
New ways to foot the hefty bill for making old ships less polluting - ghosh
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21718519-new-ways-foot-hefty-bill-making-old-ships-less-polluting-green-finance?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/
======
CalChris
_Slow steaming_ is an improvement and it saves quite a bit of bunker. But
while bunker is cheap, it's really noxious; the Cosco Busan spilled bunker
when it hit the Delta tower of the Bay Bridge.

Boats are supposed to switch over to a cleaner fuel when they enter port. For
example, Port of Oakland is upwind of residential housing in Oakland. So this
is a public health issue. Even the terminal tractors (port trucks) idling are
an issue. Hopefully they'll switch over to EVs:

[https://orangeev.com/](https://orangeev.com/)

Boats are designed for a critical hull speed. _Emma Maersk_ cruises at 31 mi/h
on the open ocean.

[http://www.emma-maersk.com/specification/](http://www.emma-
maersk.com/specification/)

That bulbous nose on container ships sets up a counter bow wave to lower drag
but only at a certain cruising speed. However, shippers weren't paying a
premium for that higher speed and although it's more efficient for that hull
it was still costly.

So new boats are tuned to a more efficient lower speed (slow steaming) with
less powerful engines and even older boats are getting hauled into dry dock
and re-nosed for a lower speed. Overall shipping speeds are down and shipping
costs are also down.

[http://www.seatrade-maritime.com/news/americas/the-
economics...](http://www.seatrade-maritime.com/news/americas/the-economics-of-
slow-steaming.html)

While the new Panama Canal extension could be a fiasco in its own right (100
years later and not nearly as well built; it leaks) new canals could improve
things. The Thai Canal could make the Suez route more competitive than the
Panama route for Asia to Europe.

Lastly, like airlines, it's really hard to make money in shipping. Witness the
Hanjin bankruptcy:

[http://gcaptain.com/south-korea-court-hanjin-to-declare-
bank...](http://gcaptain.com/south-korea-court-hanjin-to-declare-bankruptcy-
this-month/)

The City of Oakland owns the Port of Oakland and we don't make much money off
of it either. $16M/yr for both the airport and the port, last time I checked.

~~~
samstave
You might really like this book [0] -- while its talking about richmond, on
NPR the other day they were talking to the author and he talks about how the
port of oakland brings in 2 trillion dollars (or maybe it was all west coast
ports) in economic GDP spending so its many billions of dollars of merchandise
(10 billion tons per year) that flow through the port.

No way EVER that oakland would do anything to the port. The port was setup
initially to export the war machine to Vietnam when we were fighting them -
the logistics, experience and connections to Asia are more strong with Oakland
than any other port...

One of our largest exports from there is arga and wine, heading to asia's
REALLY large middle class, obv our inports in computers/electronics are
gigantic.

Yeah, oakland should do a better job "profiting" from these exports and
provide better services to their residents, but that is one of the most
important ports we have.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Refinery-Town-Money-Remaking-
American...](https://www.amazon.com/Refinery-Town-Money-Remaking-
American/dp/0807094269)

~~~
mmagin
Uh, Oakland is way down the list from Long Beach and Los Angeles:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ports_in_the_United_St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ports_in_the_United_States)

~~~
samstave
Yeah I think that the point the author of that book was making is that oakland
is an import/export port - where most others are primarily importing...

He stated they are in the process of installing a refrigeration area such that
they can start exporting meats to china.

------
kogepathic
_> That also imperils banks across the world, which have lent $400bn secured
on smoke-spewing ships._

So, why should we care? Presumably the banks have paid analysts to determine
that was a sound investment.

If governments are doing their jobs, banks should be able to eat this kind of
loss without becoming insolvent. Otherwise why bother having regulations at
all, if every minor hiccup means taxpayers have to bail out the banks?

Why do I care if shipping companies go out of business because of over
capacity? Isn't that what market forces are all about?

So we should keep dangerously polluting ships running, because the banks that
loan the shippers money will lose their shirts for several quarters if the
shipping company goes bust?

~~~
CalChris
_So, why should we care?_

Unprofitable ships are scuttled intentionally. Insurance companies then have
to pay off the loss and the seas have to eat the pollution. I'm not sure how
those very real externalities fit in with your free market trivialization.

~~~
joe_the_user
I think the GP is making an appeal to how regulation should work.

Ideally, regulation should make it so bank stock holders eat the losses for
poorly thought-out loans and should prevent all the various sleazy ways
international shippers escape responsibility for their decisions.

What happens, though, is because regulators can't do that, they wind-up paying
shippers and other polluters to change the bad decisions they already profited
from (providing extra credit to upgrade ships, for example).

It is a shame but what can you do?

~~~
kogepathic
_> Ideally, regulation should make it so bank stock holders eat the losses for
poorly thought-out loans and should prevent all the various sleazy ways
international shippers escape responsibility for their decisions_

Exactly. I'm fine for ports to ban polluting ships and for the companies who
own these ships to go out of business. It will be better for the environment
to have these ships out of service.

However it sounds like the major issue to overcome is the banking industry's
unwillingness to lend more money to the shipping industry (e.g. throwing good
money after bad)

Ideally this wouldn't be a problem as banks would admit the loans were a poor
investment and write them down

------
userbinator
It is interesting to note that the types of engines used in these large ships
are among the most efficient:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake_specific_fuel_consumptio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake_specific_fuel_consumption#Examples_of_values_of_BSFC_for_shaft_engines)

The pollution has more to do with the type of fuel used.

~~~
dredmorbius
And lack of pollution controls.

