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Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

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.

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