“Deglobalization would be far more painful and disruptive than most of those who advocate for it seem to realize.” — Vaclav Smil
Every morning when you make coffee, you participate in a global supply chain that spans continents. The coffee beans were grown in Ethiopia or Colombia, processed and bagged there or in regional hubs, shipped across oceans on container vessels powered by heavy fuel oil, unloaded at a port, trucked to a warehouse, and delivered to a retailer - all before reaching your cup. And coffee is among the simpler goods in the global trading system.
Modern globalization is built on a foundation of extraordinarily cheap transportation, just-in-time supply chains, and the seamless movement of goods, people, capital, and information across national borders. Smil examines this system with both admiration for its remarkable achievements and concern for its deep fossil fuel dependence and fragility.
The modern global economy was made possible not by trade agreements or financial innovation, but by a box: the standardized shipping container, pioneered by Malcolm McLean in 1956.
Before containerization, loading and unloading ships required armies of dock workers and took days. Goods were packed in barrels, crates, and bags of many different sizes, and had to be individually handled. The cost and time of this “break bulk” shipping made long-distance trade expensive and slow.
The container changed everything:
The result: global merchandise trade grew from about $60 billion in 1950 to over $18 trillion by 2019. The world’s manufacturing geography was completely reorganized around cheap container shipping.
The global shipping fleet - approximately 90,000 vessels carrying 80-90% of international trade by volume - runs on heavy fuel oil (bunker fuel), the thick residue left after lighter petroleum products are refined away. It is among the most carbon-intensive and polluting liquid fuels in existence.
Global shipping produces approximately 2.5-3% of global CO₂ emissions - more than Germany’s total annual emissions. And unlike electricity generation, where renewables are rapidly advancing, there is no near-term replacement for heavy fuel oil in large container ships.
Proposed alternatives include:
None of these alternatives is close to replacing heavy fuel oil at scale for the global fleet.
Aviation accounts for approximately 2.5% of global CO₂ emissions - similar to shipping - but its climate impact is higher when high-altitude contrail effects are included. More importantly, aviation is growing rapidly as global middle classes expand their travel.
Unlike ground transportation, where battery-electric vehicles are technically feasible for passenger cars, large commercial aircraft cannot be electrified with current battery technology. A fully loaded Boeing 747 requires about 150,000 liters of jet fuel for a transatlantic flight. The equivalent battery mass would be roughly 30 times the aircraft’s maximum payload.
Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) made from biofuels or green hydrogen can theoretically replace jet fuel, but current production is a tiny fraction of global aviation demand, and the cost is roughly 3-5 times higher than conventional jet fuel.
The COVID-19 pandemic provided an extraordinary demonstration of global supply chain fragility. When demand patterns suddenly shifted and key manufacturing regions shut down, cascading shortages appeared across the global economy - from semiconductors to household goods to medical equipment.
The pandemic disruptions revealed several structural vulnerabilities:
Smil argues that calls for “deglobalization” or “reshoring” underestimate how much of modern living standards depends on the international division of labor and cheap transportation. Bringing production home would mean dramatically higher prices and lower variety for consumers.
Think about the goods you use daily - your phone, your clothes, your car, your appliances. How many countries were involved in producing them? What would those goods cost if they had to be manufactured entirely within your country? What would be genuinely lost if global supply chains were severely disrupted?