(bright music) - [Michael] There's energy in the fuel to move the boats.

Sometimes the boats are carrying energy.

One way or another.

Then you have energy for the operator like there are davits and things like that.

Are those all electrically operated?

- [Speaker] Yes.

- And that electricity you get from the local utility, and they're pushing for cleaner electricity as time goes on.

- Correct.

Yeah.

- We can feel the energy in this boat right now, as it gets faster.

- This is a great one.

- [Michael] Yeah.

Don't lose your briefcase.

I mean these are all coming from different locations around the world.

(upbeat music) - Over the last 10 years, we've seen changes not only in the American consumer's buying habits, but how we get product to market.

- When you move the goods from around the world, you have to be efficient with the way that you move those goods, and you optimize those movements.

- We have giant container ships, which are an extremely efficient and inexpensive per object moved way of moving things.

You know, Asia to Europe, Asia to the United States.

- Those containers include things like cars, and microchips, and plastic toys, and books, and printed goods, and clothes.

These container ships are just massive, with hundreds of containers stacked up.

It's just hard to imagine a scale, and each container contains like a household's worth of stuff.

So there's just a lot of things that are moving through that port, which is a sign of how dependent we are in the United States on goods manufactured from around the world.

- If energy were very, very high cost in the supply chain, it would be a whole different world.

What we've done with so-called globalization is focused too much on the economic efficiency during normal operations, versus the lack of resilience when something goes wrong.

- [Narrator] This is Power Trip: The Story of Energy.