Ships: 3x the global warming once thought

How bad? Shipping contributes twice as much atmospheric carbon dioxide as much-maligned air travel. And, cleaner marine diesel here in the U.S. won’t help this one.

The true scale of climate change emissions from shipping is almost three times higher than previously believed, according to a leaked UN study seen by the Guardian.

It calculates that annual emissions from the world's merchant fleet have already reached 1.12 billion tonnes of CO², or nearly 4.5 percent of all global emissions of the main greenhouse gas.

The report suggests that shipping emissions — which are not taken into account by European targets for cutting global warming — will become one of the largest single sources of manmade CO² after cars, housing, agriculture and industry. By comparison, the aviation industry, which has been under heavy pressure to clean up, is responsible for about 650 million tonnes of CO² emissions a year, just over half that from shipping.

Until now, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated shipping emissions to be a maximum 400m tonnes, but the new draft report by a group of international scientists is a more sophisticated measure, using data collected from the oil and shipping industries for the International Maritime Organisation, the UN agency tasked with monitoring pollution from ships. It not only shows emissions are much worse than feared, but warns CO² emissions are set to rise by a further 30% by 2020.

In other words, given the increasing behemoth known as Chinese trade (see your local embassies at Family Dollar, Dollar General, etc., and the associate consulate at Wal-Mart), we’re going to keep cutting our own environmental throat.

Oh, this also gets us back to NAFTA, back to the WTO, etc., and the lack of enforceable environmental standards as part of trade.

Thanks, Dick Gephardt, Bill Clinton, and yes, you too, Al Gore, amongst other Democrats.