The Real Story on the Environmental Behavior of Transportation and Logistics

Executive Summary

• Due to the censored nature of the coverage of transportation and logistics, a false impression has been given of the behavior of this industry regarding the environment.

Introduction

While as with all industries, the transportation and logistics industry poses as one thing, the reality of transportation and logistics is that it is very is or has been done outside of route planning to make things more environmental in the past several decades, and in most cases the motive of profit maximation at all costs has caused the industry to make itself less environmental and to increase pollution.

See Our References

Our references for this and other related articles can be found at this link.

The Environmental Horror Show of Ocean Shipping

Companies like Apple proved to the world that even if you have a high margin item, you can still produce your items in a Chinese subcontractor without any discernible labor or environmental rights. What is undiscussed by supply chain authors, who are entirely compliant to corporations and would never dare to critique them on moral grounds, is that in addition to manufacturing products for consumption on first world countries using labor practices from third world countries, not only are Apple and the rest failing ethically and degrading global working conditions, but international manufacturing is extremely bad for the environment. Shipping companies are flagged exclusively out of weak and corrupt counties like Liberia and Panama that allow the shipping company to do anything it wants. This means poor working conditions on the vessels and outside of when the pull into the ports (which do have environmental regulations) precisely zero fuel or pollution or waste regulation (just as with the cruise industry).

Once outside of the port, the ships switch to the dirtiest possible fuel, called bunker fuel. It can be considered a waste product of oil refining, as explained in the following quotation.

The maritime sector has functioned for decades as a vast waste disposal system for the oil industry. As refineries became more sophisticated, producing higher quality petrol for cars, for example, the worst bits of the barrel ended up in the engines of ships. Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Exhaust gases transformed into toxic particles that pollute coastal regions. The pollutants drift inland beyond busy shipping routes, causing major respiratory illnesses and other health hazards as well as polluting lakes and streams and causing crop damage, especially in south-east Asia, say climate activists.

A 2018 study led by James Corbett found that ship pollution causes about 14m cases of childhood asthma and 400,000 premature deaths a year — from lung cancer to cardiovascular disease. That is more than 1,000 deaths a day, although other estimates are lower. The research found that the use of lower sulphur fuels could cut by more than a third the number of deaths attributed to shipping.

Mr Corbett has calculated that 200 of the largest ships produce as much sulphur as all the world’s cars. – Financial Times

It does not need to be this way but flagged under a flag of convenience, no capable nation can do anything to regulate these ships once out at sea. Industry has been undermining even the attempts to add scrubbers to the ship’s emissions as is covered in the following quotation.

Cruise and cargo ships around the world are cleaning up their dirty smokestacks, installing systems that prevent harmful pollutants in their exhaust from escaping into the air. Yet much of that pollution is winding up in the sea instead. And so a solution meant to reduce smog, experts say, is leaving a potentially toxic trail in its wake.

Thousands of ships use exhaust cleaning systems, or “scrubbers,” compared with hundreds of ships just a few years ago, as companies face rising pressure to tamp down on their pollution. International regulators now require vessels to burn low-sulfur fuels at sea, while local authorities are cracking down on emissions close to shore. Scrubbers offer a middle ground, allowing ship operators to keep burning sludgy, sulfur-laden “bunker fuel” and still comply with air quality rules.

The problem is that those ships are expected to dump at least 10 billion metric tons of what’s known as wash water — the contaminated byproduct — into seas around the world every year, according to a first-of-its-kind study from the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit research group. – Grist

Zero Focus on Reducing the Need for Shipping

International shipping that goes along with globalized manufacturing means that products that used to be made closer to where they are consumed, are now made nearly as far as possible from where they are consumed.

All of this means that manufactured products have a higher transportation pollution overhead than ever before. What is often discussed is the higher profits this allows, but what is not discussed is the increased pollution this causes. In reading many articles in supply chain websites, I have never once found this problematic issue explained. No no no….discussing such realities is a “real downer” and won’t increase your subscription or optimize your advertising revenues. No, it is much better to discuss how innovative this all is, as companies are unified in their disregard for what their behaviors are doing to the environment.

What Happens When China Manufactures Your Entire National Supply of a Product?

When the coronavirus hit, and so many companies were caught off guard and unable to acquire PPE, for the first time there were voices saying that outsourcing so much manufacturing to China was a bad idea. However, even this criticism was muted. Hospitals in the US, which charge exorbitant sums of money for their services, still are obsessed with purchasing their supplies from the absolute low cost bidder and buy from completely unsustainable sources, which of course is China. Hospitals that truly rape their customers in medical billing nevertheless will not support domestic manufacturing by paying a sustainable price for their medical supplies. This is a variation on the Apple example, which is that even when one’s margins are high, it has become normalized to crush suppliers down so that one can obtain one’s inputs unsustainably.

