The number of abandoned oil tankers and other commercial ships has shot up

Reminds me of the Shipbreakers article from 3 years ago:

https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/the-toxic-tide-of-sh...

The toxic tide of ship breaking https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34905496 - 30 comments

Unforgettable.

so these ships are abandoned by the companies that own them, with the crew still on board? and then the crew is just stuck there with dwindling food supplies until somebody comes to rescue them?

in my head this seems like a problem that could be solved by getting on the radio to a nearby port and saying "hey, we've got a tanker carrying $50m worth of crude oil, you can have it if you let us dock", but obviously it can't be that simple if that's not happening. why not?

This problem is one of the reasons Maritime unions worldwide have been significant and strong players in national labour relations.

This kind of thing seems to be pretty core to the oil industry business model. In the US when they don't want to deal with an oil well anymore they have whatever fake shell company owns it declare bankruptcy and then they don't have to deal with cleaning it up (https://www.propublica.org/article/oil-orphan-wells-cleanup-...).

This is another one of those things that, having put no thought into it as something that has sat in the background of life since childhood, I had figured was better organised/protected against malicious, negligent and/or fraudulent behaviour.

The world is far more of a chaotic jungle than the facade makes it appear. There is yet much opportunity for mischief for those who dare and have the resources and lack of moral compass.

If we actually taxed fossil fuel producers what it took to offset the negative externalities offloaded to the public, we'd be 100% on renewables long ago.

[dead]

Before I read, I’m going to guess some combination of shady business bullshit and global instability.

reads

Yup.