW” scam) cannot do numbers and do not understand the scientific method.
If they were intellectually honest, they would say “I don’t understand it so I have no opinion”.
There they go again, trying to blame things on the “weather is worse, and will get worser” myth. Tax laws regarding inventory appear to be partly to blame. Inventory represents a significant investment, in addition to warehousing costs. Perhaps the investment should be able to be expensed, similarly to purchasing new equipment. Instead of punishing businesses tax-wise for building and holding inventory, they could be at least not penalized for it.
This article can be summed up this way:
“Joe Biden’s and the democrat party’s policies are not responsible for supply problems, runaway inflation, and high fuel costs. Climate change is. (And white supremacy, and Donald Trump, and Russia.) Continue to vote for the democrat party, especially since there is an election coming up.”
There are also ad valorem taxes that must be paid every year on the value of everything owned by the company. That includes the value of everything in the warehouses.
If you allow me to start with a false premise and I can justify anything.
With no evidence presented that “climate related weather” disruptions are any worse than they ever had been, he the states “climate-related disruptions are bound to intensify” with no supporting reasons for that either. We are expected to just accept the “narrative”.
Just-in-time inventory has been a cost saving tool for companies both suppliers and sellers. It saves on bldg. costs, personnel costs, storage costs, size of store costs, interest costs, taxes of all kinds, -I probably missed other costs-but you get the gist. From day one the approach has frustrated customers. Items on sale or special priced are limited sometimes to the extreme ( ie. only 2 available per store); especially in the the grocery stores. Top mgmt. does not care; their own perks are the focus, as well as “unearned” over-profitability-by illegally squeezing the public(public officials do not really care as the money flows to their elections and bureaucrats are either clueless or in pockets unless beneficial to them). The stocholders want profits but for the most part wants reasonable returns and leave it up to mgmt. and boards to do that job. This is one case where I, a conservative, do not agree with the marketplace concerning “just-in-time ” logistics. This is a dangerous situation for our country of 340+ million people. It will take time and lots of $ to return to a “back-stock” economy; however we do not have to go back a 100% to what it was; but with new techniques and many other less expensive places like the south, and Great Plains where things are less expensive and willing to establish a better working America are eager to reconstruct The US. Along with that we have to have companies mfging. back in the US- maybe starting smaller until expansion can occur. The other important thing is that labor must be competitive as close as possible with the bring back of industries ( I also mean logic must be applied and margins less, that might help in allowing others to enter the market. Gov. regs need to be re-evaluated and lots thrown out. Bureaucrats must not be allowed to create the regs without either voter or elected officials (or Combination) review and approval – with absolute sun-setting when needed. Regs should be all up for repeal by voters and should probably be looked at at a state or regional. Regs. means all levels of gov. and that state and fed. have a process for negotiation and nothing implemented till the dust settles. There probably are other logival things to be done but I am tired.
Is there nothing that can’t be blamed on global warming? How ever did the the transport industry manage to handle bad weather in the past?
Climate change ALARMISM is disrupting global supply chains.
e.g. by Yale, etc.
Goofy government mandates and regulations are causing the supply crisis.
Stop the flow of fossil fuels to industry are now expanding the supply crisis.
Piss off truckers and their refusal to buckle to absurd mandates is now expanding the supply crisis.
All are manufactured crisis caused by government irrationality and incompetence.
The author Jacques Leslie falsely attributes supply crises as caused by climate change, yet lists nothing as evidence. Instead Jacques trots out the repeatedly falsified sea level rise predictions as causing future supply chain disruptions.
One wonders just how sea level rise can disrupt supplies being trucked or riding the rails? Nope, take a nonexistent problem and force fit supply problems into the mix.
What is simply astonishing is that Jacques completely fails to ask why most wharves and docks have existed where they are and as they are placed, for many years, without any problems caused by sea level rise.
Instead Jacques goes wandering about fantasy land dream rebuilding the old store and forward labor intensive supply transport, large stores of supplies at supply depots and stores instituting back room storage, again.
Where Jacques completely ignores all of the reasons those archaic processes were superseded. Matching demand to supply is far more efficient and cuts down on storehouses full of rats, flour & wool moths, flour beetles (AKA carpet beetles) and other vermin that destroy foods.
Large stores of food and goods quickly ossifies foods reducing their quality causes goods to be technically bypassed. It usually means that the goods in storage are not current with demand.
Another leftist elitist writer who claims to know more than experts and blames practically everything on the dreaded “climate change”.
He belongs on the rocket with the hairdressers and English majors.
How can the people from Yale come out with such gibberish? Sea level rise of two to six feet? Climate change caused shipping delays? Covid caused shipping delays? I call BS on all of it. Where is their evidence that sea level is rising at that rate? How can the climate interfere with shipping today but not five years ago? Covid didn’t cause any of the tragedies we have experienced since it’s arrival. Only governments could shut down whole countries. It is disgraceful for anyone to place the blame for any of misery anywhere but where it belongs. Politicians, administrators and bureaucrats.
Yale minus 360
And corporations which have abolished their logistics capacities, and put their imperative needs in the hands of independent operators, may find that otherwise-available supplies remain … well, unavailable.