One industry specialist explained that Hospitals were obtaining their masks for one cent per mask.

Meanwhile, the US government did nothing to intervene and stop the sourcing of PPE from what are obviously unsustainable sources from China.

For whatever reason there is far more coverage of cruise ship pollution than shipping vessels, however, the ships both use the same type fo fuel. 

The amount of pollution caused by ocean shipping  (and cruise ships) is so high it is difficult to process. 

Finally, because China so restricts the ability of the US to sell to their market, many of the containers go back empty or filled with things like scrap metal. This means that the extraordinarily polluting two-way voyage across the sea is primarily about only the leg bringing manufactured items from China that are produced with virtually zero environmental or labor regulations.

The JIT and Lean Consultants Strike for Moving Freight to More Polluting Forms of Transportation

Starting in the 1980s, and continuing to the present day, JIT and Lean consultants proposed, without evidence that it would be highly beneficial and increase profits to move freight from trains to trucks. The problems with the pollution of trucks is explained in the following quotation.

The air pollution data confirm conventional wisdom that trucking is by far the most harmful mode of goods transport. Rail seems to be somewhat more harmful than maritime transport, but this is not clear-cut; variations in the methods used to estimate the factors may outweigh the differences among them.

Air pollution from railways is substantially lower than from trucks. Trains in North America tend to be powered by diesel-fired electric generators, which then use electric power to move the locomotive which pulls the rest of the train. In Europe most trains are electric only; it is therefore the structure of power generation which determines air pollution characteristics.  – OECD

The JIT and Lean consultants made this claim not bothering to provide evidence, as they did not have any to present, and instead personally attacked or critiqued anyone that asked for evidence or contradicted theri claims. Under this the concept of keeping pipeline inventories minimal, while increasing the cost of the freight used, the environment never factored into any of these decisions.

The Fantasy Land of Electric Trucks

While transportation and logistics have been constantly dropping their standards and behaviors, the media and investors have focused on the fantasy land of electric trucks.

The Tesla Truck Mirage

The Tesla commercial truck really is a testament to the low scientific knowledge of the population. Electric vehicles are not even an answer environmentally for passenger cars, and will never be much more than a small fraction of the automotive market (batteries are low in energy density — and the current electic car network is “piggybacking” off of a prebuilt electrical grid that would need to be greatly upgraded to supply a larger percentage of electric vehicles with power). (see more on this at the article)

However, for big rigs, lithium batteries are ludicrous. Big rigs are the worst possible applications for electric vehicles or for batteries as with a big rig truck the motive power must pull a lot of weight. Even large diesel engines require involved gearing to allow the engine to pull the payload. If you look at the various applications for electric vehicles, something like a golf cart would be the best. This is because they don’t have to drive very far, they have a light load, drive slowly (thus consuming less power) and stop and start a lot and they are quiet (perfect for a golf course where silence is golden). Big rig application is the exact opposite of this application, and therefore would be on the other side of the spectrum from a golf cart. These types of trucks don’t even use gasoline engines, because a gasoline engine does not have the lower range (to pull high weight) of a diesel, and gasoline engines cannot run for as many miles as a diesel engine.

Tesla promised the Tesla Truck years ago. And as with most Tesla announcements, Wall Street swooned, but these trucks have still yet to appear. 

A full critique of the Tesla Semi is explained of the following video.

A startup called Nikola (someone apparently was running short on originality when coming up with a company name) promoted their electric big rig, but then changed to saying their truck would be powered by hydrogen fuel cells, and that they had the ability to produce large quantities of liquid hydrogen. Nikola was exposed as a scam — however, you can still buy Nikola stock.

Not one of there articles I read on the Tesla truck or the Nikola truck discusses the reality of commercial trucking and how the industry’s standards have dropped through the floor since deregulation. Presumably, if a Tesla truck were to arrive, Somalians could cut a defecation hole through that truck as easily as a diesel truck. Perhaps this could be added as a feature to help sell the truck, and Tesla could provide the hole precut. A desperate Somalian truck driver defecating through the hole of his advance Tesla truck that has “zero emissions” would get trucking companies extremely excited! But of course, the truck would have to actually exist at some point. This scenario would combine leading-edge technology, with the labor standards of a third world nation — or what is generally referred to as the “Holy Grail” by corporate power.

