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Comment by SCAQTony | Hacker News Reader

And 16-container ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world. Perhaps these ships are softer targets to correct than tens of millions of cars?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-1...

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Can we have some proper references rather than the Daily Mail. Its the UK's equivalent of Fox news. They have a pro car owning readership, so any headline like this will be welcome to them

The National Resource Defense Council (NRDC): http://www.nrdc.org/international/china-controlling-port-air...

NRDC info graphic: http://www.nrdc.org/international/files/china-controlling-po...

Industry Tap: http://www.industrytap.com/worlds-15-biggest-ships-create-mo...

The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-...

Also even their language is phrased such as it says "16 of the world’s largest ships can produce as much lung-clogging sulphur pollution as all the world’s cars"

Note the inclusion of the word 'can' before produce. Making this statistic unreliable without further support.

Additionally, it refers specifically to sulfur compounds, not to air pollution in general.

Ships going from (for example) Europe to Asia switch to the cheaper sulfur bunker when exiting the EU. This could be easily fixed with international regulations so people wouldn't be able to use that misleading argument.

Respectfully sulphur is air pollution and causes significant harm.

From Wikipedia (section of Environmental impact of shipping: Conventional Pollutants)

"...Of total global air emissions, shipping accounts for 18 to 30 percent of the nitrogen oxide and 9 percent of the sulphur oxides.[15] [16] Sulfur in the air creates acid rain which damages crops and buildings. When inhaled the sulfur is known to cause respiratory problems and even increases the risk of a heart attack.[17] According to Irene Blooming, a spokeswoman for the European environmental coalition Seas at Risk, the fuel used in oil tankers and container ships is high in sulfur and cheaper to buy compared to the fuel used for domestic land use. "A ship lets out around 50 times more sulfur than a lorry per metric tonne of cargo carried."[17] Cities in the U.S. like Long Beach, Los Angeles, Houston, Galveston, and Pittsburgh see some of the heaviest shipping traffic in the nation and have left local officials desperately trying to clean up the air.[18]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shippin...

Sulfur compounds are one kind of air pollution. No one is saying that sulfur doesn't count, they are saying that other things count too.

Here is the write-up from the Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-...

> Its the UK's equivalent of Fox news

Not really, it's more like something in between the National Enquirer and the New York Post in terms of journalistic quality. Doesn't really make sense to compare it to TV news.

They produce as much sulfur as all the cars in the world (because cars don't produce very much sulfur). For other types of pollution, cars produce much more.

As far as whacky comparisons go, I'd always wanted to do some back of the envelope calculation comparing smokers' CO2 output to cars'. Also, always wonder how much cigarette filters (that are supposed to capture various chemicals) that get thrown on the floor could contribute to (e.g.) water pollution, if at all.

Why limit it to smokers? The simple, necessary act of breathing emits CO2.

It's a pretty easy calculation considering smoking is basically carbon neutral. Almost all the carbon in a cigarette was removed from the environment by the tobacco plant when it was growing and gets returned to the environment when smoked. At most, cigarettes redistribute carbon from the regions where they grow tobacco to the places where the cigarettes are smoked. If anything, cigarettes deposit a small percentage of its carbon into the lungs of smokers which, after the smoker dies and is buried, is essentially removed from the atmosphere.

However this is only the case for CO2...as you mentioned, cigarettes have a bunch of other nasty chemicals that become pollution when smoked.

These are the last remaining targets.

We started with industrial and home air pollution in the early and mid 20th century, driven by events such as the Great Smog of London. Smokestacks mandated, a great deal of process improvements on industrial sites, and natural gas & electric replaced coal in the home.

We basically solved most automobile car pollution over a period from the 1970's to the 1990's, with class ratings, better engines, catalytic convertors, and mandatory emissions checks, in jurisdictions with lots of people and not a lot of corruption.

That's over. Unless you live in a dysfunctional municipality controlled by the auto industry, or in a rural area where the pollution is so spread out it doesn't make much difference, you have mandatory emissions checks.

For the last ten years, and for the next ten years, we've been dealing with the problem in commercial trucks, a major share of interstate road traffic in the US. Progressively lower sulfur diesels implemented, catalytic converters mandated, and a supplement to the catalytic converters, a diesel particulate filter, mandated.

