The Shipping Industry’s Pollution Problem Part II: A Lack of Authority

By Adam Sarvana, DC Bureau

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

Although the original shipping emissions standards established in the MARPOL treaty went into effect in 2005, they were written in 1997, and getting the more stringent 2008 revisions past the onerous International Maritime Organization (IMO) regulatory process was a battle that exhausted the few environmental groups that even engaged in the first place. Furthermore, the rules still do not address CO2 or other global warming risks, and some observers fear it is now too late to make a push to change the rules again.

“When you look at that slow track” of revising the NOx and sulfur limits, said Jackie Savitz, a campaign director with the ocean-focused activist group Oceana, “in terms of global warming pollution we can’t have another twenty-year process. We don’t have that time to wait. So we’re pessimistic that the IMO will be the way to control global warming emissions from ships.”

But waiting has become standard for activists in this arena: the environmental provisions of MARPOL only became enforceable in the U.S. in January of this year, with the passage of the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships.

Those global warming emissions, setting aside the health impact of sulfur and nitrogen output, are themselves considerable ─ and they are growing. The April report prepared for the IMO’s environment committee, officially titled Second GHG IMO study 2009, found that combined domestic and international shipping accounts for about 3.3 percent of the world’s total CO2 emissions, more than railroad freight (0.5 percent) and airlines (1.9 percent) combined.

Unfortunately, the report noted that the interaction of black carbon with snow melt “has not yet been calculated for ship emissions,” a glaring omission when viewed alongside the mounting evidence that black carbon is second only to CO2 in its global warming impact. According to an April 15 article in the New York Times on Third World sources of black carbon, the substance accounts for about 18 percent of the planet’s warming, while CO2 accounts for about 40 percent. No other pollutant comes close.

For many countries concerned about the industry’s impact on the health of their citizens, this lack of information is hardly satisfactory. The Environmental Audit Committee of the UK’s House of Commons recently decided to examine shipping emissions in more detail. Its final report, Reducing CO2 and other emissions from shipping, published in May, was damning: it called the shipping industry irresponsible, the IMO a feckless waste of resources, and its own government woefully unprepared to face the danger.

“[T]here can be no excuse for the lack of progress within the IMO in the years since the Kyoto Protocol was signed,” the report concluded. “That the IMO has yet to reach agreement even over the type of [global warming] emission control regime to take forward, let alone decide any details — much less bring any scheme into implementation — suggest that it is not fit for purpose in this vital area.”

Taking a swipe at the idea that quantifying emissions is too difficult, the report stated, “It is perfectly feasible to track the emissions of individual ships, given they are obliged to keep their fuel receipts, and that it is straightforward to calculate CO2 emitted from fuel consumed. ... Most of all, ships must physically enter a port at some point; it is not as though this were an industry beyond the control of individual governments.”

There is legitimate uncertainty, however, about just how much control individual governments really have.