@smachiz, totally agree. With all the cruise and shipping companies this article feels like a political attack on Carnival. Wonder what happened if they ran the stats on Maersk who has the largest fleet of 700 ships in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_container_ship...
The big freighters run on something pretty close to crude oil, it's basically unrefined. Are they really passing regulations requiring them to run on refined processed fuel? That will increase the cost of shipping dramatically. Not sure if the engines can even run on normal diesel.
Well, it appears they are. What will happen then to the high density waste oil from the refining process that is currently used for freighters? Without them burning it or existing as a market, the oil will still exist as a byproduct of refining. Will it just be dumped somewhere?
> researchers expect that on-board ship scrubbers, devices that clear harmful pollutants from exhaust gas, will be the primary compliance path for ships, which could continue to burn higher-sulfur fuels
This is probably the only option. Or switching to reactors.
Does it matter how the ship is flagged? I could imagine solutions like, "If you dock in Europe and your ship is out of compliance, you must pay $X in fines." You can tune $X to whatever is needed to cover the calculated negative externalities.
Something that blew my mind was learning that (depending on oil prices of course), a container ship can burn through up to a quarter million dollars worth of fuel on a single transpacific voyage.
> I have to imagine that all of that dwarfs carnival by a wide, wide margin.
Well, yeah it has to. The amount of freight vessels dwarfs cruise lines by multiple orders of magnitude. However, freight performs a useful, nay, critical service.
Each cruise ship takes thousands of people all year round, who otherwise would go on holiday somewhere else (probably somewhere far away given the cost of a cruise). You need to do a total comparison of the pollution emitted by the cruise-style holidays vs going on long-haul holidays elsewhere and sum that up to see whether Carnival are really causing 10x more environmental problems than European cars.
I suspect they are but would rather see more valid comparisons that are harder to refute as the headline.
when I first heard the nwes a couple week ago[1] I was thinking on the same line at the beginning: need to normalize per person, per mile, per year or something, it's impossible to get those number.
I'm curious whether luxury/recreational users of bunker fuel like cruise ships will receive more scrutiny and legislation than cargo and tanker ships. It's easy to scoff at the cruise industry and at people who go on cruises as environmentally insensitive, harder to bring about an increase in shipping costs.
Also, it's 10x the SOx, not 10x the CO2. Here's the source publication, which also analyzes NOx and PM, with a bit of CO2 data mixed in:
Look for "Marine Cloud Brightening" and "ship tracks". Dirty fuels contribute to low cloud formation -- these are known to partially mitigate warming effects.
The opportunity is to design a jet to spray salt water off the back of cargo ships to optimize marine cloud formation/brightening around the world. This is one of the most palatable geoengineering solutions out there.
The article says "Emits more pollution than all of Europe's Cars", which is a bit of a garbage claim, because obviously all of the CO2 is coming from the cars.
How does this rank in the grand scheme of greenhouse gases? Not that it doesn't still matter, but efforts should be focused on climate change as a whole, not a single cherry-picked gas.
In terms of SO2 and NO2 pollutants, cars burn very clean fuel, very efficiently, with a catalytic converter to scrub their exhaust. Ships run on shitty bunker oil, which is just one step above combustible sludge on the purity scale... And aren't equipped with catalytic converters.
The thing is, even if you legislate that ships can't run on bunker oil in your territorial waters, they'll just run on it while at sea, and switch to a legislated fuel when they dock.
Even if companies had to hire teams of government employees to handle/run the reactors, this still would be an excellent idea. It's a shame it will never happen.
Cruise ship manufacturers should do more, but I'd like to see the emissions comparison of those thousands of customers flying to their destinations, then taking small vehicles to reach final destinations.
Cars aren't going to get you across the atlantic. And planes tend to be more efficient overall than cars in long hauls efficiency wise, both in people carried, and overall efficiency/emissions. Those turbofans are much more efficient at approaching the carnot limit than your small car engine is. Scale matters.
I oppose banning anything... We just need to take the externalities (costs incured on the environment/population/other stake holders that are currently not included) into account and tax products/services accordingly.
That way, you both (1) reduce the environmental impact, and (2) encourage development of newer, cleaner technologies.
The pollution that the article is talking about, sulfur dioxide, isn't a component of climate change and actually tends to cool the Earth down. The amount of carbon dioxide emitted by cruise ships is far lower than that emitted by cars and in terms of carbon emissions per kilometer traveled per passenger cruise ships are pretty clean compared to other forms of transportation.
In terms of CO2, aviation accounts for roughly 2% of global man-made emissions. This is not nothing, but eliminating it would not be the same as eliminating all of its emissions. Shipping and travel done via aviation would simply shift to land and water based options, which would in turn increase their emissions. It would also have quit an impact on the infrastructure of modern civilization and economy. Banned overnight would result in mass disruption and probably deaths due to inability to shift material resources quickly. Alternative would take years to upgrade the infrastructure and logistics needed to truly replace aviation.
I'm not saying we shouldn't consider and focus on better efficiency and other technology in the aviation sector, but there are lower hanging fruits. It would be much more viable in the short term to fractionally decrease, say, a fraction of industrial emissions equivalent to all of aviation emissions. Or improve carbon sequestration technology.
Cruise ships are almost certainly cleaner than commercial air travel as a whole. It takes a lot less energy to move a big ship with 4000 people sideways on water at 50 MPH than to lift people into the sky in 20 groups of 200 at 600 MPH. And these are close to replacement goods (less cruises = more airplanes).
The main stat on this article is dumb because cars don't really emit sulphur oxide, so obviously something that emits some will be a huge multiplier.
