New ways to foot the hefty bill for making old ships less polluting | Hacker News Reader

New ways to foot the hefty bill for making old ships less polluting

economist.com

380 pointsghosh218 comments

Slow steaming is an improvement and it saves quite a bit of bunker. But while bunker is cheap, it's really noxious; the Cosco Busan spilled bunker when it hit the Delta tower of the Bay Bridge.

Boats are supposed to switch over to a cleaner fuel when they enter port. For example, Port of Oakland is upwind of residential housing in Oakland. So this is a public health issue. Even the terminal tractors (port trucks) idling are an issue. Hopefully they'll switch over to EVs:

https://orangeev.com/

Boats are designed for a critical hull speed. Emma Maersk cruises at 31 mi/h on the open ocean.

http://www.emma-maersk.com/specification/

That bulbous nose on container ships sets up a counter bow wave to lower drag but only at a certain cruising speed. However, shippers weren't paying a premium for that higher speed and although it's more efficient for that hull it was still costly.

So new boats are tuned to a more efficient lower speed (slow steaming) with less powerful engines and even older boats are getting hauled into dry dock and re-nosed for a lower speed. Overall shipping speeds are down and shipping costs are also down.

http://www.seatrade-maritime.com/news/americas/the-economics...

While the new Panama Canal extension could be a fiasco in its own right (100 years later and not nearly as well built; it leaks) new canals could improve things. The Thai Canal could make the Suez route more competitive than the Panama route for Asia to Europe.

Lastly, like airlines, it's really hard to make money in shipping. Witness the Hanjin bankruptcy:

http://gcaptain.com/south-korea-court-hanjin-to-declare-bank...

The City of Oakland owns the Port of Oakland and we don't make much money off of it either. $16M/yr for both the airport and the port, last time I checked.

Though the low profit margins can be seen as a good thing and competition working. (That is if all the actual benefit goes to customer surplus.)

That's exactly how it is. Unfortunately the negative externality of pollution means there is an inefficiency. One way to fix this by applying a tax, or minimum environmental standards, but on an international scale it's not so simple.

Exactly what you say.

Pollution tax on international scale isn't too hard: countries can just impose the tax on any ships that dock at their harbours, and can negotiate double taxation treaties with cooperating governments.

Why not just tax only the cargo that is unloaded at the port, which would avoid the double taxation problem? It would also place greater revenue in the hands of the consumers that are paying for the shipment of those goods.

Depends. Ideally you want to tax something that's a good proxy for pollution. You don't want to tax trade.

There wouldn't be greater revenue for consumers: the money that pays for the taxes ultimately comes from them.

(Just to mention it: the standard solution for all revenue raising taxation is, "land value tax". Any other tax is only useful as a `sin tax'. Alas, right now we have sin taxes on labour and capital..)

No, it is not so simple but then we are not a small insignificant country. We already have the Jones Act which mandates American built+crewed+owned+flagged vessels for port to port cargo (cabotage) amongst things. So these sort of regulations are not without their precedent.

The US manages to enforce a lot of their regulations around the globe, eg no trade with Iran.

> $16M/yr for both the airport and the port

Oakland should just sell them both to condo developers. They could probably get a few billion dollars for the nice waterfront property.

That's also an idea proposed for London City airport. It's prime real estate in a city desperate for more housing, it handles relatively few passengers, causes large amounts of pollution and noise problems, and its USP of being so central will be diluted when the faster trains to Heathrow are completed. On top of that, the airport doesn't actually make much money (in terms of £/area).

I wonder if it would make sense for an investor to buy the airport, shut it down and sell the land for housing, surely the land is worth £billions for property developers?

I'd suggest: the government should make sure the zoning allows for airport _or_ housing, and then just sell to the highest bidder.

You might really like this book [0] -- while its talking about richmond, on NPR the other day they were talking to the author and he talks about how the port of oakland brings in 2 trillion dollars (or maybe it was all west coast ports) in economic GDP spending so its many billions of dollars of merchandise (10 billion tons per year) that flow through the port.

No way EVER that oakland would do anything to the port. The port was setup initially to export the war machine to Vietnam when we were fighting them - the logistics, experience and connections to Asia are more strong with Oakland than any other port...

One of our largest exports from there is arga and wine, heading to asia's REALLY large middle class, obv our inports in computers/electronics are gigantic.

Yeah, oakland should do a better job "profiting" from these exports and provide better services to their residents, but that is one of the most important ports we have.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Refinery-Town-Money-Remaking-American...

Uh, Oakland is way down the list from Long Beach and Los Angeles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ports_in_the_United_St...

Yeah I think that the point the author of that book was making is that oakland is an import/export port - where most others are primarily importing...

He stated they are in the process of installing a refrigeration area such that they can start exporting meats to china.

Ships. They're ships. Ships lean away from their turns. Boats lean into their turns. Also ships can carry boats.

Source: (Former) ship driver.

Submarines are boats and they lean away from their turns.

> That also imperils banks across the world, which have lent $400bn secured on smoke-spewing ships.

So, why should we care? Presumably the banks have paid analysts to determine that was a sound investment.

If governments are doing their jobs, banks should be able to eat this kind of loss without becoming insolvent. Otherwise why bother having regulations at all, if every minor hiccup means taxpayers have to bail out the banks?

Why do I care if shipping companies go out of business because of over capacity? Isn't that what market forces are all about?

So we should keep dangerously polluting ships running, because the banks that loan the shippers money will lose their shirts for several quarters if the shipping company goes bust?

Who on earth are you arguing with? The article doesn't say you should care or that the banks should be bailed out. In fact, it's a neutral analysis of the status quo with a positive slant towards a green solution.

Why do you care that these companies go out of business?

The answer is that you care because you need all the stuff you consume that comes from across the oceans.

You care because you complain if the stuff you buy is more expensive, penalizing companies that use cleaner shipping nethods.

You care because (I think) you are not the one committing your money to create a less contaminating medium of transportation.

At the end of the day, you care that these ships are operational because it's better for you and you don't care about the damage for the future of others.

you above is not just you but all of us.

I don't quite understand the sentiment. There is no word proposing bailing out banks or shipping companies in the article. Instead, an arrangement is proposed where multiple charterers would share the cost of upgrading the ship over more than one contract period. Such arrangement would logically seem preferable over the insolvency of any party, which causes wider mayhem.

The underlying message in that sentence "banks [...] which have lent $400bn" is that we cannot enforce stricter regulation on ships, because it would hurt banks that lent the money.

It is also true that banks have so little equity that they easily get insolvent. In the beginning of the nineteenth century banks were around ~30% equity. Nowadays ~1-2%.

I read it the point of the sentence was was to illustrate why the banks are unwilling to lend even more for the green tech retrofitting, since the shipping business is troubled and already heavily indebted. The stricter regulations will anyway come in place by 2020-2021.

