Content area
Full Text
As air pollution rises on the global political agenda, pressure is mounting on a largely hidden and proliferating source of dangerous emissions: the shipping industry.
The corpuscles of the global economy, ships carry more than 90 percent of the world's merchandise by volume, and the tonnage of cargo sent by ships has tripled since 1970. Yet the fuel propelling them is cheap and dirty and produces an especially noxious exhaust.
Ships release more sulfur dioxide, a sooty pollutant associated with acid rain, than all of the world's cars, trucks and buses combined, according to a March study by the International Council on Clean Transportation. That study also found that ships produced an estimated 27 percent of the world's smog-causing nitrogen-oxide emissions in 2005. Only six countries in the world emitted more greenhouse gases - which trap heat in the atmosphere, warming the globe - than was produced collectively in 2001 by all ships larger than 100 tons, according to the study and United Nations statistics.
The global shipping industry is mired in an internal struggle over how to cope with its emissions problem, and no simple strategies have emerged for regulating the open seas.
Demands for solutions are intensifying. Assertive governments and a few ports that wield substantial commercial power are proving that local action can reverberate internationally. Since Jan. 1, the state of California has required ships sailing within 24 miles of its shores to use cleaner-burning fuels in their auxiliary engines. Similar to a 2005 measure governing Europe's Baltic Sea region, the California law restricts access to America's two largest ports, Los Angeles and Long Beach. Ships that don't comply can be fined or impounded.
The prospect of authorities around the world adopting different standards for fuel and emissions worries many in the shipping industry. For commercial reasons, most ship owners and operators prefer burning less expensive, if dirtier, fuel when sailing outside a protected zone. Yet the procedures for switching back and forth between different types of fuel are complicated and potentially hazardous.
So a few of shipping's largest players are making an unprecedented proposal for a single, strict limit on sulfur emissions in all oceans.
Yet the ravenous appetite of consumers for imported goods is growing so fast that marginal...