Hello again, good VGC folk. Some of you might know about the book called "How to Avoid Huge Ships" by captain John W. Trimmer who got a bunch of hilarious meme reviews on Amazon and so. Well, this is about it. Sort of.

Now, let's imagine for a second Elon Musk realizes his grand dream, stop running his company on a loss for once and end up swapping every oil-based car in the world for an electric equivalent. The world is saved, right? No more global warming will drown Disneyworld and kill of exhaustion those poor polar bears.

Well, wrong.

Automobiles, put together, are only a tiny part of transportation and energy use nowadays: you have airplanes, trucks, ships and trains as well. Except for maybe trucks, all of those are colossal on size and energy demand. For instance, an Boeing 747 cruising will burn about a gallon of fuel a second. Much harder to swap an oil tank for batteries when your power requirements are 100 times higher than for cars!

But I don't want to focus on airplanes here, but shipping, as the thread title might indicate. Not only ships burn low grade cheap fuel full of cancer and asthma causing pollutants, such as sulphur oxides, but they do so on a very, very inefficient fashion. And they aren't even fast as airplanes to compensate. Indeed, the ~15 largest cargo vessels, alone, emit more of those polutants over a year than the combined car fleet of the entire world (close to 800 million vehicles nowadays).

Now, you might argue those ships transport a fuckton of containers - over 500,000 square meters of cargo for the largest ones, to be precise - so the comparison isn't exactly fair. However, the combined gross tonnage of the ~15 largest ships put together, and divided by the combined car fleet in the world, would equal a tiny volume for every car - no larger than a suitcase indeed. And I doubt carrying a packed suitcase over a year on your vehicle would double its emissions during this period, so yeah.

TL, DR: tourism is bad for nature and your health, and importing PlayStations from China even more so. Buy locally and sell locally whenever you can, and travel on light vehicles.

And no, being a vegan and importing soy and lenses, or exotic vegetables, from the other side of the world, isn't going to save the planet because there's one less cow farting methane out there.

PS. the energy used on transportation is also much larger than the entire consumption of electric energy, if I'm not mistaken, so the same thinking also applies for those too focused only on the environmental damage caused by fossil fuel power plants.

You'll be happy to know I don't travel.

It's crazy that I clicked on this thread and a video automatically played for a new Battlefield game and it shows a huge Aircraft Carrier.

Originally read the title as "Avoid huge shipping costs" and my response was "No shit".

Anyway, I won't have a problem with this. Thanks for the warning.

Well yeah. Cruises are the worst thing you could do to harm the planet.

That's actually a pretty old number. We're at around 1.3 billion right now.

Well, build better ships then.

Aren't all home consoles and handhelds imported from china because they are all manufactured at FoxConn & Co.? How to avoid this by buying a locally produced console (which would again have dozens (or even hundreds) of necessary components shipped around the world.

And why is importing a home console even more bad for nature than tourism? I'm pretty sure that a gamer spending his vacation at home playing video games has a much smaller carbon footprint than someone going on vacation that time.

P.S.: Also avoid huge shipping costs.

P.P.S.: Which you can by buying digital games instead of retail games. Digital game distribution is much better for the environment than producing Blu-rays/modules + game cases and ship them around the world.

Just to be clear, buying a video game from your local store or importing it from China is exactly the same thing from an environmental point of view. The game you buy locally was NOT made locally, it came from some factory halfway across the world just as the game you imported yourself from China. The same goes if you import a Playstation or if you buy it locally.

Why are you jumping between an airplane comparison and a "car fleet" comparison? Your car fleet is no option at all for transporting goods between continents... with a lot of water between them.

And you need a fleet of airplanes to transport the content of one container ship... it is also much less efficient and bad for the environment.