- Shipping generates roughly the same quantity of greenhouse gas as Germany and, if it were accounted for as a nation, would rank as the world's sixth biggest emitter.
Like aviation, it had been excluded from climate negotiations because it is an international activity while both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement involved national pledges to reduce greenhouse gases.
When I think about things like this, I can kind of understand why people are attracted to the idea of "smaller is better." People who believe in small government, Bill McKibben's views on regional projects, etc. With things like shipbuilding, developing power stations, exploration projects, etc., theres often so much money and planning involved that things literally take decades to develop, which makes it very difficult to suddenly change course. Contracts, loans, hiring and training personnel, and so on all factor into the decision making process. The bigger a project, the more sunk costs seem less like a fallacy and more like a justification for embracing a project's inertia.
Might be better than a good start. Some of those ships produce more pollution than all the cars in California. They use heavy fuel oil that nobody else can use (although that started to change in 2014 from that article). HFO is terrible shit from my experience. The interesting thing from that article is that they are pushing for LNG. You probably know this but a big source of the terrible LA basin pollution has always been shipping. All those container ships off Long Beach dumping soot and untreated smoke into the air. It's too early but I remember seeing that they now force the ships to use ground power to turn off the generators etc onboard which has helped with the soot and sulphur. So there is a bit of movement, small that it is. Next up will (should) be the concrete industry.
Within the logistics fraternity all the focus is on shifting more onto water from air, road and rail. eCO2 per Tonne-km is roughly 1% of airfreight, 10% road and 50% of rail. I think this fact has allowed the Sea-freight community to keep off the hook until now. So great to see the realization that complacency of being the most efficient mode of transport should not get in the way of radical improvement. There are some appallingly old and inefficient shipping stock on the seas and the economics of the industry sometimes create odd conditions where lanes can be underutilized despite there being cargo available at a price above marginal cost. That being said if it was my choice to invest a tonne of CO2 anywhere it would be on shipping. Compared to Air transport which either moves only the wealthy or the goods and services that the wealthy consume, Sea freight impacts the lives and well being of almost everyone on the planet. So the question is... what the hell are we going to do about aviation?
Interestingly, the jets that are coming down the pike fly higher and faster, and will produce vapour trails and contrails in the Stratosphere. After 9/11 they got a chance to do some data gathering and noticed that daytime temps are lower in areas with contrails, but it also does not cool down as much at night. So, if we run a bunch of aircraft to make clouds to reflect sunlight, what exactly will that do? One of the potential solutions talked about a while back was to change global airline flight paths to go over the North Pole area to increase upper level clouds and block sunlight from melting the polar caps. But if those same clouds trap heat, could it also be a negative. The problem of aviation is that the margins are tiny and any increase of operating expenses will cause a massive lobbying push for handouts.
Tangently related article, all from this single quote . . .Textile production worldwide creates more than a billion tons of CO2 per year. That's more than all international flights and shipping combined. On top of this comes the pollution of the seas by microplastics from textile fibers and the use of poisonous chemicals.