Banks trying to keep risks minimal actually sounds great to me. If you increase the equity, they can take bigger risks, but then again estimating risk is always by definition guesswork and can backfire in disastrous ways (think 2000s subprime crisis).

This is sarcasm, right?

Government's sole purpose is to protect big banks and companies and fool the people it's for their own good.

That's the kind of claptrap nonsense that got us here.

Government is - at best - an emergent agent with a lot of internal incentives to keep itself going. It does what the people in it want to do. It does what legislation tells it to do modulated by the people interpreting and implementing those statues.

Big Banks and certain Companies and industry advocacy groups spend a lot of money on putting people friendly to them into Government, and that introduced a bias in the collective decision-making process. It should be (and will be eventually) counteracted.

Sure, there are different ways to do something about this, the extreme is of course to abolish the Government, but if you were to think a bit about the consequences and requirements of such a change, you'll see that it's not really the best option.

> It should be (and will be eventually) counteracted.

10,000 years and still waiting

It'll take some time, as people understandably don't like to use their brains, much less being told that they should drop their irrational cognitive patterns and that they should learn game theory.

We're still not done with this Enlightenment thing.

Big banks and certain industries don't spend all that much money (in the grand scheme of things) on getting people into power, and the recent election showed that the more well funded candidate doesn't necessarily win.

Big banks and certain industries have outsize influence because we are a capitalist country where peoples' well being depends on having a job, which is created by a company and bankrolled by banks.

That's why industries like the auto industry have so much more political weight than the tech industry, despite the latter being far richer.

> which have lent $400bn secured on smoke-spewing

Shipping bubble?

Funny enough, governments should do less of that job. Canada had a famously sound and famously stable banking industry without much regulation in the 19th century. (In comparison to frequent failures in their more regulated southern neighbour.)

The same goes for the free banking episodes in Scotland, Australia and France.

If you think that the US banks are/were more regulated than Canadian banks you would be incorrect.

See the sources mentioned in https://www.alt-m.org/2015/08/08/thats-right-famously-sound-...

So, why should we care?

Unprofitable ships are scuttled intentionally. Insurance companies then have to pay off the loss and the seas have to eat the pollution. I'm not sure how those very real externalities fit in with your free market trivialization.

Any links to that statement that I can read?

The Vanity Fair article on Nick Sloane covers his career as a salvage master and touches on scuttling:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2014/12/nick-sloane-costa-co...

Another scuttling but for a different reason:

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

I think the GP is making an appeal to how regulation should work.

Ideally, regulation should make it so bank stock holders eat the losses for poorly thought-out loans and should prevent all the various sleazy ways international shippers escape responsibility for their decisions.

What happens, though, is because regulators can't do that, they wind-up paying shippers and other polluters to change the bad decisions they already profited from (providing extra credit to upgrade ships, for example).

It is a shame but what can you do?

> Ideally, regulation should make it so bank stock holders eat the losses for poorly thought-out loans and should prevent all the various sleazy ways international shippers escape responsibility for their decisions

Exactly. I'm fine for ports to ban polluting ships and for the companies who own these ships to go out of business. It will be better for the environment to have these ships out of service.

However it sounds like the major issue to overcome is the banking industry's unwillingness to lend more money to the shipping industry (e.g. throwing good money after bad)

Ideally this wouldn't be a problem as banks would admit the loans were a poor investment and write them down

It is interesting to note that the types of engines used in these large ships are among the most efficient:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake_specific_fuel_consumptio...

The pollution has more to do with the type of fuel used.

And lack of pollution controls.

Since no country can regulate the seas, perhaps regulate your costal waters and heavily disincentivize these heavy polluters from docking in your ports -enough countries get on board and it becomes the rule, the tyranny of the minority as it were, because it's not as though other less regulating countries would regulate against less polluting ships.

Any country can, if they choose, regulate their registered ships.

They should also be able to regulate ships that enter their territorial waters. "Oh, you burn bunker oil and don't scrub the exhaust? Can't dock here..."

Or charge a very high docking fee for all, with correspondingly large discounts for incentivized technology/fuel.

At least one airport does this with planes, John Wayne Airport in Orange County, CA. In the 1980s, they implemented stricter controls over how much noise planes flying in & out can make. [1]

On related note, FedEx flew (flies?) Boeing 727s, a rather noisy plane by commercial jet standards. They knew that plane noise was increasingly become an undesirable trait, and managing noise levels needed to be made a priority. At some point, FedEx decided to that retrofitting 727s to produce less noise was a sound investment, so they built a hush kit. [2] It'd be interesting to learn whether the development of hush kits was a proactive and/or reactive decision.

I suspect that a large enough country like the USA could heavily incentivize for more efficient shipping. The USA could levy a tax on goods shipped via inefficient ships. All they'd have to do is have enough information about the supply chain to reasonably enforce the tax. Sure, dodging the tax could be gamed, but compliance is a different issue. While the USA couldn't tell Canadian ports what to do, they could tax goods which entered Canadian ports when those goods enter the USA.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne_Airport#Aircraft_no...

[2] http://www.fedex.com/us/hushkit/history/index.html

True but then the ships will just register in the next ship registry haven, ships, however, need to dock in busy ports, Rotterdam, Yokohama, Singapore, Shanghai, etc.

There's something of a Gresham's Law of ships registries, whereby ship's owners seek the least-regulated possibly registry, known as flags of convenience:

As of 2009, more than half of the world’s merchant ships were registered with open registries, and the Panama, Liberia, and Marshall Islands flags accounted for almost 40% of the entire world fleet, in terms of deadweight tonnage.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_convenience

And yes, though I'd only just thought of the concept, there's literature on it, e.g., https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF03195134

This. Making rules and taxes for ships registered under your flag has no effect other than to have ships registered under other flags.

Regulating ships in open waters is difficult. If US environmental rules became too much of a hassle companies would ship to Mexico and into the US by rail, or the cargo would be transferred in nearby ports to ships that complied with regulations.

Any vessel operating in the English Channel, Baltic or North Sea must be burning low sulphur fuel or have scrubbing systems in use.

  http://ec.europa.eu/environment/air/transport/ships.htm

Here's an easy way for any country with a large port to regulate the seas: you can't use our ports if you don't follow our rules. All sorts of impossible things suddenly become possible when there's profit to be made or lost.

> All sorts of impossible things suddenly become possible when there's profit to be made or lost.

This only works when there's no alternative. For example, say Germany would prohibit nasty-fuel ships to enter the Hamburg port... Shippers would instantly switch over to e.g. Rotterdam, it's close enough.

For America there is no alternative except Canada - and if the federal US government imposes a rule like "have scrubbers or you don't have access to our ports", then shippers have to abide. In the EU there are 22 countries with a coast which means unlike the EU does a regulation there are 21 other countries willing to pick up the business. Just look at how much money goes off to Luxemburg or Ireland...

