Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/01/climate-criminals.html
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Ladies and gentlemen, The Aristocrats!!!
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But hey, that Made in China/Vietnam/Sri Lanka tag makes that (what should be $20 tee-shirt) cost only $15.
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But hey, that Made in China/Vietnam/Sri Lanka tag makes that (what should be $20 tee-shirt) cost only $15.
But hey, that Made in China/Vietnam/Sri Lanka tag makes that what should be $20 tee-shirt cost the same $20 - but with an extra $5 profit for the shareholders.
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I’m thinking that the tee-shirt still retails for $15 (go check Old Navy or Gap), but it actually costs ~$2 to make in the sweat-shops, ~$5 in petroleum to ship it here, ~$3 to pay the sales clerk and then the shareholders get their $5.
But I don’t run back-end retail economics so I’m probably wrong.
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I’m optimistic about this. The same amount of sulphur is going to be dumped into the open environment by the non-complying ships (albeit with the 2% boost due to increased fuel consumption), so whether it’s directly into the sea, or indirectly via acid rain, it’s getting into the ocean either way. And on a macro scale, in the long term, this will lead to the total amount of sulphur entering the environment going down. The more of a pain in the ass it is for ships to use bunker oil, the better off we all are.
Ocean shipping is extremely efficient. The fuel cost to ship that t-shirt here measures in the cents. Far more carbon is emitted when you drive a few miles to the store to buy it.
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I’m not a back-end importer economist, but I see your point. Even worse is if you order it online and have a shipping box with inflated plastic stuff to make sure it doesn’t get damaged. Ugh. I hate that all the cool stuff I want I have to buy on amazon or elsewhere online.
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Getting it delivered is much better, carbon -wise, than if you drive a dino-vehicle to a store just to buy it. Once Amazon’s fleet of EV delivery vehicles comes online, it will be better still. Those inflated plastic packing airbags weigh next to nothing, and embody very little carbon. The box itself sequestors some carbon, although the lifetime calculation on that is challenging. Of course, better still is not buying it in the first place.
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I ain’t got no dino-vehicle. Pedal power FTW!
Of course, that’s not %100 true: I have to plug in the e-bike every evening and I do use the busses.
But it’s a start!
And my wife always jokes that I’m a monk when it comes to owning stuff. The more you own, the more it owns you.
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Guess where they’ve been pumping the human waste from nearly every ship and boat forever…?
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Some days I really think there is just no cure for the ailment that is humanity.
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
The Road
Cormac McCarthy
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No wonder Greta is pissed off. This hill is sisyphean, especially if we continue practices such as these. Abstract targets don’t help when they are ignored.
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Aren’t there cargo ships where all the containers are filled to the brim with toxic waste and deliberately sunk to “recycle” them?
What exactly did they think these ships were going to do? Try and drift across oceans? Stop all shipping until the Water Prius is working? Have we looked in to whales towing cargo ships like sled dogs?
Why am I rhe only one working on these things?!
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You can’t escape the laws of physics and if you use a chemical reaction to move things, you will get by-products
Incidentally, around the turn of the century I worked in a research group that studied the performance of catalytic converters for cars, back then there was a clear road map from the european union to reduce emissions to a level that we knew it was technically not possible unless a major technological breakthrough was achieved, and I mean a paradigm shifting discovery, one that would change the basic understanding of chemistry at quantum level.
In the absence of that discovery, all we could do is tinker with the technology of the moment, incremental gains in catalyst performance and stability, less metal load, fancy combinations of novel materials, better degradation management… All good science and engineering but miles away of what it was required to comply with the legislation that was to come
Funny enough, 10 years after I left that research group, the news broke that some car companies were cheating on the emissions tests. The little dirty secret that never came out is that ALL companies were cheating because it was impossible to meet the regulations. Conveniently, the matter was promptly dropped after some fines and a hand slap to the worse offenders…
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Bunker fuel is the absolutely nasty for the environment. We’d all be better off to just ban the stuff once and for all.
So some places have already or are in the process of banning open-loop scrubbers, like Fujairah and Singapore, also China. There’s talk of more ports moving in that direction.
Ultimately, I suppose it’s a question of what do we prefer, pollution in the sea or the air? While the IMO is keen to tackle some of air problems, it is also concerned about the economic impact of the shift. It was not too long ago that there was discussion that the US would delay the implementation of the IMO 2020 regs. The worry was that it would drive up prices in the midst of the next election round.
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At the risk of sounding like an apologist for polluters, 180M tons of wastewater is 0.000000013% of the water in the ocean. I think it’s worthwhile to consider whether this amount of wastewater will cause appreciable pollution problems, whether the increased fuel costs (=carbon emissions) from closed-loop systems are worse for the environment, and what the fate of wastewater transported to port will be, in terms of environmental costs. The ocean is vast, and the solution to pollution is dilution.