EDIT: This is almost certainly wrong, as other comments have pointed out to me. Not deleting it for posterity's sake.
There is no reason to ban them. Charge the emissions to influence behaviour and investments. We don't know what innovations can come out of this if enough pressure is applied.
Yeah, it's something that gives me pause about political action against global warming: how many people who want such political action are willing to never ride a plane or a cruise ship ever again? I think few have processed that a real effort to address this problem would involve real personal sacrifice, it can't be conveniently resolved just by building a ton of solar panels and windmills.
Carnival emits 10x the amount of one specific pollutant.
This is a seriously and intentionally misleading headline. Not to diminish the problem, which absolutely should be addressed, but the headline is journalistic malpractice.
The devil is, as always, in the detail. Here, the 'air pollution' is oxides of sulphur, which are a consequence of the use of nearly regulation free dirty bunker fuel by ships.
If the measurement is CO2, or other pollutants, it's almost certainly less bad comparatively (though in no way clean).
[+] [-] smachiz|6 years ago|reply
I have to imagine that all of that dwarfs carnival by a wide, wide margin.
But with flags of convenience, this is actually a semi-tough battle to fight, as they'll just reregister the ships somewhere else.
The low sulphur regulations coming into force in 2020 should help quite a bit in that these ships will have to burn cleaner fuel at the very least.
[+] [-] dfcab|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] droithomme|6 years ago|reply
The big freighters run on something pretty close to crude oil, it's basically unrefined. Are they really passing regulations requiring them to run on refined processed fuel? That will increase the cost of shipping dramatically. Not sure if the engines can even run on normal diesel.
https://news.ihsmarkit.com/press-release/energy/new-low-sulf...
Well, it appears they are. What will happen then to the high density waste oil from the refining process that is currently used for freighters? Without them burning it or existing as a market, the oil will still exist as a byproduct of refining. Will it just be dumped somewhere?
> researchers expect that on-board ship scrubbers, devices that clear harmful pollutants from exhaust gas, will be the primary compliance path for ships, which could continue to burn higher-sulfur fuels
This is probably the only option. Or switching to reactors.
[+] [-] ijpoijpoihpiuoh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyllo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiveturkey|6 years ago|reply
Well, yeah it has to. The amount of freight vessels dwarfs cruise lines by multiple orders of magnitude. However, freight performs a useful, nay, critical service.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] albertgoeswoof|6 years ago|reply
Each cruise ship takes thousands of people all year round, who otherwise would go on holiday somewhere else (probably somewhere far away given the cost of a cruise). You need to do a total comparison of the pollution emitted by the cruise-style holidays vs going on long-haul holidays elsewhere and sum that up to see whether Carnival are really causing 10x more environmental problems than European cars.
I suspect they are but would rather see more valid comparisons that are harder to refute as the headline.
[+] [-] LoSboccacc|6 years ago|reply
and yet, they are normalized per year. the number are outrageous even normalized per city https://altreconomia.it/app/uploads/2019/06/Schermata-2019-0...
and the situation only gets worse because when out in international water they use a worse fuel for their engines.
[1] https://altreconomia.it/navi-crociera-inquinamento-auto/
[+] [-] beat|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|6 years ago|reply
Also, it's 10x the SOx, not 10x the CO2. Here's the source publication, which also analyzes NOx and PM, with a bit of CO2 data mixed in:
https://www.transportenvironment.org/sites/te/files/publicat...
(As you might guess, the source article is not unbiased...)
[+] [-] dr_dshiv|6 years ago|reply
The opportunity is to design a jet to spray salt water off the back of cargo ships to optimize marine cloud formation/brightening around the world. This is one of the most palatable geoengineering solutions out there.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.201...
[+] [-] perfunctory|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tathougies|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nabla9|6 years ago|reply
Installing scrubbers and cleaner fuel or moving into LNG are options. They add only little to the price of the ship.
[+] [-] npip99|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _bxg1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vkou|6 years ago|reply
In terms of SO2 and NO2 pollutants, cars burn very clean fuel, very efficiently, with a catalytic converter to scrub their exhaust. Ships run on shitty bunker oil, which is just one step above combustible sludge on the purity scale... And aren't equipped with catalytic converters.
The thing is, even if you legislate that ships can't run on bunker oil in your territorial waters, they'll just run on it while at sea, and switch to a legislated fuel when they dock.
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[+] [-] czechdeveloper|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomp|6 years ago|reply
That way, you both (1) reduce the environmental impact, and (2) encourage development of newer, cleaner technologies.
[+] [-] Symmetry|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ineedasername|6 years ago|reply
I'm not saying we shouldn't consider and focus on better efficiency and other technology in the aviation sector, but there are lower hanging fruits. It would be much more viable in the short term to fractionally decrease, say, a fraction of industrial emissions equivalent to all of aviation emissions. Or improve carbon sequestration technology.
[+] [-] cm2012|6 years ago|reply
The main stat on this article is dumb because cars don't really emit sulphur oxide, so obviously something that emits some will be a huge multiplier.
EDIT: This is almost certainly wrong, as other comments have pointed out to me. Not deleting it for posterity's sake.
[+] [-] bwb|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] beat|6 years ago|reply
This is a seriously and intentionally misleading headline. Not to diminish the problem, which absolutely should be addressed, but the headline is journalistic malpractice.
[+] [-] albertgoeswoof|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmyteh|6 years ago|reply
If the measurement is CO2, or other pollutants, it's almost certainly less bad comparatively (though in no way clean).
[+] [-] whiddershins|6 years ago|reply