Kate Wing's Blog
Invisible Ships
October 17, 2007
Posted by Kate Wing in Solving Global Warming
Talking about global warming can gin up the finger-pointing faster than you can say "tar sands." Who's really to blame, and if the finger points at you, well, isn't there someone out there who's worse than you? Let's go find them and make them fix the problem!
We in the ocean world are used to being a low priority. No, no, don't worry about us, we're used to it. After all, no one actually lives on seamounts (yet) so people don't wake up every morning face to face with broken corals or sick fish or piles of discarded fishing gear. If you go to the beach and look at the sea and it looks blue and wavy, it must be fine, right? So, we understand when you forget that there's a lot going on in that 70% of the world.
And with the holiday season just around the corner in the U.S., a lot of what's going on is shipping. 90,000 container ships and tankers and RoRo ships steam around the globe, bringing us cute party clothes and cars and buffalo wing dispensers. The Independent reports that new estimates put greenhouse gas emissions by shipping at 1 billion tons per year. That's about 2/3 more than the aviation industry. Cheap shipping allows companies to provide more products faster from more places and reduce their inventory costs. It's cheaper to put things on a ship than drive them from Point A to Point B. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of quick and easy fixes for re-engineering large ships to run on biofuels, but we can't afford to forget about ships when we're looking for emissions to reduce.
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