Europe’s most important inland trading waterway, the Rhine River, dries up

pave it with bitumen, then the trucks can use it, business as usual.

Quick explainer, because “25 cm” gets misread in every one of these threads: that’s the **Kaub gauge reading**, not how deep the river is. The Kaub gauge is a reference point , and the actual shipping channgel there is roughly 2m deeper. So the river hasn’t turned into a puddle. The real problem is that barges have to sail with a fraction of their normal load to avoid running aground. The captain in the article says he’s carrying over 80% less.

That’s why this hurts so much economically. A single Rhine barge carries about 3,000 t, and a truck carries about 25t. You can’t replace that with trucks or rail on short notice (or sustainably), so freight rates spike, and chemical plants and steel mills along the river start cutting production. We saw exactly this in 2018 and 2022.

What worries me more is the longer trend. The Rhine’s later summer flow depends a lot on Alpine snow and glacier melt, and that buffer keeps shrinking. There’s already a project to deepen the Middle Rhine bottleneck by about 20 cm, but it’s been delayed for years. Deepening the channel doesn’t help much if less water keeps coming down the river. Rotterdam, BASF and half of Germany’s industrial base depend on this river being boring. Its’s less boring every few years.

On the good side: Maybe we’ll finally see the Rheingold popping up somewhere!

But we shouldn’t let anyone make a ring out of it…

Thank goodness they still have their V8’s, unrestricted autobahns, and filthy coal power plants to enjoy.

Parrelell it with a railway

just throw in some air conditioners bro, crisis solved