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One Giant Cargo Ship Pollutes As Much As 50M Cars
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.
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.
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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.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Honestly, how much of our current problems would go away if we just stopped buying the cheapest crap we can find? Trade imbalances? Global pollution? Landfill? We really have to get away from the whole "I want it right now, and I want it cheap, and I don't care how crappy it is if it just makes me happy for a few minutes." Here is an idea: Do some research. Buy a quality product that will last you the rest of your life instead of one you have to throw away next week. And if you can't afford it right now? Save up until you have the money for it. Trust me. You'll appreciate it more.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
It's a question of economics. They're built to operate as cheaply as possible. That includes fuel efficiency. So, I'd expect the engines to operate fairly efficiently, in order to minimize the fuel cost; however, that does not mean they minimize pollution. In addition, these ships often use the cheaper heavy fuels, like No. 6 fuel oil, which tend to be higher in sulfur and other contaminants. Until it's cheaper to operate the ship on something else, this will not change.
I'll quote some math I did about a year ago in this post.
While the amounts of HFO burned by, say, the Emma Maersk 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 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.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
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.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
This has been developed and put into use by a German company: SkySails. 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, 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.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
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"?)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
That is why the top 50 cargo ships should be nuclear powered. Clean, efficient, fast, consistent.
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.
Please help metamoderate.
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/...
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