Sustainable Shipping – How and When?
Last week I spent three days in cool rooms at the Sustainable Shipping Conference in San Francisco with an incredible array of experienced people, from Port directors and shipping company executives to air pollution specialists and NOAA scientists – all focused on how to make shipping cleaner.
After endless Power Point charts of daunting statistics about NOX, SOX, Particulate Matter (PM), and Carbon Dioxide (CO2), everyone seemed to be in agreement that shipping is a dirty and dangerous business, year round.
- Shipping burns some 350 million tons of heavy bunker fuel
- Ships emit about a billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2)
- Ships contribute 17% to the U.S. PM inventory, and 18% in California
- 100,000 cancer deaths worldwide are attributable to shipping
As the conference steamed ahead, solutions emerged that were as complex as ships are big. By and large, though, no one rushed to take the lead. Instead, many industry constituents seemed at the end of a long period of foot-dragging, if not outright denial, and only now were closer to acquiescing to change. True enough, a presenter from the U.S. EPA cut to the quick saying, “sustainable must mean healthy air.”
Despite the revelation that 20% more efficiency and emissions reductions are possible with the current fleet, there were still numerous skeptics in the room. The keynote speaker from Maersk said that the best way to achieve sustainability is through international standards promulgated by the International Maritime Organization. This was coming from a shipper who is ahead of the curve, who’s company had voluntarily instituted the early use of low sulfur fuel and vessel speed reductions. American companies don’t want to foot the bill for a cleaner planet if foreign shippers are able to remain dirty and pocket the profit.
No one at the conference, unfortunately, was talking about shipping’s other environmental impacts: the great danger of serious injury or death to whales that are struck by the steel giants (the latest victim, a young blue whale was discovered off of Big Sur last week with multiple fractures to its skull and vertebra), or the tremendous amount of noise incidentally introduced into the sea making it dangerously less navigable and habitable for marine life. Besides saving fuel and emissions, slowing ships down would significantly mitigate these serious threats to marine life. Most striking was that after three days of discussing harmful emissions, and identifying a multitude of ways to get at the problem, no one was taking action. For now this industry is laying low despite the tongue and cheek admonition from one spirited presenter, “If you are not at the table, you are on the menu.”
Tags: Clean Energy, environment, Marine, marine sanctuaries, Shipping
