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Comment by shakezula | Hacker News Reader

You can't "buy less stuff" when the things we're talking about are necessities, often times food and critical supplies like fuel. Container ships don't just ship you game consoles and televisions.

And even if you managed to reduce all private consumption to zero, commercial consumption probably makes up an order of magnitudes more than private does. It doesn't matter what YOU do, you can't change the scales that these ships operate.

The only thing that will fix this is government intervention and fines that make it less cost effective to abandon the ship than to deal with the consequences.

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You can't "buy less stuff" when the things we're talking about are necessities, often times food and critical supplies like fuel.

This isn't really an excuse in e.g. USA, which produces surpluses in both of these commodities.

Those surpluses are mostly exported, and besides that you're missing the forest for the trees. Individual action, even if completely efficient and pervasive, would not be enough to fix this problem.

That is a related but distinct point. Solidarity and collective action are required, but when we accomplish those we'll be able to just eat and burn what is produced domestically.

I would hazard an eyeball guess that the overwhelming majority of container ships headed for the U.S. are carrying non-essentials.

I disagree with your statement that "it doesn't matter what you do". It is all that matters, because what everyone else does is beyond my control, and only what I do is under my control.

Individual action and its spread through word-of-mouth is pretty much the only way anything changes in this world.

It doesn't matter what you do, because it's not a problem you, the consumer, created.

It's a set of misaligned incentives that create a hole where ships like these fit. No amount of your individual do-gooding will fix that incentive misalignment.

But you can "buy less stuff" in general. And that will reduce your impact.

Sure, but that has literally no impact on the incentives that created this problem in the first place. It's not related to volume or frequency, and if anything less frequent and smaller shipments might exacerbate this issue in the current system. Supply chains are counter-intuitive like that sometimes.

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