Shipping Costs Start to Crimp Globalization

This article on expensive oil's affect on global trade tells the story of profligate waste and chasing pennies. A great lesson in externalized costs. As hard as it is now, the run-up in oil prices will be seen, in say a decade, as the best thing that could have happened, much as the oil crises of the 1970s are considered, among many political economists, as crucially important in modernizing the US economy and weaning us, slightly, from oil addictio:

Shipping Costs Start to Crimp Globalization - NYTimes.com: "Soaring transportation costs also have an impact on food, from bananas to salmon. Higher shipping rates could eventually transform some items now found in the typical middle-class pantry into luxuries and further promote the so-called local food movement popular in many American and European cities."