Yes, in Europe it would need to be an EU regulation (similar to how any individual US state would not be able to pull it off).

Ships also stop off at multiple countries, so just the US doing this would change quite a bit. The US also loves exercising soft power so this doesn't seem too far off once the EPA is run by someone who wants to protect the environment.

>if the federal US government imposes a rule like "have scrubbers or you don't have access to our ports"

Or they just offload their cargo to a "clean" ship just outside our jurisdiction in international waters. This is how shipping companies have worked around the Jones Act for quite a while.

Or then the gov't can require certificates of non-circumvention of rules so that if they try circumvention games like this they can still be charged hefty fees.

Ports have certain capacities, they can't simply double their volume in 1 or two years... In addition countries can implement something like "certificates of clean transportation" or similar to ensure their overseas voyage consisted of approved methods. Cheating could be diminished via container tracking, etc.

There's a certain amount of that which occurs under the Paris treaty, and individual rules in Tokyo and the U.S., mentioned on the FOC Wikipedia page.

You make it sound like it's impossible to regulate these things at sea. That is simply not true and very much possible. For example, right now the highest allowable sulfur content for bunker fuels used outside of ECAs is 3.5%. Obviously this requirement will be tightened further in the future.

What fuel-type does the Space-X drone ship use? (just curious)

The ASDS (drone ships) use diesel[1] for stationkeeping but they use tugs[2] to get from the port to the landing site & back.

I can't get engine details on the tugs[3], but wikipedia says[4] tugs often have locomotive diesel engines.

1 - https://www.thrustmaster.net/out-drive-propulsion-unit/porta...

2 - https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/wiki/asds#wiki_ships

3 - https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:43...

4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tugboat#Tugboat_propulsion

I've hit my limit for the economist this month, so I went and looked up the article. It seems these articles have been coming out since at least 2009, and the gist is that because these (older) ships burn heavy fuel, which isn't refined like gasoline.

And it seems the fix is to urge the companies to update their ships by not allowing them in ports, but considering how long these articles have been coming out, it looks like progress is slow on that front - and if it has changed. Shipping companies have been selling off some of their stock, and it would seem that at least a few of the older ships should have been included.

It's more so that they have no scrubbers on them at all than the specific kind of fuel they burn. A random ten-year-old diesel truck has a way better pollution control system on it (by virtue of it even existing) than the largest cargo ships in the world, despite burning way, way less fuel. It just comes down to cost and lack of pollution emission regulation at a global level, which should absolutely be addressed.

Is retrofit possible?

Technologically or economically?

Unless something is outright technologically impossible, it's awfully hard to separate those things.

Is it feasible is the real question.

Yes, it is. You add huge stacks of scrubbers to the exhaust system. It's not any different than scrubbing the exhaust of a truck's diesel engine in principle, just on a much larger scale. Of course, it is still quite expensive, so shipping companies won't install them until they're mandated. We're talking retrofits costing many millions of dollars per ship.

It is in fact largely the specific fuel that they burn. "Heavy fuel oil" is where the refineries direct almost all the sulfur and heavy metals originally present in the crude. The sulfur content of HFO can be, and often is, up to 3%.... cf auto diesel in the example 10 yo truck where a maximum of 10 ppm is permitted.

Incidentally, the kind of pollution control measures that are used on truck engines, eg cat converters, are unable to cope with the contaminants present in HFO. The catalyst becomes rapidly poisoned and ineffective. So a retrofit to conform with automotive standards is unfortunately not possible.

Thanks for the info. So if it's largely a refining problem, is anything lost if bunker fuel is simply outlawed? (Besides lower cost anyway?) Is bunker fuel an inescapable result/byproduct of petroleum refining, or can it be refined further into less-polluting, more desirable fuels?

It's complicated... crude oil is a mix of hydrocarbons with carbon chain lengths between say 5 and 40+, plus various impurities such as sulfur. It is refined into gasoline (~7-12 carbon atoms per molecule), diesel (~12-18) etc, with bunker fuel containing the heaviest fractions. It is possible to crack the heavy fractions into lighter ones, and this is commonly done at most refineries.

However, what to do with the impurities? You can take them out, but then disposal becomes a problem (see image below for example). So, if possible, refiners tend to leave them in the product.

http://www.petroleumjournal.kz/imgdb/article_3/article_3_pre...

That yellow stuff is elemental sulfur.

I had a job years ago that involved software and (small) vendor-provided gear for ships and getting this stuff out deployed to vessels was a slow and painful logistical nightmare. 'Update your ships' sounds about a million times worse so we'll probably be reading more of these articles for a while.

For at least 15 years in Norway I have read articles urging local ship companies to switch to greaner engines running on liquid gas or even electricity. The progress has been made as occasionally I board an electrical ferry without unpleasant smell coming from the pipes. But it is very slow.

And this is not surprising as ships are designed to run for 50 years or more and engine upgrades are very costly.

Newer ships aren't necessarily much better. Mærsk's E class container ships still burn bunker fuel. The Triple E Class made improvements in efficiency and emissions, but are still burning bunker fuel at about 50% of the emissions per container than the previous class.

From what I understand, these ships are huge and cover very large distances. This requires a lot of fuel. Bunker is the cheapest fuel for this use-case (it, -- sort of literally -- being a bottom of the barrel sort of thing).

Not sure what the global impact would be of banning bunker, or (trying to) refine it. Economic or environmental.

With the disclaimer that I have no idea what I'm doing and there are probably many flaws in this reasoning:

A metric ton of bunker is about $300 (http://shipandbunker.com/prices)

The same volume of diesel would be about 315 gallons and would be about (https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/wholefarm/html/c6-87.... / http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=diesel), so about $500.

The energy density of the diesel is about 13% higher than the bunker (https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch8en/conc8en/energy...).

Assuming identical efficiency (no clue on this point), you would end up paying about 50% more for the same amount of "energy." We would also be dramatically increasing the worldwide demand for diesel and we'd still have the leftover residual product from refining that was previously used to fuel these ships.

50%+ margin increase on containerized shipping seems pretty significant.

A bit of clarification on which oxides, from the article: By burning heavy fuel oil, just 15 of the biggest ships emit more oxides of nitrogen and sulphur—gases much worse for global warming than carbon dioxide—than all the world’s cars put together

"gases much worse for global warming than carbon dioxide"

Do you have a source on that? My understanding was that they are short lived and block heat rather than retain it.

Well he was quoting the article, so you're really asking if the Economist has a source for that.

Looks like a combination of false and misleading. Perusing Wikipedia's list of gases:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Global_warming_...

The only listed oxides are CO2 and N2O. N2O does indeed have much greater potential than CO2, but its concentration in the atmosphere is only 270ppb, which is 20% over preindustrial levels, so its overall contribution is negligible.

