It may be cheap but those big ships sure us a lot of fuel.
The boat I'm working on at the moment has 3 Caterpillar diesel engines driving 3 electric generators. According to the engine specs average fuel consumption per engine is about 350-370 L/hr. The big 16 & 18 cylinder Cat engines use anywhere between 1300-1700 L/hr. And these are small engines :-) Shipping is still the most efficient way to bulk transport goods, but it uses a hell of a lot of fossil fuel. Dave S. On 4/28/06, Martin Trautmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 2006-04-28 16:34, Tim Øsleby wrote: > I don't have time for a large debate, I'm going away, but I just have to get > this off my chest: > > And who says we _have_ to transport our daily life goods around the globe? > IMO, doing that is plain stupidity. Buy local food slow food. I try to live > by that slogan, but it is near impossible. I'm always surprised how cheap it is. Apart from ships dedicated e.g. to south american orange juice (I don't know what they transport backwards), it's amazingly cheap to ship a full container of tea or other stuff around the world, when you spread these costs on the product itself. Transporting this futher on by truck may cost much more for the final miles. That's one of the reasons why transporting apples from the other side of the continent (including low farming and harvest costs) is much cheaper that the local fruits around. Not a good idea - but still a reasonable economic behavior. > This is because many of us don't care about what we do to Mother Earth. (I'm > not accusing any specific persons, please have that in mind). You should not go away now. Better to stay at home instead of driving around. The individual's motorized traffic is one of the major wastes of energy (together with heating in this county or cooling elswhere). > Sorry about this political outburst. Let me add a little friendly :-) Don't get me wrong ;-) Martin
