Like I remember that one European Cruise company's ships produced the same amount of CO2-equivalent than all European Cars combined last year (or was it the year before that?).
All friggin EU cars? This is what I would call a lever.
And for what? For the sake of one company making money by providing a kind of recreation that could at least be discussed as it provides recreation - but recreation could be provided in a more environmental friendly way as well.
Just regulating this one industry would go a long way. And there are probably some other low hanging fruits still undiscussed.
Sadly the whole discussion seems to revolve around what the individual should/could do. Often it seems to me especially to mask the fact that regulating some industries would be a faster and imho more efficient way.
Seems like BS. Such propositions are sometimes claimed, but they are for SO2/NOx/particulates emissions, not for CO2. Then they got misinterpreted as CO2 emissions.
When polled, people in Copenhagen don't say they ride a bike to save the planet, it's just the easiest way to get around. The city is also absolutely heavenly to walk in.
The problem is the employers who move to the sticks, far away from the cties, where office space is cheapest and assume their workers can afford cars and should commute. Not only that but they actively fight against remote work saying it destroys team effort.
One huge step in the right direction would be governments incentivizing employers to accept remote work for office workers who's jobs are 100% digital. This way we won't all be clogging the streets at rush hour making commutes easier on those who have to drive.
Heck, one friend of mine broke his leg skiing and his company, instead of allowing him to work remote, prefered to pay his taxi fares to and from work for 2 months saying WE DON'T DO REMOTE!. And the company is a top EV supplier that loves to boast how green they're making the world. You can't make this stuff up.
If governments incentivised companies to encourage remote work, this money would be unnecessary as many people wouldn't commute any more - saving money for everyone, saving the environment and allowing people to have a home life and see their kids/partner etc.
Remote working is a massive win-win for everyone, I wish the government realised this.
Whether or not that would be enough, who knows...
Working from home would be easy and save me a lot of time, but it's very much frowned upon, as you say.
No, it wouldn't.
Look at pandas, they are bears (omnivores, like us), living on a primarily vegetarian diet.
They sleep 16 hours a day and when they are awake they eat, because a vegetarian diet is not really energy efficient.
If we are talking about a true vegetarian diet, environmental friendly.
if we are talking about "I can be mostly vegetarian because I buy integrators from the drugstore" that's the same of eating fried chicken intensively farmed 4 times a day, in large quantities, for the environment.
What most western cultures should aim for is eating raw food, completely avoid processed food and, most of all, EAT LESS.
Pandas eat bamboo. Bamboo has practically no nutritional value so, no, Pandas are not very energetic.
None of the vegetarians I know need 16 hours of sleep per day, and I suspect that's because
- They are not bears, and so do not have the metabolism of bears.
- They don't subsist entirely off bamboo, or one foodstuff in general.
Besides, the a primarily vegetarian diet doesn't necessarily mean no meat, it just means realising that meat production is so absurdly energy, land, and water intensive that eating it on a daily basis is simply unsustainable.
The amount of energy that goes into cooking hour meat is negligible compared to the amount of energy needed to produce it in the first place.
Just eat less.
If you eat less, you automatically balance your diet.
You could live of three pieces of beef junkie a day for a long time, that's not so bad for environment as well.
They made you believe that "meat production is so absurdly energy, land, and water intensive" but that's because our information system is mainly based on the US lifestyle, the land of freedom (to destroy other people lives).
I grew up in places like this, where meat production is almost a natural process.
https://reportagedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/pascolo-...
The more you eat, the more the spectrum moves towards junk food.
Beyond true hunger, it's only addiction.
Addictions are never a good thing.
Look at Indians instead. We eat a primarily vegetarian diet. I assure you we sleep nowhere close to 16 hours a day. We also work in the sweltering heat etc, which our diet seems more than capable of taking on.
Yeah, eating raw food is great, and eating less is also great. "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants" and all that, but Indian cuisine stands as an example that eating vegetarian food need not be a bland affair.
I'm Italian my friend.
We live of vegetables, but we don't try to create the myth of the "mostly vegetarian diet" like most do about Indians.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-43581122
EAT LESS, that's all we have to do.
I could live of tomatoes, because I love them, not because I think I'm part of some kind of world salvation army.
Koalas eat eucalyptus.
Raw fruit is fine, veggies not really. Many contain substances that should deter animals from eating them. The digestibility of veggies usually increases when they are cooked.
wheat contains Phytic acid for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytic_acid which can be reduced with the correct dough process.
The beta-carotene in carrots is fat soluble and the cells are pretty robust, so you get more out of them if you cook them in fat.
Champignons contain a mild poison, which is not deadly for humans but destroyed when heated, digestibility increases too.
Buy them raw and then cook them yourself.
Of course I cook my meat and my potatoes :)
Changing diets yes. Changing driving habits, not really. Personal use of passenger vehicles accounts for a tiny fraction of transportation related CO2 emissions. The overwhelming majority comes from cargo ships and associated logistics.
A typical cargo ship will burn about 30 liters of bunker fuel (far more polluting than diesel) to travel 1 meter. 15 typical cargo ships emit as much CO2 as all cars on the planet combined. There are about 15,000 such ships operating today, with a further 30,000 slightly smaller ones. A single cruise ship company like Carnival Cruise emits more CO2 than all of Europe's car's combined.