Not false. The EPA quotes that "300x worse" number directly: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases#n...

The "false" part is all the other oxides emitted by ships that don't contribute to climate change. Sulfur dioxide, for example, cools the planet.

The added effect of one ship's N₂O emission has nothing to do with the preexisting level in the atmosphere.

Sure it does. Adding 1000ppm CO2 to Earth's atmosphere would be catastrophic, while doing the same to Venus would be irrelevant, for example.

Molecules don't block vs retain heat. They vibrate at a given frequency given the energy flow.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas

Which, in the context of Earth's atmosphere, results in retention or rejection of heat.

https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch2s2-1...

SO2 has a cooling effect usually: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1o34mn/why_does... but it can form dark aerosols that absorb heat (thus decreasing Earth's albedo)

https://www.epa.gov/so2-pollution/sulfur-dioxide-basics#effe...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_dioxide#As_an_air_pollu...

"""Sulfur dioxide is a major air pollutant and has significant impacts upon human health.[34] In addition, the concentration of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere can influence the habitat suitability for plant communities, as well as animal life.[35] Sulfur dioxide emissions are a precursor to acid rain and atmospheric particulates."""

So acid rain etc isn't really significant to you?

My question was specifically about global warming. Thus the quote of the thing saying "global warming."

But that's quibbling over the poster's word choices and narrowing and distorting the understanding of people reading these posts.

Why would you insist on that?

How is it "quibbling" to point out that these emissions are not, in fact, particularly important to global warming? Are you saying that I should just treat all pollution equally regardless of its effects and ignore the details? I don't get it.

This is not some meaningless detail. If 15 ships emit more greenhouse gases than all the cars in the world put together, that implies that everyone working towards sustainable cars is putting their effort in the wrong place and that climate change activists who don't talk about big ships are idiots at best, and scammers at worst.

If, however, 15 ships emit more pollution of some other kind, that's quite different. Especially when the pollution in question tends to have relatively local consequences, and is mostly emitted in the middle of the ocean.

I'm pretty sure using the phrase "worse for global warming than carbon dioxide" for something that actually causes acid rain instead is the thing that narrows and distorts understanding.

The author and editor of the economist made a technical error in saying that.

Having a strawman argument about sulfur dioxide about that without pointing out why the rest of reality doesn't like sulfur dioxide is the essence of bad faith argumentation.

Everyone reading the strawman argument is worse off.

Instead -

"Sulfur dioxide isn't as much a global warming issue as just a serious pollutant and we care because X"

"Bad faith," seriously? I have to mention the bad aspects of anything that doesn't contribute to global warming if someone says it does? What's next, someone says mercury emitted by coal plants contributes to global warming, and I have to be careful to say "it's still a serious pollutant" if I point out that it doesn't?

Yes. Especially in an area like this that is already full of noise and confusion.

Why don't you step up and improve peoples understanding instead of baiting a low information comment?

I guess the answer is you are inclined to not take pollution seriously and this is more fun?

Fuck me for asking for clarification and stating my understanding of the topic, I guess? You want to know what "bad faith argumentation" looks like? It's seeing someone post "Do you have a source on that? My understanding was that they are short lived and block heat rather than retain it." and responding with "So acid rain etc isn't really significant to you?"

If you think some additional context would help people's understanding, then maybe you should provide it, instead of making idiotic assumptions about people's views and sarcastically criticizing them for it.

>just 15 of the biggest ships emit more oxides of nitrogen and sulphur—gases much worse for global warming than carbon dioxide...

Oxides of sulphur are not greenhouse gasses. Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas but it doesn't come from burning fuel.

These links go into the actual reasons these sorts of pollutants are bad:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOx#Environmental_effects

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_dioxide#As_an_air_pollu...

Interestingly enough, there is some thought that nitrogen oxide emissions from ships actually cause global cooling.

It seems to me that many comments here are missing the point. To be fair, the article also seems to get it wrong. The problem with sulphur and nitrogen oxides isn't just global warming (though apparently N2O is a real problem, there). To my mind, the real problem is good old fashioned pollution as we talked about in the 80s. Acid rain, anyone?

I would argue that you are missing the point, although probably only by not being sufficiently cynical. Articles about how a handful of large ships pollute more than all the cars on the planet have been going around for years. They're almost always written to be highly misleading, to trick the reader into thinking that ships are far more important polluters than cars and that all the effort by environmentalists to clean up cars is either wasted or a scam.

Note that the title (both on HN and on economist.com) has changed to something much more reasonable. It used to say something like: just 15 ships emit more pollution than all the cars in the world combined.

To me it is almost self evident that the cars are a far more serious issue as far as global warming goes though I grant that might not be clear to all readers of the article. That is why I said that the article sort of misses the point.

That does not mean that the pollution from these ships is not just as serious; it is just serious for other reasons, and yes, it really is a big deal.

For my part, I don't think the article is trying to mislead or distract. The author is simply falling victim to the current bias of talking about every environmental problem in terms of global warming whether appropriate or not.

15 Biggest Ships Create More Pollution Than All Cars in the World (2013)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10716102

128 points by danboarder 457 days ago | 65 comments

Isn't it feasible for container ships to go electric ? They have such massive surface areas for batteries. I thought of solar but then the container loading/unloading aspects will become quite cumbersome, unless you could somehow put solar panels on individual container roofs and load those on the top. A logistical nightmare nonetheless.

A crude search yields this about Emma Maersk, one of the largest container ships.

She is powered by a Wärtsilä-Sulzer 14RTFLEX96-C engine, the world's largest single diesel unit, weighing 2,300 tonnes and capable of 81 MW (109,000 hp) when burning 14,000 litres (3,600 US gal)[31] of heavy fuel oil per hour. At economical speed, fuel consumption is 0.260 bs/hp·hour (1,660 gal/hour).[32] She has features to lower environmental damage, including exhaust heat recovery and cogeneration.[33] Some of the exhaust gases are returned to the engine to improve economy and lower emissions,[34] and some are passed through a steam generator which then powers a Peter Brotherhood steam turbine and electrical generators. This creates an electrical output of 8.5 MW,[35] equivalent to about 12% of the main engine power output. Some of this steam is used directly as shipboard heat.[36] Five diesel generators together produce 20.8 MW,[35] giving a total electric output of 29 MW.[26] Two 9 MW electric motors augment the power on the main propeller shaft

So you need about 285 Tesla Models P100D motors to power a ship of this size. Doable I guess. Again, I'm no expert on shipping.

One of the more interesting retro-futuristic ideas is to use wind power and large, high-altitude kites to help propel big oceangoing cargo ships: http://newatlas.com/cargill-ship-will-be-largest-ever-to-uti...

