The Shipping Industry’s Pollution Problem Part I: Low-Hanging Fruit

By Adam Sarvana, DC Bureau

Part I in the four-part series No Safe Harbor about the shipping industry's emissions problems

The shipping industry is an invisible and nearly unregulated environmental disaster, and if you haven’t heard much about its poor record, you’re not alone. Compared to power plants, cars and even commercial aviation, shipping has drawn little scrutiny ─ it gets few mentions in the media, and activist groups tend to focus their attention elsewhere. Seen as little more than an expensive tourist option or a humdrum conveyor of goods, the modern sea vessel is a mystery to the average person, either a love boat or a floating tractor trailer. If there were no pirates or seasick honeymooners, the shipping industry would barely register in the public consciousness.

This invisibility is unfortunate, because toxic shipping emissions bring about the premature deaths of thousands of people living near ports every year. Worldwide, cargo shipping pumps out more carbon dioxide (CO2) annually than the United Kingdom (UK).

Most commercial ships are powered by a thick brew of sulfur and sludge called bunker fuel with a deserved reputation as one of the dirtiest energy sources on earth, even among industry representatives. Bryan Wood-Thomas, the vice president for environmental policy at the World Shipping Council (WSC), which represents many of the biggest shipping companies (including Møller-Mærsk, the world’s largest) in Washington, D.C., called bunker fuel “the residual crap that comes out of [oil] refineries.” It is so thick, he said, that “if you put a chunk on your desk, it would keep a three-dimensional shape.” Engineers need to liquefy it through super-heating before putting it into a ship’s fuel lines because it would otherwise clog them.

The high sulfur content of this fuel, which leads to sulfur-heavy emissions, is only one danger. Ships are prodigious emitters of several so-called criteria pollutants, those that are most heavily regulated under the Clean Air Act because they are the most dangerous to human health, including fine particulate matter (PM2.5), nitrogen oxides (NOx) and sulfur oxides (SOx), the last of which not only harms lungs but can lead to acid rainfall.

In addition to these risks, many observers (including some industry representatives) consider shipping a low-hanging fruit in the battle against global warming. Arctic shipping lanes can mean a quick melting death for polar sea ice thanks to emissions of black carbon, a sooty residue that absorbs heat and settles on anything it touches. As David Marshall, an activist with the Clean Air Task Force, somewhat casually put it in an interview for this article, “If the Greenland ice shelf collapses, we’re looking at significant sea rise.”

Why has the issue not received more attention? It’s a tricky question to answer. Unlike oil companies, which have invested millions of dollars and years of effort to deflect attention from global warming research, shippers can sit back and let the environmental conversation pass them by.

“The industry knows it’s under-regulated, and they keep a low profile,” said Sarah Burt of the environmental law firm Earthjustice, which has sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over its failure to regulate shipping emissions. “When it does get attention it’s at specific ports, at the local level, not at the national level. ... The industry has managed to lay low. There’s no smoking gun that you can point to and say, ‘This is the reason’” for a lack of regulation.

John Kaltenstein of the activist group Friends of the Earth agreed, noting,

“A lot of areas [of the country] feel like they’re not affected by port communities. It’s a selective issue.”

Indeed, during a Feb. 14, 2008, hearing on a proposal to more strictly regulate ships in U.S. waters, on which more later, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) remarked that stronger rules would only be appropriate for “areas such as California that really have an air quality problem,” as opposed to nationwide rules that, he said, would put the country at a competitive disadvantage.