Self Driving Trucks?

Of course not only did Tesla envision taking the trucking industry by storm with their vaporware electric truck, but Elon wants to get rid of the Somalian driver entirely. By this time, according to Musk, all Teslas were going to be earning money for their owners working as robot taxis when their owners were not driving them. However, that never seemed to come to pass.

Now Elon’s vision of driverless big rigs is also postponed, because a.) the truck may never be brought out, and b.) the driverless technology does not appear to be progressing as anticipated.

On Air Transport

Air transport is extremely energy intensive. This is explained in the following quotation.

Flights are energy-intensive and depend on fossil fuels. Subsidies from fuel taxes give the airline industry an unfair advantage over other transportation modes. Consumers don’t see the true environmental costs of their air travel because low flight prices don’t reflect their environmental impact. Emissions from flights stay in the atmosphere and will warm it for several centuries. Because aircraft emissions are released high in the atmosphere, they have a potent climate impact, triggering chemical reactions and atmospheric effects that heat the planet. – David Suzuki

Conclusion

Freight movement accounts for 16 percent of emissions, according to the Environmental Defense Fund.

Because of specific choices made by the industry to put the environmental concerns at the bottom of their list of priorities. And this does not include the great increase in consumption due to population increase and more products purchased per person globally.

Transportation is one of the most difficult areas of energy use to make green, because the fuel must be energy dense. As an example, without oil, there would not be aviation, because a heavy fuel, like coal and the necessary engine would make the airplane too heavy to fly.

Freight movement requires more energy density in its fuel than say a passenger car, because the weight and the miles driven is much higher. The only truly green form of transportation I am aware of is a nuclear submarine, and those only exist because some militaries can afford them, and you have not have emissions to stay below the surface for long periods.

One of the very few positive aspects for the environment has been sophisticated routing, which has saved miles driven. Routing also allows dynamic changes to be performed while out on a route, which means opportunities to pick up and drop off are improved. The development of online freight marketplaces has meant that trucks can find loads more easily, leading to fewer empty miles. However, even with the arrival of these technologies. there are still a lot of empty miles driven, as is explained in the following quotation.

The Environmental Defense Fund says that freight truck movement is responsible for seven percent of all corporate greenhouse gas emissions. The terrestrial shipping industry is remarkably inefficient thanks to centralization and a lack of transparency, so trucks drive billions of miles every year empty or partially full. Capturing even half of current unused capacity could reduce carbon emissions by as much as 100 million tons per year. – Medium

As with car engines, truck engines have become less polluting, however, these changes have only marginally anything to do with an environmental focus of the transportation and logistics industry, but instead have to do with engine technology progress generally and government emission standards — which this industry has primarily fought against. However, the improvements in technology have been miraculous, as expressed by the following quotation.

And in many ways that reduction has to do with industry-wide shifts toward cleaner machines. Roeth says it would take 70 trucks built today to replicate the emissions from just one truck built in 2002. – PSMag

And this has included changes to improve fuel economy, which the industry has supported, but only because of reasons of cost savings.

Costs like these breed innovation quick. Over the years, truck aerodynamics have been heavily tweaked to increase fuel economy. When you’re running long hauls, a simple adjustment to, say, side mirrors or bumpers can lead to thousands in savings over a vehicle’s lifespan. Similarly, little adjustments to tire technology, to skirts (devices affixed to the underside of a trailer to decrease wind resistance), to transmissions or engine programming, all can lead to significant payoffs down the line. When truck manufacturers announce their new lines each year, you best believe they’re highlighting the fuel-reducing features. – PSMag

Major climate problems are now here and will be getting much worse in the future. Transportation and logistics have been bringing this day to us faster due to their disregard for the environment. And for some reason, the industry tends to get a pass. It is in fact very rare to even hear of the pollution implications of the commercial freight industry. However, while we have emission regulations on passenger cars, ocean vessels are virtually unregulated and do not face scrutiny. If a single individual were to remove the pollution control on their cars, it would be considered unethical. However, if a container ship runs bunker fuel, or if a company knowing moves freight from a low polluting form of transportation to a higher one, or if freight is moved by airplane (a highly inefficient and energy consumptive form of transportation) when it could have been moved by land or disregards pollution concerns in scouring the globe for where to produce with the most compliant labor, nothing is said. This is part of a long-range program by corporations to have individuals to be held accountable for their actions and to be “part of the solution” while corporations run around doing whatever they like. One might say that much work has been done to instill the idea that corporations cannot expect to act ethically — all while corporate attorneys continually promote the idea that corporations are “people.” They are strange people indeed — they have only rights, no responsibilities, and are only expected to maximize profits.