These ships are a very poor place for battery's vs cars because of how infrequently they recharge and how efficient their engines are. They extract ~2.5x as much energy from their fuel so the real solution is changing fuels and adding a catalytic converter not battery's.

PS: Remember, this pollution has a short half life, so it's simply not around that long.

No.

The combined power and capacity constraints make solar a nonstarter.

Specialised, high-efficience, very light, all-electric boats have been built. They top out at about six knots, roughly 1/4 the speed of most shipping of the 1980s and 1990s (more recent ships have slowed somewhat to about 18-20 kt for efficiency, called slow steaming).

We had a technology for low-fuel shipping, it's called sails, and achieved net speeds of 12-20 kt with cargoes. Commercial sail vessels actually operated through the 1940s, in rare cases, as fuel costs and limitations were still concerns. These ships could and did out-pace coal-fired boats.

They are, however, dwarfed by modern monsters such as the Emma.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustaf_Erikson

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windjammer

Thank you for the Wikipedia ride, now I'm kind of waiting for Larry Ellison to enter grain shipping with ocean skimming carbon composite monstrosities ;)

(Or at least for a Neil Stephenson novel about that happening)

Carbon-composite monstrosities? So ... Clipper Ships?

;-)

You're using power (MWh) to make your point, but the crucial practical issue is energy storage (MWh). According to this chart[1], bunker fuel has about 80 times the energy density of lithium batteries. Something has to charge those batteries, too, so there will be another fuel source required generate the electricity.

Container ships do have large surface area, and its conceivable - it might be practical to build a hybrid solar/diesel ship. I can imagine most of the system being packaged in containers with solar cells on the top, and batteries and inverters inside. They would then be loaded last, on top of of the load and connected to a ship-board motors.

1: https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch8en/conc8en/energy...

The challenge is that container ships don't have a roof over the containers. You'd have to have shipping container sized solar banks placed on top of each container, then wire them into the ship's power system. Every load and unload would add extra time spent unhooking, unloading, reloading, and reconnecting the solar roofs.

4U solar banks (each one fits over four, or some multiple, of containers). Cuts the annoyance down a bit.

Container ships also sail at night.

Its why this would purely speculative exercise would be hybrid - it would still need a diesel engine, it would just burn less fuel. Regardless, I expect the cost of running a ship's engine on bunker fuel is so low there's little incentive for this.

I see I made a typo - meant to write "MW" for power, obviously.

The issue is energy density, not motors. The ship burns 1,660 gal/hr = 6000 L/hr when at "economical speed". The energy density of fuel oil is about 10 kWhr/L. Googling tells me that a journey between China and California by ship takes 2-4 weeks. So for three weeks of economical speed, that is 30 MWhr of energy. That is the size of the largest battery installation in North America, the Tehachapi Energy Storage Project. The batteries will weigh about 25 times more than the diesel fuel would weight (assuming fuel oil at 13,000 Wh/kg and 500 Wh/kg for batteries).

That calculation is for a purely battery powered vessel. I think the person you replied to was suggesting much lower battery capacity, and running primarily while the sun shines, using non-stored electricity.

Still isn't enough, but it's a different calculation.

Let's do that calculation. It looks like if you covered the entire surface area of the ship in 100% efficient solar panels then at high noon near the equator you would get just about enough power to run at "economical speed".

Put on realistic cells and account for the motion of the sun and you won't have 1/10th the power you want.

Wow, I wouldn't have thought it could even get that close. But as long as we're spitballing....

If you're running on solar and you are only carrying enough batteries to last through the night, then your ship isn't carrying all that fuel, and the enormous engines to burn it (and, heck, alternators). So the boat will have a lot less mass, and a lot less draft - so you can significantly lower the power requirements. Add a SkySail, and relax your shipping deadlines, and maybe you could make it work?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkySails

Sail and relaxed shipping deadlines? Sure. But the engine being removed saves 2.3 kilotons and the fuel being removed saves 3 kilotons. On a ship that weighs about 50 kilotons and holds 150 kilotons of cargo. You can probably get the solar panels installed at less than 1 kiloton, and a battery that can hold a day's power is also less than 1 kiloton.

But even with an optimistic estimate of saving 10 kilotons, that's only a 5% reduction in ship mass.

You're also going to need a much bigger sail. The biggest skysail can save you 2MW right now. This ship uses something like 40MW or 60MW and solar panels might very roughly also give you 2MW.

So what you really need is a sail 10x the size. And once you have that, the question of whether your backup drive is diesel or solar becomes a lot less important.

You lost a factor of a thousand in there somewhere. 6000l/h * 10kWh/l is 60MW. So 30GWh total. Also lithium ion batteries are nowhere near 500Wh/kg.

So we might need about 150 tons of battery to match the energy, and that's the entire capacity of the ship gone. But batteries are more efficient, so let's say 50 tons.

It's possible, I guess, but not practical. Maybe if lithium air batteries live up to their promise it could be done.

And then I lost a factor of a thousand too. I meant kilotons.

1 Westinghouse nuclear powerplant like used in an aircraft carrier will make 100MW.

There have been nuclear merchant vessels in the past and there are still nuclear ice-breakers around. The nuclear merchant vessels were never a success, due to various challenges, some of the outlined in this article: https://www.flexport.com/blog/nuclear-powered-cargo-ships/

Huh the last bit of that article seems very pro nuclear container ship primarily due to oil price instability and environmental concerns.

Interesting read though, I wonder if the US's nuclear ship was a decade later and actuallytrying to be commercially viable if we'd have nuclear container ships right now.

I love nuclear power, but there is a huge gap between how the Navy runs their nuke fleet and how the civilian maritime world operates. Navy nukes are some of the most insanely anal and uptight professionals you will ever meet. It's a zero-defect culture, because it has to be.

The job of civil maritime is to provide commodity supply - the only way to make money over the long term is to be a low cost operator. The best (usually Greek) shipowners will milk every last dollar out of an asset, which down in the bilges means fixing boilers with duct tape and bailing wire. That's not how you want to run a nuclear plant.

> Such schemes used to be thwarted by the difficulty of measuring exact fuel consumption on ships. New technologies allow more accurate readings.

Why is it so difficult to measure fuel consumption on ships?

you bet whoever's paying for it knows exactly how much fuel each ship consumes.

Ships can burn a wide range of fuels. The cost per litre can vary enormously. The amount they burn per unit distance depends upon their speed. This means that whilst whomever is paying will have good control upon overall fuel price this may not map to fuel volume in as simple a way as the cost of fuel for a diesel truck would.

Transnational jurisdictions.

Former ship engineer here.

I only worked with Diesel, not HFOs.

