Global shipping vs. carbon emissions and air quality
Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2017 9:55 am
I brought this up once before, but I thought it would good to discuss in its own thread. Namely, people who are simultaneously in favor of globalism and air quality/carbon controls are engaging in a most spectacular brand of illogic. I propose that "buying American" i.e. local, which is what I already like to do when I food shop, is probably the best emissions reduction plan out there.
Large ships, including transport and cruise ships, burn No. 2 oil. This is the dirtiest and cheapest oil, essentially the sludge left over at the end of the refining process. It contains large amounts of contaminants such as sulfur and nickel that, when the oil is burned, is released into the atmosphere. No. 2 oil was recently banned for use as heating fuel in NYC, after a report that the 6,000 old apartment buildings (< 1% of the total) using it produced 90% of particulate pollution from residential sources in the city. This of course is on top of the carbon emissions that are required regardless of choice of fuel.
According to this article, the world's entire auto fleet is out-polluted by just 16 large ships - and there are 100,000 of them, mostly operating out of countries like Thailand and Panama to take advantage of cheap labor and minimal government regulation.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... world.html
Large ships, including transport and cruise ships, burn No. 2 oil. This is the dirtiest and cheapest oil, essentially the sludge left over at the end of the refining process. It contains large amounts of contaminants such as sulfur and nickel that, when the oil is burned, is released into the atmosphere. No. 2 oil was recently banned for use as heating fuel in NYC, after a report that the 6,000 old apartment buildings (< 1% of the total) using it produced 90% of particulate pollution from residential sources in the city. This of course is on top of the carbon emissions that are required regardless of choice of fuel.
According to this article, the world's entire auto fleet is out-polluted by just 16 large ships - and there are 100,000 of them, mostly operating out of countries like Thailand and Panama to take advantage of cheap labor and minimal government regulation.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... world.html
So we can't burn coal but we can enable trans-Pacific shipping in order to bring us our cheap crap? It is interesting that enthusiasm for reducing emissions and for globalism generally co-exist in the same mindset. Not even a question whether the shipping pollution is worth the one and only benefit of globalism: the ability to cut >90% of labor costs out of a product.Thanks to the IMO’s rules, the largest ships can each emit as much as 5,000 tons of sulphur in a year – the same as 50million typical cars, each emitting an average of 100 grams of sulphur a year.
With an estimated 800 million cars driving around the planet, that means 16 super-ships can emit as much sulphur as the world fleet of cars.
Smoke and sulphur are not the only threats from ships’ funnels. Every year they are also belching out almost one billion tons of carbon dioxide. Ships are as big a contributor to global warming as aircraft – but have had much less attention from environmentalists.