Secondly, something else I realized while writing this article is that in all the conversations I have ever had with those that either worked in companies that ship product or in logistics companies, I never once ran into a person that either understood the outcomes of transportation on the ecology or seemed to care. The topic literally either does not come up at all in these companies, or it comes up in some superficial and erroneous and pollyanish way, such as a discussion around Tesla’s mystery truck. This means that in addition to the topic not being a focus, these companies lack the understanding of ecology to make positive changes.

Compliant PR Coverage on the Industry From Trade Publications

You also won’t find out about the environmental damage and declining standards in logistics and transportation at supply chain websites.

Transportation and logistics websites are about promoting the industry — they do not concern themselves and are vehemently opposed to covering the industry in a way that is anything but promotional. Their impact on environmental issues is primarily negative as they serve to gaslight readers at the behest of industry as to how the industry is doing environmentally.

A review of some of the articles on environmental issues could have been written by the PR departments of the companies profiled themselves. Here are a few examples of quotes from some of these articles in Logistics Management.

With ocean carriers raising the bar on environmental sustainability, will 2013 finally be the year for a greener and more vibrant U.S. port scenario?

Keeping pace with the greener, slow-steaming strategies employed by vessel operators, sustainable growth seems to be a consistent pattern.

And this one..

“The Port of Los Angeles is looking forward to being part of these international standards and setting the stage for North American ports to follow suit and reward operators for greening their fleets,” said Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Geraldine Knatz, Ph.D. and IAPH president. “As participation grows, the benefits increase for carriers and communities.”

There is no checking of the validity of the statements from these industry sources, just authors paid to repeat whatever claims are made by the industry.

Instead of the environmental realities discussed in the article you are currently reading, you will hear about how some company is providing great on time service, or is using AI to do something fantastic. If only AI could replace bunker fuel with something less polluting, or stop freight from being migrated from lower polluting forms of transportation to higher polluting forms. However, AI cannot do this. Only regulation can make companies behave in a way that is not entirely antisocial and has a concern for the public interest.

A large percentage of global emissions and greenhouse gasses come from transportation. And shippers and logistics companies have not even attempted to improve anything related to commercial transportation pollution or sustainable practices. And nothing will be improved because private companies fundamentally do not care. Corporations have done an excellent job of co-opting the environmental movement. We have gotten used to accepting false environmental claims of for profit companies. When even oil companies greenwash themselves, you know there is something wrong. The answer to getting companies to do things in the public interest is regulation, not trusting them to do so. However, you can’t regulate companies if the companies themselves control the political process.

*Note: It may strike readers that there is an inconsistency in stating on one hand that ocean vessels are the most energy efficient form of transportation (when going over the trucking example), while then critiquing the ocean vessels for using bunker fuel. This may at first appear inconsistent, but it is not. This is because shipping companies do not have to use bunker fuel. They use it because it is the cheapest fuel, and without regulation, ocean shipping companies drive down their costs regardless of the impacts on the environment. Secondly, in the example of the ocean shipping to China, these are voyages that were not necessary when the manufacturing was within the countries of consumption. Therefore, it is of course less polluting when the voyage is not made at all, even if that form of transportation energy efficient.

Interesting Quote on Power Usage of Ocean Vessels

The US Environmental Protection Agency (1985) has estimated more detailed factors for calculating vehicle emissions per unit of fuel consumed. They separate vessels into several categories; commercial steamships, diesel-powered vessels, and motorships used on inland waterways, as well as auxiliary generators used to provide energy while in port. The US EPA emission factors are based on several key assumptions. One is that ocean-going vessels consume 80 per cent of the fuel used underway at slow speeds and the other 20 per cent moving at full power. Another is that diesel vessels consume 20 per cent of their fuel running auxiliary generators while at port and the remainder while underway. A third is that the generators used to provide auxiliary power operate at 50 per cent of their rated capacity on average; this is a sensitive assumption, since electric generators are much more polluting when running below rated capacity than when running at it. – OECD

Interesting Quote on Air Transport Pollution

Aircraft emissions during high-altitude flight are a significant source of greenhouse gases, although both their quantity and their exact impact are still matters of considerable scientific debate (Vedantham and Oppenheimer 1994, pp. 4-13; Crayston, personal communication). Global aviation accounts for more than two per cent of total anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions.