Cutting the speed of ships has benefits for humans, nature and climate – report

Now, there are still ways to cheat that, but my gut feeling is that cheating would be more expensive than just following the agreement.

Graduate the port fees based on average speed for arrival.

There is such as thing as unregistered ships. They are called almost always pirates up to no good: most navys will sink them on sight. Most ports will not allow an unregistered ship.

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-12.0/cent...

Also, it can be easily checked when the ship left/entered the port.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_steaming

Older ships are being modified. All engine manufacturers advertise those kits/modifications and their benefits.

Which will most probably cause the producers to want to reduce that inventory by not producing that much anymore, which will further ease the pressure on the environment. Yeah, that will most probably raise some prices, but as a species we can't have our cake and eat it at the same time, at some point we do have to price in the externalities.

I think its still best to focus our political willpower on accelerating the transition to electric vehicles. There is the obvious human health benefit of not having hundreds of millions of tiny engines exhausting fumes at the ground level of cities.

The fast ships are likely operating at inefficient speeds, which is only made possible by transporting premium cargo where the increased costs are absorbed by the ultimate higher prices of the goods. In a real sense, the world is paying too much by a psychological need for instant gratification.

Note that cargo ships have all sorts of negative externalities beyond CO2 emissions. For example, the studies that are coming out now on the impact of fine particulates... well, I’d short the Diesel engine all the way to $0. So while a carbon tax might be the best global win for all industries, this sounds like one that could be implemented tomorrow and have a real impact.

But off-topic: I wonder what computers would look like if there _were_ arbitrary restrictions like that. What directions would we have pursued in microarchitecture, distributed systems, etc etc if there was a regulation capping clock speed or number of transistors, or a rule that made it illegal to have asymmetric network connections?

In fact that probably would have already made the case for speed restrictions, as every multi-thousand-knot container ship created its own tsunami. There have long been speed restrictions on canals at a few miles an hour to avoid erosion.

Now as it happens the Reynolds number for a large cargo ship is almost certainly quite large, because it involves the product of the ship's velocity and some linear measure of its size, and container ships are huge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_number#Similarity_of_... lists ~5e9 for a large passenger ship, and the quadratic behavior sets in somewhere in the 1e3-1e7 range depending on how streamlined you are. So we're well into the quadratic regime in this specific case. But assuming that you're there in all cases is not a great idea. For example, it's not clear to me that a walking human is in the quadratic regime (though I am pretty sure a running human typically is).

Small fish are typically _not_ in the quadratic regime, I expect.

Of course, people need to value this rule changes enough to enact it.

The trouble is corruption gets in the way, by that I mean carbon based industries lobbying against such taxes.

The oceans and atmosphere get polluted because societies don't have robust enough property rights. Markets are really good at efficiently allocating scarce resources, so we need to figure out how to define strong property rights to allow damaged parties to hold shipping companies liable. As I see it, citizens, companies, and smaller governments (cities, counties, small countries) are powerless to hold large polluters accountable, either because there's not an adequate property-rights based legal framework, or the litigation costs too much.

There is 19 other ship classes that produce the other half. fast roro, reefers, ferries, , etc.