The shipping news: start moving freight by water again, and we'll use less oil, emit less carbon, cut highway traffic--and perhaps even save St. Louis.

• Author: Longman, Phillip

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Every four days, a 4,200-horsepower tugboat, having crossed the Gulf of Mexico from Brownsville, Texas, slips into the ship channel off Egmont Key at the mouth of Tampa Bay. The vessel pulls a single barge. On board are stacks of metal containers ranging in length from twenty to fifty-three feet. Few of the bathers along the beaches of nearby Fort De Soto Park are likely to take much notice of such a routine sight, much less associate it with a green-energy future. But there is a connection, and it will help protect places like the Gulf floor from the sort of drilling that now threatens the region with environmental catastrophe.

The tug and barge are operated by a privately held company called SeaBridge Freight. If you hire SeaBridge to move a container between northern Mexico and the southeastern United States, a truck will pick the container up, and a truck will deliver it to its final destination. But rather than use a truck to make the entire journey, the company will load your container onto a barge and ship it across the Gulf of Mexico. This water route saves 690 miles of driving, takes no longer than trucking door to door, and consumes much less oil.

According to SeaBridge's president and CEO, Henry P. "Hank" Hoffman, a SeaBridge barge on a recent sailing carried containers loaded with 420,000 metric tons of cargo of all descriptions, from chilled orange juice to automobiles and mechanical assemblies. Making the run from Brownsville to Tampa Bay consumed 9,000 gallons of diesel fuel. If trucks had made the move, Hoffman notes, they would have consumed more than 53,000 gallons of diesel fuel. Needless to say, such conservation does wonders for a reduction in oil use.

Waterways used to be the most important avenues of transport in the United States. Today, however, only 4.7 percent of our current freight (as measured in ton-miles) moves by water, most of it low-value, bulky materials such as grain and coal. Compare this to the European Union, in which 40 percent of all domestic freight (also measured in ton-miles) moves by coastal shipping and inland waterways.

Boosting that abysmal market share, as a handful of companies like SeaBridge are trying to do, would require no sacrifice from the average American, and it would provide dramatic economic and environmental benefits. Barges use just over a quarter as much diesel fuel as a semitruck in moving a ton of freight. If only 30 percent of the freight that currently goes by truck went by barge instead, it would result in a reduction in diesel fuel consumption of roughly 4.7 billion gallons. This is equivalent to conserving more than 6 percent of the total end-use energy consumed by U.S. households, including heating, cooling, and lighting. To put it another way, the energy savings would be equivalent to turning off every household appliance in the state of Texas. Yet no one would have to do so much as turn down the air conditioner, ride a bike, or even install a fluorescent bulb.

It gets better. A rebirth of domestic water transportation would roll back the nation's reliance on trucks, the fastest growing source of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. That's in addition to many incidental benefits, from boosting the Navy's sealift capacity to improving rescue efforts for disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the earthquake in Haiti. Moreover, by getting containers off trucks and onto a marine highway, it promises to make driving safer and faster for the rest of us, while also significantly reducing the need for highway repairs and new road construction.

The case for using our waterways begins with plain geography. Writing in 1783, George Washington observed that he was increasingly taking "a more contemplative and extensive view of the vast inland navigation of these United States," and that he "could not but be struck with the immense diffusion and importance of it." The United States is unique among nations in being blessed not only with three extensive coastlines and abundant natural harbors but also with 25,000 miles of navigable lakes and inland waterways, thanks both to what Washington and his generation called "Providence" and to the investments made by subsequent generations of Americans in locks, levies, and other improvements.

Today, it is impossible to account for why most U.S. cities sprang up where they did without considering the role played by access to navigable waters. By 1825, completion of the Erie Canal connected New York harbor to the Great Lakes...