One Giant Cargo Ship Pollutes As Much As 50M Cars 595
thecarchik writes "One giant container ship pollutes the air as much as 50 million cars. Which means that just 15 of the huge ships emit as much as today's entire global 'car park' of roughly 750 million vehicles. Among the bad stuff: sulfur, soot, and other particulate matter that embeds itself in human lungs to cause a variety of cardiopulmonary illnesses. Since the mid-1970s, developed countries have imposed increasingly stringent regulations on auto emissions. In three decades, precise electronic engine controls, new high-pressure injectors, and sophisticated catalytic converters have cut emissions of nitrous oxides, carbon dioxides, and hydrocarbons by more than 98 percent. New regulations will further reduce these already minute limits. But ships today are where cars were in 1965: utterly uncontrolled, free to emit whatever they like." According to Wikipedia, 57 giant container ships (rated from 9,200 to 15,200 twenty-foot equivalent units) are plying the world's oceans.
What are they going to do about it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of those ships are not registered in the US or Europe or any 1st world country. They are registered in Panama, Aruba or wherever there are no taxes and no regulations. And you can't really stop them coming into your harbors without affecting the local or even global economy.
On the other hand, how much pollution would it generate to bring those products in on more smaller ships or on trucks through a series of tubes in the ocean.
Re:What are they going to do about it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Impose tariffs based on what kind of cargo ship the stuff came in on. That's what they can do about it.
Re:Could be a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Sailing ships don't require that: WOODEN ships do. Though ships of old were typically wooden, there is no requirement at all that a sailing vessel be made of wood (and modern sailing vessels typically aren't).
Don't confuse the proposal that we use sails more as a proposal that we go back to using Spanish Galeon's. You can merge the concept with a more modern approach as needed.
Am I missing something? (Score:2, Insightful)
Assumptions (Score:3, Insightful)
If you assume that the average vessel pollutes 1/10 as much as the largest, dirtiest container ship, ass TFA does, then you've made one hell of an assumption.
Not that it's not a problem, but - really - saying that 10 small coastal vessels equals one massive container ship undermines what sounded like a reasonable point and makes me question everything about their maths. And I'm generally in agreement with them!
Re:What are they going to do about it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Concentration (Score:3, Insightful)
Just like a volcano eruption in Iceland changes climate on the US west coast eventually.
Obviously with a different scale of magnitude.
Cargo ships from... (Score:3, Insightful)
Pressure is mounting on the UN's International Maritime Organization
China knows how to put the kibosh [peopledaily.com.cn] on that sort of thing.
following the decision by the US government last week to impose a strict 230-mile buffer zone along the entire US coast
Countdown to WTO injunction on the US government's new 'anti-competitive' shipping regulations:
5..4..3..
Western manufacturers and workers can't compete with unregulated totalitarian regimes and third-world workers that willingly tolerate "crazy bad" [google.com] contamination. When you choose to indulge yet more environmental regulation please consider what might be done to prevent your noble intentions from simply evacuating more industry out of the West. International NIMBYism isn't morally admirable.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Could be a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Stop Buying Crap! (Score:5, Insightful)
Not the same as carbon emissions (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't really tell the whole story. The way the story's worded, you'd think that car emissions are a drop in the ocean (ha ha ha) compared to cargo ship emissions, but that's only true for a certain range of pollutants, and it's certainly not remotely true for carbon emissions.
Re:Am I missing something? (Score:3, Insightful)
It just says that CO2 emissions are not proportional to traditional pollution emissions. Not surprising; there's lots of things you can do to reduce NOx, SOx, HC, and particulate emissions, but not much you can do to reduce CO2 emissions assuming you're burning hydrocarbons.
Misleading statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
Saying that one ship pollutes as much as 50million cars is misleading. To be completely accurate, you must say one ship produces as much sulfer-pollution as 50million cars.
Now I have no doubt that this is still quite bad, but this doesn't mean that it has 50million times as much carbon emissions as cars. A quick google search shows that this can cause breathing problems and acid rain (both very bad) it doesn't seem to be a global warming problem. When you blindly say it pollutes 50million times as much of something cars now pollute very little of, it makes good headlines but it's bad science.
Location Matters (Score:5, Insightful)
If they completely relaxed emissions rules for cars then regardless of whether world-wide pollution decreased we would have smog in all the major cities, just like before emissions controls were put into place. Different types of pollution have different area ranges where their effects are felt, and our laws need to take this into consideration.
Re:Could be a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Point taken, but consider the following:
1. If the technology had continued to be developed, I'm sure we would have seen larger, faster, and more sophisticated sailing vessels used for shipping, likely resulting in far greater efficiencies today even with sailing compared to then.