Due to the rocking of the ship, it's hard to get an accurate reading of the fuel in the tanks. Fuel is transferred from storage tanks to a day tank, and a fuel meter can be used for that, but that only tells you how much you transferred, not how much you consumed. Unless you always fill the day tank to the exact same level (remember, hard to measure at sea) and at the same time each day, you won't know exactly how much was burned in a 24 hour period. And of course fuel consumption changes based on the ships speed.

This is a good, short explanation on how we measure tanks on ships: http://benvalle.com/Level.html

Edit: there is probably a lot of money to be made if someone can come up with a very accurate tank measuring method. I've seen some tanks use ultrasound to detect the level in a sounding tube, but sometimes those can be distorted if the "liquid" sticks to the sensor. Maybe some kind of 3d mapping? However not all tanks have an unabstructed free surface in order to prevent the free surface effect from capsizing the ship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_surface_effect

2nd edit: Maybe not, since measuring at sea isn't as important as measuring in port when the ship is not rocking and the products are being transferred to/from ship. I'll leave the first edit since it might be interesting to people.

> Due to the rocking of the ship, it's hard to get an accurate reading of the fuel in the tanks.

Would it not be possible to install a flow rate monitor between the engine and the day tank? If so it would be possible to estimate with okay precision flue usage for any given time period.

I Apologize for the naive question, because I imagine there's a reason it isn't done already.

Yes, and that is probably part of the "new technologies allow more accurate readings."

I've only been on one ship built in the last decade that had that, and you could read the number on a computer screen. (FYI, the computer systems and automation on ships are a joke, if you can do it better than the current companies, you could make some money. Also, tangentially related to why we'll never have fully-automated ships. Stuff breaks, and ships lose money every day they're in port for repairs.)

However not all fuel that goes to the engine ends up being burned. Fuel is always being pumped through the fuel line at a high pressure, and only a fraction of that is burned when the cam system actuates the injectors to inject fuel into the engine cylinders. The rest of the fuel is returned to the tank.

As for the ship I was on that had a more accurate measurement, I don't know exactly what was measured. I can only speculate it was the fuel in minus the fuel out.

Just to add on to your very good point, the reason these ships aren't (always) equipped with flow meters is also that they're quite expensive. My last vessel had one,the one before relied on tank soundings and what we know about consumption.

I was involved in a project that measured the fuel consumption of 1-2MW diesel gensets a couple of years back. It is not that hard...

Given that we can record how much fuel was put in, and how fast the motor was spinning at each point in time, why can't you model how much fuel is left in the tank? Is fuel consumption-to-motor-use very variable?

As for being variable, probably not outside of the margin-of-error. If the ship was full of goods, then it would be heavier, and would sit lower in the water adding more resistance to forward motion. So the weight would have an effect, but whether it's noticeable outside the errors introduced when measuring, I don't know.

It's up to the Chief Engineer if he/she wants to use an Excel spreadsheet to track fuel consumption (and most probably do). As for tracking it based on weight, maybe some chiefs do that, but I imagine it's not worth it for most.

I wasn't a chief, so I don't know what their responsibilities are in regards to fuel consumption. But I imagine they would have to give estimates of future fuel needs to the company based on the ship's schedule.

Absolutely, Chief is in charge of bunker planning. Fuel consumption must be tracked anyway because the charterer needs the consumption figures. After all, he's the one paying. The Excel spreadsheet definitely is a thing.

Why would we need to know how much was burned in a 24 hour period?

For the purposes of this article, it would be sufficient to measure how much fuel you transferred during a calendar year, and that's about as much as you consumed. The particular level of the day tank can be ignored as it won't even make a 1% difference to the total amount

We need that info for the day's run. Many figures on ships are calculated daily. Distance, fuel use, lube oil consumption, fresh water, etc. This is mostly from tradition, because it's quite easy to compute the vessel's position at noon using celestial means.

It's difficult to measure for outside entities.

For car fuel consumption, most countries can simply count the sales of gasoline and diesel, which are regulated and taxed so they know the total amount sold, and report reasonably accurate official statistics of total countrywide fuel consumption.

Ships move around jurisdictions, refuel whenever and wherever convenient, and it's hard to get the whole picture unless each ship reports to you what it consumed - and noone can unilaterally require that, as ships are under different jurisdictions; unless a requirement is included in one of the large international agreements, most ships can ignore it most of the time.

"The problem, he adds, is one of incentives. Ship owners, who would normally borrow for such upgrades, do not benefit from lower fuel bills. It is the firms chartering the vessels that enjoy the savings. But their contracts are not long enough to make it worthwhile to invest in green upgrades. The average retrofit has a payback time of three years, whereas 80% of ship charters are for two years or less."

"Hence the interest in new green-lending structures. ... The idea is to share the fuel savings between the shipowner and the charterer over a longer contract, giving both an incentive to make the upgrades. Such schemes used to be thwarted by the difficulty of measuring exact fuel consumption on ships. New technologies allow more accurate readings."

This is the exact same problem that arises in landlord/tenant relationships when it comes to things like insulating a property. Insulation might be relatively cheap and pay itself back in a few years. But the landlord doesn't have an incentive to insulate because the benefit goes to the tenant. The current tenant also won't insulate because they'll probably leave before they can realise all the benefit of their investment.

In theory, landlords or shipowners should have an incentive to invest, since it should improve their property and therefore allow them to increase their rents or charter fees, but for some reason this doesn't happen. Possibly consumers can't accurately assess the value of improvements so they are reluctant to pay more.

The measurement devices mentioned should allow both parties to have a more accurate way to share in the benefits.

It's a complicated dance of incentives and information...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry

Wish they had gone into more detail on this. It seems like a solid competitive advantage for the owners to offer lower fuel consumption & therefore a cheaper charter. Easy.

Anyone know if there are similar upgrades that can be applied to smaller ships?

This comment thread illustrates why HN posters shouldn't presume to write their own headlines for an article unless they really know what they are doing.

Maybe it's time to re-examine using nuclear reactors on cargo ships?

https://www.flexport.com/blog/nuclear-powered-cargo-ships/

Unless you can design a nuclear cargo ship that's safe from being commandeered by pirates|terrorists|nutjobs, this will never happen.

Warning: I'm totally ignorant on the subject.

It seems like oil gets refined with gasoline going to cars and heavier fuels going to ships. Can we really say that cars are so much cleaner? Their fuel is surely subsidized by a market for the heavier fuels.

You are not crazy and this is exactly the right way to view the problem.

A lot of the heavier fraction is cracked into gasoline.

Refineries play both sides of the market, specializing to take certain types of oil as input and then working their process and the various destination markets to maximize their return.

Here's one entry point:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracking_(chemistry)

"Carrying more than 90% of the world’s trade, ocean-going vessels produce just 3% of its greenhouse-gas emissions." The article says itself, shipping is super efficient.

So combine that with the next sentence:

By burning heavy fuel oil, just 15 of the biggest ships emit more oxides of nitrogen and sulphur—gases much worse for global warming than carbon dioxide—than all the world’s cars put together.