Even if the entire world converted to zero-emission EVs overnight, it wouldn't make a meaningful dent in these numbers.
The inconvenient truth is that in order to make a serious dent on transportation related CO2 emissions, the entire developed world would have to give up its lavish lifestyle of internationally shipped products and foods. Sadly a harder sell then 'drive an EV to save the planet lol', so our governments continue to focus on inconsequential but easily attainable measures. And that is nothing to say of the fact that cutting down international shipping is at odds with free market capitalism that's driving our civilisation.
Fun fact: bulk carrier shipping is so cheap that in Australia, locally caught fish are shipped to China for processing and freezing and then shipped back here for retail. The pollution associated with this alone is more than the sum pollution of all Australian cars.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec3_23.pdf
https://www.ft.com/content/8bceef94-86cd-11e9-a028-86cea8523...
https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/cargo-container-shipping...
https://newatlas.com/shipping-pollution/11526/
https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/why-australia-is-not-maki...
My actual job is in the shipping route optimisation space. Sub-percentile improvements in fuel consumption for a single route result in hundreds of millions of dollars of fuel savings. Of a fuel that's both cheaper and far more polluting than diesel. It's pretty obvious that shipping fuel consumption and associated emissions eclipse personal transportation.
The inews source compounds this error, and is cited by the Medium blog.
The newatlas source confirms this: "The low grade bunker fuel used by the worlds 90,000 cargo ships contains up to 2,000 times the amount of sulfur compared to diesel fuel used in automobiles." The measurement is sulfur emissions and NOT CO2.
FT likewise discusses sulfur and not CO2: "Sulphur dioxide emissions from cars was 3.2m kt versus 62m kt from cruise ships, with Carnival accounting for half that, the study found."
The AFR link discusses seafood and not shipping emissions.
while this might represent a small fraction of the global total emissions, the CO2 (and other harmful particles) produced by cars is much more detrimental to human health since it will be concentrated in the cities and near humans live.
The cargo emissions should be less harmful as there are not many people living in the oceans and algae effect should also be considered as it produces most of the oxygen we breath.
Living next to major roads or highways significantly reduces life expectancy.
https://www.lung.org/our-initiatives/healthy-air/outdoor/air...
The scope is significant -- you can see shipping lanes simply by the SOx emissions, as the Nullschool Weather Visualiser shows, here, traffic between Indonesia and the Gulf of Aden is clearly visible:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2019/09/03/1800Z/chem/surface/...
But: CO2 remains resident in the atmosphere for centuries or millennia, affecting long-term climate. It's a vastly larger problem.
Moreover, particulates and SOx can be mitigated with improved fuel quality and stack scrubbers, at relatively low (though nonzero) costs. CO2 emissions are intrinsic to hydrocarbon combustion. We either have to stop burning anything with carbon in it, or switch to biomass (present-cycle carbon) rather than fossil-fuel based sources. Which is its own problem, though potentially tractable for shipping using various biomass wastestream sources.
That's either a typo or a thinko. 30 litres per metre would be 30,000 litres (a guess; 25 tons?) of bunker per kilometre.
From your own link "These mammoth engines [of the emma maersk] consume approx 16 tons of fuel per hour or 380 tons per day while at sea."
I don't have time to work it out but 30 litres per KM would be less wrong anyway.
That breaks down to 170 liters per km optimally or 237 liters per km at full engines.
Based on 1660 gallons fuel/hr at 25 knots.
That's 136 liters/km, or 57 gallons/mile.
And it's moving 157,000 tons (DWT).
Though how much is ghg and how much a matter of particulates? Seems most analysis shows the drive to the grocery store emits more carbon than shipping the fish.
Also fish is generally a disaster, but that's a separate topic. (Eating carnivores full of plastic dumping concentrated waste and disease in to the ocean is suboptimal)
Source: Figure 8.1, IPCC 5th Assessment Report, https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
http://www.etipbioenergy.eu/images/overview-fig-3.jpg
Worldwide, light-duty vehicles, mostly passenger transport cars and light trucks, account for 53% of transport fuel use.
Trucks are 17%.
Rail and busses are 3% and 4%.
All marine fuel use is 10%.
Aviation is another 10%.
All other uses: 3%.
For the US, use is even more strongly skewed to passenger vehicles: 59%.
http://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/wp-content/uploads/201...
Overall, transportation is a quarter of primary energy use, industrial uses are half:
https://cfnewsads.thomasnet.com/images/sites/3/2012/04/World...
Ships individually use vast amounts of fuel, but are small in overall number (there are about 60-80,000 registered cargo vessels), and achieve efficiencies up up to ton-miles per gallon of fuel, as compared with 500 ton-miles/gallon for rail, 100 for trucks, and less than 10 for cars. Moving cargo by water is the most efficient option that exists by a long shot.
Where cargo ships have bad emissions is in particulates and sulfur, based on what fuels are burnt and how. CO2 emissions, however, are quite low relative to any other transport mode.
For passenger cars, the low mileage expressed in ton miles is largely due to the very low cargo utilisation. I'm using a single passenger of 150# here. You can increase net efficiency somewhat, but even, say, four 250# passengers and some luggage makes for only a modest improvement, as the starting point is single-digit tmpg.