2. When you consider the utter mess we're making of this planet, reduced shipping capacity isn't that bad of a thing to accept. It's akin to finally realizing that though racking up credit card debt can net you a lot of goodies, eventually you have to stop. That may mean a reduction in life style, but it's something you have to accept eventually. As it is now, there's no damn reason why the spoons and forks in your local stores should need to be shipped from halfway across the friggen planet. Manufacture some of the small trivialities closer to home. Make sure that the stuff we're shipping across the oceans have a legitimate NEED to travel that distance. Artwork? Family heirloom? Passengers? Sure, send those over. The knick-knacks at the dollar store though? I don't have much sympathy if that particular valve is shut off.
economics (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Could be a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure there is a reason, it is cheap as hell to ship them. Cheaper than making them close to home. You might not need those cheap forks, but who are you to deprive our working class of affordable tableware?
Re:Stop Buying Crap! (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't even have to stop buying crap. We just need to buying/selling crap at what it really costs to ship it. My sister got some wooden blocks for her 1 year old to play with, they were made in France.
Painted blocks could be made anywhere, they don't have to be shipped across the world, packaged in America and sold here.
Aside from the pollutants, container ships burn 217 tons of fuel per day (source http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_fuel_does_a_container_ship_burn [answers.com]). Lets assume that this could be converted to run in cars or whatever other things we care about. Then you have to ask how much oil are we wasting to ship wooden blocks around the world?
The same should be asked about cruise ships where a weeks trip is cheap, the food is free and it all seems like a good deal. Except what damage is it doing?
Re:Could be a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
To really consider sails as an alternative, we'd need to be willing to accept much slower transit times and much lower reliability.
What about sails as a complementary means of propulsion? The wind is blowing -> release a kite, dead calm -> boost the engine. Anyway, I don't understand why is it so impossible for these ships to cut the speed by at least a few knots. Wouldn't it be cheaper?
Re:Proportions seem to be missed (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll quote some math I did about a year ago in this post [slashdot.org].
While the amounts of HFO burned by, say, the Emma Maersk [wikipedia.org] are enormous (about 300 metric tonnes per day at full operation), this is almost nothing when compared to trucks. Assuming 300mt/day at a cruise speed of 25 knots (over 45km/h), that equates to roughly 30 tonnes per 100 km. A semi-trailer truck pulling two TEU containers [wikipedia.org] runs at around 30 liter per 100 km (that's around 8 mpg). This means the Emma Maersk, carrying 14000 TEU, uses 1000 times as much fuel as a truck carrying 2 TEU, which makes this ship about 7 times as fuel efficient as trucks.
Re:Which is worse? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I agree with you that we need to take the nuclear option much more seriously, for power generation purposes. Something needs to replace all those coal fired power plants, and we're still a ways off from being able to build commercial fusion reactors.
However, I'm a realist. I can't imaging nuclear power ever winning points on cost. And the reason for this is not just that the current crop of 40 year old+ reactors is expensive to operate.
If you want to make any piece of technology virtually failure safe, you can do so. You can make a building that will survive every earthquake. Or a computer that cannot crash. Or (insert-imaginary-perfect-machine-here).
What you can't do is make such technology cheap. Systematic redundancy, backups upon backups, religious levels of maintenance, every piece of equipment built to specifications that vastly exceed the operational reality - all of these are possible, and they all cost a fortune.
There are only a couple of areas of human engineering where we build with such precise paranoia around failure. Nuclear power is one of them. And the reason for doing this with nuclear power is that we're properly paranoid about it, because failure carries with it such consequences. An excellent study in this is to contrast Three Mile Island (where the safeties were well designed) with Chernobyl (not so much).
Nuclear power done right is going to be expense. We can cut more corners with anything else. Now, this doesn't mean we shouldn't use nuclear power, but it does mean that the best use for it is in large commercial power plants.
Re:Misleading statistics (Score:2, Insightful)
This is an interesting inadvertent side effect of the 'awareness' about carbon dioxide these days. Everyone is thinking 'carbon, carbon, carbon' when there are other major issues to tackle, too.
I even heard someone say we should 'scrub the carbon out of the atmosphere and blast it into space', which is crazy. There's basically the same amount of 'carbon' on the planet as there has been since the planet formed. We just have a nasty habit of burning the stuff and mixing it into the atmosphere, where it doesn't really belong.
It's like the skanky girl in college who was so worried about AIDS, but managed to get every other STD under the sun.
Re:Could be a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually sailing ships required the destruction of vast forests (one of the reasons Britain wanted North American colonies was for the wood to build ships with). They generally didn't last that long and had to be replaced frequently. So their effect on the environment wasn't minimal.
carbon sequestration
Already exists (Score:5, Insightful)
This has been developed and put into use by a German company: SkySails [skysails.info]. They report fuel savings of up to 30% in some conditions.
