{"id":57408,"date":"2021-04-05T19:07:44","date_gmt":"2021-04-06T00:07:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=57408"},"modified":"2021-04-05T19:07:44","modified_gmt":"2021-04-06T00:07:44","slug":"wheres-dirk-gently-when-you-need-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=57408","title":{"rendered":"Where\u2019s Dirk Gently When You Need Him?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Where\u2019s Dirk Gently When You Need Him?<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Did you hear? A supersized cargo ship got wedged in the Suez Canal on March 23rd? If you didn\u2019t, you must do pretty well at avoiding the news, social media, and late night TV. But the short of it is: the\u00a0Ever Given<\/em>\u00a0somehow lost control (sandstorm strength winds have been blamed, as have human errors<\/a>) and crashed into the bank of the canal and lodged itself in.<\/p>\n

So what? Is this really news? Or just a sensational story to distract us from the pandemic, which, one might argue, is itself a distraction from the rapid unraveling of Earth\u2019s systems and thus human civilization? Perhaps. But then again perhaps not.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s why this incident is worth understanding:<\/p>\n

First, a ship single-bowedly disrupted global trade for six days.\u00a0It was finally freed on March 29th<\/a>. However, there is now a backlog of\u00a0over 300 ships<\/a>\u00a0while many ships rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope. The Suez Canal is part of a trade route that carries more than\u00a010 percent of global trade, including 7 percent of the world\u2019s oil<\/a>. Each day\u00a030 percent of the world\u2019s shipping container freight moves through the canal<\/a>. Thus it created backlogs in shipping (including some 200,000 live animals who could have overheated or run out of food<\/a>). It raised the\u00a0price of oil<\/a>\u00a0briefly. It created shortages in factories\u2014not just of parts but of shipping containers. And of course, it felt like a freak occurrence. Last year, of the\u00a018,840 ships<\/a>\u00a0that moved through the canal, there were no incidents.<\/p>\n

But the main reason is because this is an excellent metaphor on how fragile our entire globalized system has become.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Erik Assadourian, suez canal, supply chains, trade, shortages, globalisation, gaianism, shipping<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Where\u2019s Dirk Gently When You Need Him? Did you hear? A supersized cargo ship got wedged in the Suez Canal on March 23rd? If you didn\u2019t, you must do pretty well at avoiding the news, social media, and late night TV. But the short of it is: the\u00a0Ever Given\u00a0somehow lost control (sandstorm strength winds have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[16162,30755,4651,4856,4053,19169,3237,805],"class_list":["post-57408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-environment","tag-erik-assadourian","tag-gaianism","tag-globalisation","tag-shipping","tag-shortages","tag-suez-canal","tag-supply-chains","tag-trade"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57408\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}