It is impossible to compete when the playing field is not level. If state subsidies, energy production, co2 impact (not bullshit certificates and offsetting) could be equalized, then tariffs wouldn’t be so badly needed.
I too would like to have no VAT, import tax etc, and for everyone to get along nicely. The reality is, that we live in a highly competitive world where major powers are fighting for control over critical industries and raw resources.
So let them compete, isn’t that the idea? Countries and economies can compete with each other just like companies do. China can subsidize their EVs, America can subsidize its defense industry and corn, Europe can subsidize cheese and wine or whatever it is they make, each country specializes and offers the best product at the cheapest prices for consumers. Or make WTO have more ‘stick’ and less carrot so we can make countries stop subsidizing their own industries.
Either way, a return to trade tariffs and isolationism doesn’t sound great to me. It sounds like everything getting more expensive and less efficient (and therefore, more environmentally wasteful). It also sounds like countries being less dependent on each other, which means less reason to not go to war. We live in a very rare, peaceful time in human history. International trade (and massive technological/scientific breakthroughs) are a major part of that.
@makeasnek, this may be fine if and when all countries apply to the same rules, but this is not the case. China is heavily protecting its market, and they do so much more than the EU or the US. In China, foreign companies can’t even run a subsidiary in the country, they need a Chinese parther firm to create a joint venture. Recent Chinese ‘security laws’ even make simple market research almost impossible as it may be seen as ‘espionage’ by China, which made many consulting firms close their Chinese offices. And these are just two examples.
There are two factors at play here which have to meet in the middle: where is the most efficient place to produce the product and what is the most efficient way to ship the product? The answer to the first question is: wherever has local access to the resources (people, iron ore, etc) and energy required and has the scale required to efficiently build those products. The more cars your country produces, the bigger your factories are going to be, and the more efficiently you can make cars. The answer to the second is by sea. Always by sea. Boats are vastly more efficient than rail, truck, anything.
Container ships are reallyyyy big and reallyyy slow so they experience relatively low drag
Drag on a plane is high, they have two massive jet engines that try to push them through the air burning literal tons of fuel to do so. Obviously not the best if you want to be efficient.
Drag on a train scales with the weight of the train. A long heavy train will have more rolling resistance that sucks away energy from it. You can’t scale this down without going through and making your wheels harder so they deform less, but you already have steel wheels on steel rails so you’re not going to get much better.
Drag on a ship scales with the surface area of the ship that is touching the water, putting more weight on a ship causes a bit more of the surface to touch the water, but not very much. Moving an empty ship is going to use a surprisingly large amount of fuel because the drag is pretty similar, but your fuel consumption isn’t going to go up linearly with load like it would for a train.
Consider something like a Maersk Triple E, it carries over 18,000 20 foot containers. It can get them up to 23 knots (26 mph) but generally runs at 16 knots for efficiency and does this with just 80,000 HP of engine capacity. Those 18,000 containers would turn into a train 68 miles long! With 140,000 tons available for cargo, that’s just 0.57 HP/ton at full speed, and significantly less at the lower cruising speed(where the ship is built to be efficient). Trains will generally run around 1 HP/ton so this big ass cargo ship is using half to a third as much power to move its cargo.
The downside of this is that it takes 6-8 weeks for a ship to go from China to California, but the upside is that it did that with a crew of just 13 and just had a big diesel running in its happy spot the whole time.