And yes, cutting speeds by about 10% reduces fuel use for the same distance by about 20%. This happens all the time in economy dips. Since fuel is the largest cost in shipping and its share in total costs keeps rising, it's an easy way to save a lot of money by offering up a little time. Maersk [wikipedia.org], the big container line, has reduced the operating speed on its ships from 22 to 20 knots because of the global economic recession. This is a pretty hard thing to do for them, because their ships operate on a schedule and have to stick to it, so changing operating speed means changing the schedule worldwide.
In other types of shipping such as bulk carriers and tankers, this practice is much more common. When there is little demand, ships can go slower to save money so they make more profit per job. When the economy is doing well and demand is high, shipping prices can suddenly skyrocket. In this case, sailing a little faster is the best way to transport more cargo in the same time, and thus complete more jobs. In fact, increasing speed is the short-term version of building new ships: it virtually creates more carrying capacity instantly. Building a ship takes months or years, so it can't be used to respond to sudden changes in demand.
Re:Could be a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
That may mean a reduction in life style, but it's something you have to accept eventually.
(hmmm... you seems so willing to sacrifice my lifestyle... what about yours?)
Then
The knick-knacks at the dollar store though? I don't have much sympathy if that particular valve is shut off.
Better still... download them over the Internet.
Of course I'm kidding ... actually going on a tangent (what would /. be good for, other than switching the thoughts from useful work, so why not continue?)... anyway, that's a major difference between IT and industries producing tangible goods: while for the later one can quantify the impact on environment of off-shoring/outsourcing practices, in IT the impact is too small to count.
Now that the context is set, here comes the question: would you be willing to sacrifice your life-style (not mine) in the conditions your everyday knick-knacks costs you 3-4 times over, while living under the constant risk of having your job outsourced?
(and, if you are not working in IT, why do you feel entitled to recommend solutions that "should be good for all"?)
Re:Could be a problem (Score:2, Insightful)
We need to stop buying crap we don't need, period (which includes pretty much everything that has to be shipped). If that makes it so the global economy can't function (capitalism requiring constant growth, over-consumption, waste), then we need a new economic system - a pretty obvious statement anyway.
Re:Stop Buying Crap! (Score:3, Insightful)
This. It's very tempting to just buy whatever is on special, but one should always factor in how long the product is expected to last.
And, buy local where possible. If you stop buying stuff made in China, those ships will have less need to cross the oceans in the first place. And, of course you'll be supporting your local economy.
The above paragraph doesn't apply if you live in China :)
You don't need to be near the smokestack (Score:3, Insightful)
If there's nobody to breathe a pollutant before it degrades, it's not hurting anyone.
A great many pollutants never degrade. Many pollutants don't have to be inhaled or ingested in any way to cause real damage. Not all damage is direct biological damage.
Now, there's going to be all sorts of soot and sulfur released from that fuel because the regulations are so lax -- but who's it going to hurt in the middle of the Pacific's vast nutrient-devoid dead zones?
How about everyone? Perhaps you've heard of global warming? Acid rain? You don't have to be anywhere near the smokestack for it to have a real effect on your life.
Re:They're in the middle of the ocean. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah right, even TFS states that among the emissions is not just soot but also sulfur, nitrous oxides and stuff like that. Then again, I bet you wouldn't mind some sulfuric acid in your food either, would you?
Everybody knows that sulphur is toxic in any quantities and none of the living organisms needs it...
Oh, wait... what about Rieske protein [wikipedia.org], present in cytochrome complexes in plants, animals and bacteria?
Also, did you ever note the stench of a decomposing piece of meat? Turns out most of it is given by the H2S... by the smell of it, methinks there should be a non-trivial amount of sulphur in there.
Re:Could be a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Let us DRIVE our containers across the ocean!
That raises an interesting point. These ships travel a lot farther than any car ever would. If the ships could be replaced by cars driving the same route, how many cars would it take to produce the same amount of pollution? I wager it would be far fewer than 50 million.
Re:What are they going to do about it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Simple fix, get your neighbors to also do this via treaties. For instance if the USA, Canada and Mexico all imposed the same tariff the shippers could do nothing about it.
Re:Could be a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
That is why the top 50 cargo ships should be nuclear powered. Clean, efficient, fast, consistent.
Re:One can dream... (Score:2, Insightful)
I've got a MUCH more efficient solution- ship only natural resources, send the plans electronically over the Internet, and manufacture locally.
And those nutrient-devoid dead zones are dead *because* of the sulfur bearing soot.