So all of the world's cars produce less than 3% of greenhouse gas emissions?

Sounds like we should work at optimizing other parts of the system.

(Eg. When you're trying to improve speed/throughput of a system, you focus on the bigger chunks first, not where < 3% of the work is done.)

You're ignoring the possibility that cars may emit only tiny amounts of sulphur and nitrogen oxides, compared to ships whose emissions are largely made up of those gases. That would be consistent with both sentences, although I don't know if it's true. EDIT: Looks like that is indeed true, see this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10716251

The article seems to imply in its first paragraph that sulfer dioxide is a greenhouse gas. But doesn't SO2 have a cooling effect on the climate?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_sulfate_aerosols...

I read 30 years ago that some cargo ships were being equipped with computer operated sails, which would substantially reduce fuel use. I wonder what happened to that.

Seems sails for ships this size would either be unwieldy in port, too little volume for much impact in locomotion, or too costly to maintain.

These ships could be nuclear powered - like subs/other vessels are already. That ought to make a huge impact on carbon footprint.

Oh that is good, right through pirate infested waters with no armed crew?

You can make non-weaponizable nuclear power.

And non explodable? Citation?

Yes, and it's not like staffing ships with security would hurt anybody's cost structure. Especially once they're not filling it with oil.

Increase the price of petrol. Many conflicts in the world are related to petrol. A significant part of military budget can be seen as a subsidize to petrol. There should be enough taxes to compensate all these hidden costs.

Wouldn't increasing the price increase scarcity, making it an even more contentious resource, thereby increasing conflict? On the other hand, a widely available, cheap resource is not worth fighting over.

Checkout "Freightened" - https://vimeo.com/202104276

What would be the economic repercussions if these ships were immediately shut down?

90% of everything.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/inside-shipping-the-invisible...

Why not just tax them for the excessive pollution?

The lede is false and misleading on its face. Excluding "carbon dioxide" from your list of "oxides" when discussing (and comparing with) automobile greenhouse gas emissions is absurd. The misleading claim is also clearly intentional, so none of the other claims can be accepted at face value. (No, shutting down 15 ships would not do more to address greenhouse oxide emissions than banning automobiles world-wide.) More than disappointing, and never should have been published.

This is why I don't consume news anymore except in connection with HN, Reddit, or Twitter.

I'm convinced that one of the reasons journalists do such a crappy job of reporting on science is that they don't even realize that describing methodology and assumptions is more important than the punch line.

Important is a relative thing though. The headline is more important... for attracting readers and getting ad dollars. Which is sadly the priority.

I'd understand if you said you replaced the popular press with academic journals or books by scientists. But Reddit and Twitter? That's an improvement??

If you scroll down on Reddit (and especially HN), there is usually a top comment providing missing context.

The article is titled "Green finance for dirty ships" - the misleading HN title (which doesn't show up anywhere in the article) _is_ the problem in this case, IMO.

Readers are pretty crappy at reading the news too. One would be wise to apply the same skepticism you have for science reporting on all reporting.

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

― Michael Crichton

It's somewhat ironic that the article is perfectly clear and reasonable, and only the HN title which is misleading.

Perhaps you should simply not read too much into HN titles?

> Ocean-going vessels produce just 3% of its greenhouse-gas emissions. But the industry is dirtier than that makes it sound. By burning heavy fuel oil, just 15 of the biggest ships emit more oxides of nitrogen and sulphur—gases much worse for global warming than carbon dioxide—than all the world’s cars put together.

It starts out with the pretty clear statement, that in terms of green house emissions they are small, but that doesn't make them not a problem. Isn't that a fair thing to point out? Shipping should absolutely do more towards stopping pollution.

Maersk is an example of a company that at least keeps this in mind - http://www.maerskline.com/en-bs/expert-blogs/guest-blogger/b...

The headline is:

> Green finance for dirty ships

Regarding "oxides" it says:

> By burning heavy fuel oil, just 15 of the biggest ships emit more oxides of nitrogen and sulphur—gases much worse for global warming than carbon dioxide—than all the world’s cars put together.

The HN headline is definitely misleading, but I'm struggling to see what you find so objectionable about the article. That sentence, which you haven't even attempted to refute, is simple and specific, and merely sets the stage for an article about finance.

The article certainly never claims that "shutting down 15 ships would not do more to address greenhouse oxide emissions than banning automobiles world-wide". It's only mention of oxides or automobiles is in the sentence above.

Because they speciously choose to compare ship emissions to cars, which emit almost no oxides in the limited classes they select (because almost all their emissions are in the excluded category). This is an bald attempt to make the problem sound extreme. If they are compared to other sources of oxide emissions, it doesn't sound quite so bad. For example, for nitrous oxide, sewage accounts for fully a third as much as fossil fuels. Burning of biomass accounts for just as much. Agriculture emits SEVEN TIMES as much as fossil fuel combustion. Of course, I only chose Nitrous oxides, which allows me to make this bold statement about how terrible agriculture is. They are cherry-picking misleading data to advance a thesis. That's not acceptable.

Ships are more like cars than they are like agriculture; so the comparison isn't insane. Especially since it demonstrates that cleaner combustion is possible even in tricker (smaller) circumstances. I'll go out on a limb and speculate that even fairly hefty price increases in shipping fuel (e.g. were bunker completely phased out) would barely budge end-consumer prices.

But, in this particular domain (non-carbon oxides) ships AREN'T like cars---that's the whole thesis of the story.

I don't have a problem with saying we really need to address pollution from bunker fuel. I have a problem with purposefully selecting misleading data to bolster your argument.

Then I don't understand what the problem is.

Comparing ships (which most people aren't familiar with) to cars (which most people are) serves merely to give people a sense of what's possible. And that sense is reasonable; making engines as small as those in a car, and that need to run under such varied conditions is a much trickier task. A ship should be able to do at least as well.

Now, there are other factors clearly too; such as carbon-dioxide emissions and costs. So some discrepencies are perhaps to be forgiven.

But then, the article never implied nor suggested that exact parirty between ships and cars was necessary. Nor does it state or imply that ships are the primary source for sulfur and nitrogen oxide pollution. It implies that pollution isn't irrelevant and states that reduction thereof is an aim to set the stage for what it's actually about: how improvements to ships can be financed.

Your complaints are unreasonable.

The problem is in the hackernews title, not the article.

Perhaps a better hacker-news onliner would have been "Just 15 of the biggest ships emit more sulphur- and nitrogen-oxides than all the world's cars"

We changed the title from "Just 15 of the biggest ships emit more oxides than all of the world's cars". I'm not sure how it ended up there—maybe the Economist originally had it?—but if the submitter wrote it, that's bad and violates the HN guideline about titles.

