US/Canadian Proposal for Cleaner Ships Enters Final Stage Next Week

Next week, the International Maritime Organization will be meeting in London to consider a proposal that would drastically cut harmful air pollution from the largest, dirtiest ships at North American ports.

If successful, next week’s meeting will be a major step forward for public health in cities and towns up and down our Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf of Mexico coasts - and even hundreds of miles inland.

Here's the background:

Only the IMO can set standards for all of the ocean-going vessels at our ports, such as oil tankers, container-carrying cargo ships, and large cruise ships.  In October 2008, after several years of debate, the IMO adopted a new global pact to reduce ship emissions. 

Most significantly, the new pact includes a provision that allows individual countries to create special Emission Control Areas (ECAs) to accelerate the reduction of ship pollution off their coastlines.  Last March, the Obama administration and the Canadian government proposed the creation of a joint US/Canada ECA that would require ships within 200 nautical miles of our coastlines to use fuel that has 98 percent less sulfur than in current ship fuel, and will cut their smog-forming nitrogen oxides emissions by 80 percent and their cancer-causing particulate soot emissions by 85 percent, starting in 2015.

Cleaning up these floating smokestacks is critical.  Most burn residual bunker fuel, which can contain up to 45,000 parts-per-million (ppm) of sulfur, and lack even the most basic of pollution controls.  Sulfur is a naturally-occurring presence in petroleum, and its presence leads to sulfur dioxide and particular matter emissions (aka soot) that trigger asthma emergencies, cancer, and thousands of premature deaths across the U.S. every year.  Plus, sulfur in the fuel ruins anti-pollution catalysts and filters, just as lead in gasoline was once a barrier to effective catalytic converters in cars.  (In contrast to dirty ships, diesel fuel used in trucks and buses in the U.S. was capped at only 15 ppm in late 2006, leading to new diesel engines that are more than 90 percent cleaner than they were prior to that date.)

The health benefits of implementing the ECA will be huge.

Air quality will improve along the coasts and even hundreds of miles inland, with air quality benefits extending all the way to Nevada, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania - and even the Grand Canyon.  EPA esimates that implementing the ECA will avoid as many as 14,000 premature deaths in 2020, and nearly five million people will be relieved from acute respiratory symptoms each year.  As with all EPA's diesel rules over the past decade, these financial benefits will far, far, far exceed the expected implementation costs—in fact, EPA estimates that there will be more than $34 in health benefits for every $1 in implementation cost.

And there may be significant climate benefits too.

Scientists are increasingly pointing to black carbon emissions as an important issue in the acceleration of melting sea and glacial ice, especially in the Arctic region.  Because black carbon emissions last only a few weeks in the atmosphere, cutting them today should help slow the pace of this melting.  Reducing ship pollution will cut these black carbon emissions, and the benefits will be greatest for ships travelling in the northern latitudes to and from our continent.  At the IMO meeting, there will also be consideration of additional black carbon strategies for shipping.

I'll be attending the IMO meeting as a member of the U.S. delegation, joining officials from EPA, the Coast Guard, and other agenices as we advocate for this critically important step forward.

Stay tuned as this story develops.

 

 

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