Re:Could be a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Getting 30 feet or so off the ocean gets you reasonably fast winds. The "topsails", which were acutall the second sails from the bottom, provided the main thrust for square-rigged ships. We know today that by far the best way to get thrust from a sail is by using it as a wing - a spinnaker (or "baloon sail" or "kite sail") only works if you're going downwind, and doesn't work that well as your only sail. And if you meant an actual kite, with no mast, there are so many problems with that.
Re:Could be a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
we'd need to be willing to accept much slower transit times and much lower reliability
ever hear of a clipper ship?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper [wikipedia.org]
I'm sure a modern equivalent could be built.
Re:Could be a problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Morality: a simple concept for most.
Re:Stop Buying Crap! (Score:2, Insightful)
When looking for a certain product, don't buy the cheapest one, that's usually crap quality and you get what you pay for.
Don't buy the most expensive one, they're usually great quality, but I'm not made of money, and a 5% improvement in quality and features is not worth doubling the price.
Buy at the middle of the road or one step up towards the most expensive. That's where the best quality vs. price ratio is.
I suppose you could call this the Goldilocks method.
Which means of course, don't shop at Walmart. Walmart specifically encourages its vendors to create lower quality versions of its products, so what you're buying there is even worse quality than normal. You save so much money shopping there! Yes, and it's all junk.
Try to buy American, or better yet made in your own state, as much as possible. You'd be surprised how affordable American made products are when you shop by the above method. I bought two lawn mowers this year, both American made, and they're very well built and were reasonably priced.
Re:Could be a problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"Going Nuclear" on cargo vessels (Score:3, Insightful)
shipping plastic trinkets from China
And this is the root of the problem right there, which everyone seems to be ignoring. What kind of an ass-backwards economy do we have when it's cheaper to make shit in China and send it (literally) halfway around the world, rather than make it locally?
WRONG (Score:3, Insightful)
the logic is cost and jurisdiction (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the logic is that these heavy emissions actually sink into the ocean in international waters at diffuse levels not harmful enough to do damage (also that it would significantly increase the cost of all overseas goods).
I think the logic is that in international waters you don't answer to anyone, and you can burn the cheapest fuel your engine will tolerate.
Re:Could be a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Small nitpick, wooden shipbuilding techniques before ~1800 required long pieces of wood for the strakes, and specifically curved pieces of wood for the scantlings. Shorter pieces worked too much at sea, making the ships hog and sag, and creating leaks. A typical third rate 72 gun ship of the line required over 5,000 old growth oak trees to build. Finally, thirty years was the service life discounting rebuilds, which could extend the life of a ship to double that, or more.
I have heard the theory that Britain wanted American wood for ships in other places before this. We have a type of oak, White Oak, that is particularly suited to shipbuilding due to its strength and resistance to splintering.
Right! Supplies of the sort of wood most desired for building large ships were scarce. Also don't forget timber for masts. Good mast timber for a very tall ship is rare. No ship building activity would cut down a forest - it just removes the choicest timber.
Forests were being denuded at this time - but it wasn't due to ship building. It was charcoal making to fuel the first blast furnaces of the industrial revolution. The furnaces didn't care what type of timber was used.
Re:One can dream... (Score:5, Insightful)
Since a few years ships are already required to switch to low-sulfor fuel when they come near the coast or enter ports..
Several types of marine fuel exist: MGO, MDO, HFO,..
HFO (heavy fuel oil) is getting banned in some parts of the world.
And yes this means vessels actually have 2 or 3 different types of fuel on board and switch over from one type to another.
The economic crash of 2 years ago was beneficiary for the environment btw.
The years before it, prices for renting a ship (baltic dry index) was so high that only the rent made up the largest part of the cost, fuel costs were low in comparison. So cargo vessels were instructed to go full speed (and consume/pollute more).
Now the BDI dropped, the rent is lower and it's again a matter of optimising days at sea / consumption (slower speed = less consumption, so renting a vessel 1 or 2 days longer can be better because fuel savings are more than the extra rent you pay for these days).
A lot of old (and more polluting) vessels also were laid in docks or are scrapped the past 2 years as there suddenly wasn't enough cargo to transport..
disclaimer: I work at the it department of a group of companies that operates cargo vessels.. have worked on a program to register their trips and optimize fuel costs/speed/...
Re:One can dream... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You don't need to be near the smokestack (Score:3, Insightful)
Acid rain? You don't have to be anywhere near the smokestack for it to have a real effect on your life.
That is more of a problem, although still relatively near the ports, as acid rain tends to form up to 100's km from the source, not so much at 1000's km.
Contrary to what you seem to believe, not all cargo ships sail 1000s of km off the shore. Many busy shipping lanes, like the Channel, the Mediteranian, Suez + Gulf, Panama, Strait of Malaysia, etc, are near land. And even between those, lots of ships don't go all that far away from the shore. Certainly not 1000s of km. Otherwise all cargo ships would have to the middle of the Pacific.