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Ships and sea travel
While air travel has received considerable attention lately for its contribution to GHG emissions, shipping has generally been considered a green transport option and has escaped much attention. Although it is true that shipping, on a per kilogram basis, is a much more efficient mode of transporting goods than airplanes, new studies are showing that CO2 emissions from shipping are significantly higher than previously thought. For instance see:
http://www.pa.op.dlr.de/SeaKLIM/Fuel_Emissions_International_Shipping.html
This is due to the sheer size of the global fleet and rapidly expanding international trade, which has doubled in the last 25 years. There are about 70,000 ships plying the world’s oceans. They consume about 200 million tonnes of fuel per year and emit between 600 – 800 million tonnes of CO2, about 5% of the global total. What is even more worrisome is that about 20,000 new ships are on order and they are generally bigger than existing ones so CO2 emissions from shipping will increase greatly over the next 15 years, perhaps by as much as 75%. At this time, GHG emissions from ships do not come under the Kyoto protocol.
So what’s the solution? Its unlikely that world trade is going to slow much in the foreseeable future and ships are still the most efficient way of transporting goods. What we need is a fleet of much more efficient vessels and some companies are certainly thinking along those lines. New standards for ships and innovative technologies are required.
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