It's fall seeding time so I've not been attentive here. Too bad, since there is lots going on and I could blather at length if I had time to craft posts, a slow and painful thing for me since I am a horny handed son of toil rather than a soft handed keyboard adept with a large and fluid vocabulary.

This subject deserves attention when there is time.

. . . while higher fuel prices will reshape trade patterns and probably boat designs, neither global trade patterns nor transportation costs will return to those of the 1960s or 1970s. This is due to huge improvements in logistics that have radically dropped the labour cost for shipping goods long distances, and this has also decreased fuel costs.

The rapid expansion of skills in logistics is a hidden environmental efficiency of the modern world economy - in that it allows things to be moved around for less cost than earlier in history. However as occurs with most increases in efficiency, modern society undoes the environmental advantages of efficiency by using the cost saving to simply move more stuff for the same amount of money.

This isn't an undoing, it is an investment in the next round of improvements. It's dynamic rather than static. Stasis thinking is the stuck-on-stupid blind spot of environmentalists. Curiously, but nor surprisingly, as conservatives seek to green wash themselves this is the part of environmentalism they find most congenial to their go slow, risk averse temperaments.