A similar story with that title was posted a while ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10716102

And the industrytap link has been posted to HN a few times: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=industrytap.com%20ships&sort=b...

IMO, the title should note that "oxides" does not include "Carbon Dioxide".

It's also worth noting - for those that will inevitably use this to defend driving - that the environmental effects of cars extend way past dioxide emissions.

That would run counter to the goal of these articles, which is to trivialize the importance of pollution from cars and make environmental activists look like fools.

The original title is "Green finance for dirty ships", and the article uses the phrase "oxides of nitrogen and sulphur", rather than just "oxides".

If anyone still doesn't know that CO2 is the biggest total contributor to global warming in recent times, I wouldn't put the blame squarely on this article.

There is a shitload of politically-motivated anti-scientific propaganda out there written with the intent of confusing people into believing falsehoods about climate change. And there are a shitload of people who fall victim to it. Contributing to that misinformation is not a good thing.

As something of environmental activist. No. These kinds of articles are useful because they highlight areas for campaigning that otherwise can be overlooked.

Ocean shipping isn't a particularly big contributor to climate change, so "they highlight areas for campaigning that otherwise can be overlooked" is just another way of saying "they distract you from more important stuff."

And why would they want to do that?

They're politically invested against action taken to mitigate climate change, and the best way to push those policies is to convince people that climate change isn't important and the people who say it's important are either idiots or lying.

The Economist? You clearly don't read it. It's strongly in favour of action against climate change. They sometimes disagree about the best actions to take, and mostly oppose subsidies for renewables, but they certainly don't say it's not important.

Why? I thought Carbon Dioxide was one of the most innocuous oxides released by engines, both in environmental and health effects.

That's true. As a pollutant, carbon dioxide is almost entirely innocuous, except for its behavior as a greenhouse gas. In that role, carbon dioxide is the most significant driver of global warming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Natural_and_ant...

Methane is worse.

A methane molecule is 72 times worse than a CO2 molecule in terms of "global warming potential" over a 20 year time scale and around 7 times worse over a 500 year time scale). However, we put a lot more CO2 into the atmosphere than we do methane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Global_warming_...

Doesn't that indicate methane is the low hanging fruit? I guess that assumes it's the same cost to prevent / recapture 1 molecule of methane vs. CO2... But if the next 20 yrs are the most crucial, methane sounds like a great target.

seems likely; after that, technology will hopefully have stabilized our energy sources

The total volume of emitted carbon dioxide, of which land vehicles are a major contributor, is a significant factor in global climate change. An insufficiently specific headline that can be read to imply otherwise is thus misleading.

Gram for gram or tonne for tonne, most other stuff is much worse. But mile for mile and kWh for kWh, the relative quantity of CO2 more than makes up for its relative harmlessness.

(Except maybe in dirty ships where there is much more of the nasty stuff per tonne of CO2 than in the exhaust gases of any other mode of transportation - they are basically using the skies over international waters to dispose of refinery waste that would be impossible to legally burn anywhere else)

Flagged, use the given title from the page.

Which makes danes one of the biggest hypocrites on planet earth.

We won't solve global warming by finding the hypocrites. We'll solve it by knowing the problems and resolving them (or, if we don't want to work 1 problem after 1 problem, imposing taxes on petroleum usage or gas emissions, but history shows that such laws never get through).

You'd find the biggest hypocrites among all the consumers buying goods shipped around the world on those ships.

Danes are not 'one' but 5.6 million, they don't all share the same opinion on the environment, on shipping, or on Maersk. But I agree that Danish governments have succeeded in making Denmark appear much more environmentally progressive than is generally the case and that is a form of hypocrisy.

Not only that but look at their taxes and tariffs for cars. That is hilarious!

Only until you compare the environmental impact of shipping / ton / km to other transport modes - at which point you realise that modern container vessels is by far the most environment friendly transport mode.

you know what's even more interesting, it seems like shipping fuel is heavily subsidized. The international price for bunker fuel is about $330 per ton. Oil is $50 per barrel, a barrel is about 300 lbs, so 7.5 barrels make a ton. That's $375. Why is the refined product cheaper than the raw product?

edit: many have responded calling residual fuel a "waste product" - it is useful and being used so calling a waste product strikes me as semantically incorrect. If it were being sold opportunistically, like a large proportion of it was going to waste but some was being sold, I would agree with that, but it seems like it's all being sold, right?

My guess would be that the other distillate fractions from each barrel have been sold for a lot more.

> Why is the refined product cheaper than the raw product?

Because bunker fuel is the absolute waste that remains after the refinery distills all the valuable lighter fuel components (from pretty heavy kerosene all up the way to gasoline and even lighter).

The stuff basically has no other use except as fuel for tankers... what refineries are doing here is, basically, selling waste they'd otherwise have to spend money to get rid of it. (On a sidenote, I can't imagine how one could get rid of bunker fuel except pumping it back where it came from)

Well, there's also petroleum coke, though you're broadly correct.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_coke

Come to think of it, the same is true for gasoline. No other use for it than to run combustion engines. Turns out we are all doing those oil companies a pretty big favor, unless we used their product, they would have to pump all of those distillates back into the ground.

> No other use for it than to run combustion engines.

Ordinary gasoline is a powerful solvent and cleaning agent. This is, interestingly enough, the reason that Bertha Benz refueled her car in the world's first long-distance automobile journey, in a pharmacy - it was sold as "Waschbenzin" at the time, which translates to "washing gasoline".

I think it's basically a waste product from refining which happens to find some use. It's like how slag is cheaper per ton than the ore it comes from.

Is that because bunker fuel is (more or less) the remainder after the lighter components have been distilled out?

It is because oil in a barrel contains many different parts. Refining is mostly just distillation. Chemically changing the product is sometimes done but is much more complicated and expensive. With just distillation, one will get everything from butane to kerosene to fuel oil [1]. The light parts (lower boiling point) are generally more valuable, with fuel oil as the gunk left over (also used for asphalt). This is also why "light" crudes are more valuable than "heavy" crudes.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=6970

crude oil is $50/bbl it has not been refined yet - the heavy fuel oil that ships use is a relatively undesirable leftover from refining crude into gasoline, diesel, and kerosene. oh, fun fact: you get more than 1bbl of refined products out of 1bbl of crude.

If I made a blend of gravel and gold, and sold it by the barrel at cost price, once you pick out the gold the price of the remaining gravel per barrel will be a lot less than the price of the blend per barrel.

Would anyone care to link to evidence that carbon dioxide causes an increase in temperatures? I'd be curious to read some of this literature.

Downvoted twice already –– I'm just asking for some simple links to the literature.

The downvoting is probably because your comment has nothing to do with the content of the article and is an obvious attempt to distract from the actual issue with an irrelevant discussion.

These may be a good start: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas

Reply on news.ycombinator.com