Carbon emissions from merchant shipping are nearly three times as much as previously estimated, according to a draft United Nations study leaked to The Guardian on Wednesday.
According to the report, annual emissions from global shipping equal about 1.12 billion tonnes of CO2, or an estimated 4.5 percent of global carbon emissions.
"This is a clear failure of the system," Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN's Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, was quoted as saying in the newspaper, after having been contacted about the contents of the study.
"The shipping industry has so far escaped publicity. It has been left out of the climate change discussion. I hope (shipping emissions) will be included in the next UN agreement. It would be a cop-out if it was not. It tells me that we have been ineffective at tackling climate change so far."
Full story here.
1 comment:
So I'm going to assume your question as to why goods are produced in China and then shipped over here is not rhetorical and you're looking for an answer. The answer, as with most things in life, is money. It's cheaper (by far) to pay Chinese laborers to make the stuff we buy than it is to pay (probably unionized) American laborers to make our crap.
I use to work at a port, and a study came out (probably 15 years ago) that showed you can ship more merchandise farther on a gallon of barge fuel (diesel?) than you can on a gallon of semi-truck fuel (diesel). Someone way smarter than me would have to run the numbers: is it more "green" to make the products in the US and then truck them around or is it better to make the products in China and ship them over?
Post a Comment