Regulations vary locally on the matter of small household engines, but the general trend for decades has been to phase out two-strokes in favor of simple four-strokes. A small two-stroke lawnmower will tend to be dirtier on some metrics than thousands of cars combined, and four-stroke engines have weight issues that may disallow handheld machines, so there is some consumer lament, but it's happening anyway. There's probably also some automotive emissions measures that will migrate to the larger ones.

As a result of all this, the road fleet is becoming exceedingly clean. The only things left to clean up are marine (bunker fuel), rail (bunker fuel) and small aviation (leaded avgas) engines, and we're at the beginning of the several-decade process of dealing with those.

Fuel sulfur content is both a primary emissions problem, and a signal. The catalysts required to cut particulate & VOC pollution down to negligible levels are apparently destroyed by sulfur, so it's only once you go to ultra-low-sulfur fuels that you get the option of cleaning up the exhaust. I'm not sure where that leaves sour crude suppliers.

I maintain that, with the rise in ship size, and progress in reactor design, we should re-open the issue of the civilian nuclear fleet. Ships have gotten three times as large in just the last ten years to conserve fuel and serve the globalized economy. Fuel is still 90%+ of their cost structure. The Maersk Triple E class wouldn't even feel weather conditions that would have destroyed the NSS Savanah, and we have developed exceedingly fine bathymetric guidance systems since that era to avoid grounding. We can build proliferation-resistant (piracy-friendly), passively safe reactors without even utilizing the basic nuclear navy 100% failsafe strategy of dumping the reactor in several pieces into deep water to avoid meltdown if cooling systems become overwhelmed. We have had to use that failsafe, best as we can tell, precisely zero times over 5400 reactor-years of the US Navy.

Ships are not usually found in the middle of cities.

As someone who lives next to the port of Oakland, allow me to say that ships are indeed an issue in urban environments, and they do cause large amounts of pollution. And besides the ships, there are usually a number of diesel trucks that are coming to ship goods to and from the port.

Recent state and federal regulations have made this less a problem.

Have you ever been to Long Beach CA? Take a look at the (frequently) dozens of containter and tanker ships idling just offshore. Any major port city will have the same issue, transport ships waiting, for various reasons, just outside of a port with their engines running. Any refrigerated cargo needs to be cools, which requires power, which means that they run 24x7 while sitting around.

there was a push to improve shore-power options for these ships a while back, but i'm not sure where it went. probably deemed to costly or intrusive by the shippers.

It is called AMP, and it happened:

http://www.portoflosangeles.org/environment/alt_maritime_pow...

There has been push back from cargo shippers, but cruise ships are using it. The port of LA has been pretty forward-looking about improving operations efficiency.

The problem is the proximity of humans to cars. The results are form a study done at UofT Eng Dept. The crux of their findings were that it takes much longer than anticipated for the levels of 'pollution', in various form, to drop in concentration with distance from the source. I think the following excerpt from the UofT press release is the most intriguing[1];

“The ultrafine particles are particularly troubling,” says Evans. “Because they are over 1000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, they have a greater ability to penetrate deeper within the lung and travel in the body.”

On a typical summer day in Toronto, Evans’ instruments measure approximately 20,000 ultrafine particles in each cubic centimetre of air. This means that for every average breath, Torontonians are inhaling 10 million of these nano-sized particles. These numbers increases to 30,000 and 15 million in the winter, when there is more stagnant air and less evaporation of the compounds."

[1]http://news.engineering.utoronto.ca/traffic-emissions-may-po...

If I'm not mistaken, those ships are more efficient per unit of cargo than smaller ships. It's one of the main reasons they were built.

Myths again. Sulphur is a relatively local pollutant. Ship sulphur emissions have probably killed a lot of people every year in Europe. Some say thousands. Well, that was until 2015, when the emissions regulations came into force!

Hurray for the European Union! Also Norway is participating.

http://www.imo.org/MediaCentre/PressBriefings/Pages/44-ECA-s...

http://www.airclim.org/acidnews/2011/AN2-11/ship-pollution-c...

sure, lets shut down everything and go tribal

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