~~~
mc32
Since no country can regulate the seas, perhaps regulate your costal waters
and heavily disincentivize these heavy polluters from docking in your ports
-enough countries get on board and it becomes the rule, the tyranny of the
minority as it were, because it's not as though other less regulating
countries would regulate against less polluting ships.

~~~
a3n
Any country can, if they choose, regulate their registered ships.

~~~
rosser
They should also be able to regulate ships that enter their territorial
waters. "Oh, you burn bunker oil and don't scrub the exhaust? Can't dock
here..."

~~~
amorphid
At least one airport does this with planes, John Wayne Airport in Orange
County, CA. In the 1980s, they implemented stricter controls over how much
noise planes flying in & out can make. [1]

On related note, FedEx flew (flies?) Boeing 727s, a rather noisy plane by
commercial jet standards. They knew that plane noise was increasingly become
an undesirable trait, and managing noise levels needed to be made a priority.
At some point, FedEx decided to that retrofitting 727s to produce less noise
was a sound investment, so they​ built a hush kit. [2] It'd be interesting to
learn whether the development of hush kits was a proactive and/or reactive
decision.

I suspect that a large enough country like the USA could heavily incentivize
for more efficient shipping. The USA could levy a tax on goods shipped via
inefficient ships. All they'd have to do is have enough information about the
supply chain to reasonably enforce the tax. Sure, dodging the tax could be
gamed, but compliance is a different issue. While the USA couldn't tell
Canadian ports what to do, they could tax goods which entered Canadian ports
when those goods enter the USA.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne_Airport#Aircraft_no...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne_Airport#Aircraft_noise_abatement_and_curfew)

[2]
[http://www.fedex.com/us/hushkit/history/index.html](http://www.fedex.com/us/hushkit/history/index.html)

------
Broken_Hippo
I've hit my limit for the economist this month, so I went and looked up the
article. It seems these articles have been coming out since at least 2009, and
the gist is that because these (older) ships burn heavy fuel, which isn't
refined like gasoline.

And it seems the fix is to urge the companies to update their ships by not
allowing them in ports, but considering how long these articles have been
coming out, it looks like progress is slow on that front - and if it has
changed. Shipping companies have been selling off some of their stock, and it
would seem that at least a few of the older ships should have been included.

~~~
CydeWeys
It's more so that they have no scrubbers on them at all than the specific kind
of fuel they burn. A random ten-year-old diesel truck has a way better
pollution control system on it (by virtue of it even existing) than the
largest cargo ships in the world, despite burning way, way less fuel. It just
comes down to cost and lack of pollution emission regulation at a global
level, which should absolutely be addressed.

~~~
tootie
Is retrofit possible?

~~~
usrusr
Technologically or economically?

~~~
jerf
Unless something is outright technologically impossible, it's awfully hard to
separate those things.

------
anonu
A bit of clarification on which oxides, from the article: By burning heavy
fuel oil, just 15 of the biggest ships emit more oxides of nitrogen and
sulphur—gases much worse for global warming than carbon dioxide—than all the
world’s cars put together

~~~
mikeash
"gases much worse for global warming than carbon dioxide"

Do you have a source on that? My understanding was that they are short lived
and block heat rather than retain it.

~~~
djsumdog
Well he was quoting the article, so you're really asking if the Economist has
a source for that.

~~~
mikeash
Looks like a combination of false and misleading. Perusing Wikipedia's list of
gases:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Global_warming_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Global_warming_potential)

The only listed oxides are CO2 and N2O. N2O does indeed have much greater
potential than CO2, but its concentration in the atmosphere is only 270ppb,
which is 20% over preindustrial levels, so its overall contribution is
negligible.

~~~
mrkurt
Not false. The EPA quotes that "300x worse" number directly:
[https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-
gases#n...](https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-
gases#nitrous-oxide)

~~~
mikeash
The "false" part is all the other oxides emitted by ships that don't
contribute to climate change. Sulfur dioxide, for example, cools the planet.

------
upofadown
>just 15 of the biggest ships emit more oxides of nitrogen and sulphur—gases
much worse for global warming than carbon dioxide...

Oxides of sulphur are not greenhouse gasses. Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas
but it doesn't come from burning fuel.

These links go into the actual reasons these sorts of pollutants are bad:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOx#Environmental_effects](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOx#Environmental_effects)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_dioxide#As_an_air_pollu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_dioxide#As_an_air_pollutant)

Interestingly enough, there is some thought that nitrogen oxide emissions from
ships actually cause global cooling.

------
goodcanadian
It seems to me that many comments here are missing the point. To be fair, the
article also seems to get it wrong. The problem with sulphur and nitrogen
oxides isn't just global warming (though apparently N2O is a real problem,
there). To my mind, the real problem is good old fashioned pollution as we
talked about in the 80s. Acid rain, anyone?

~~~
mikeash
I would argue that you are missing the point, although probably only by not
being sufficiently cynical. Articles about how a handful of large ships
pollute more than all the cars on the planet have been going around for years.
They're almost always written to be highly misleading, to trick the reader
into thinking that ships are far more important polluters than cars and that
all the effort by environmentalists to clean up cars is either wasted or a
scam.

Note that the title (both on HN and on economist.com) has changed to something
much more reasonable. It used to say something like: just 15 ships emit more
pollution than all the cars in the world combined.

~~~
goodcanadian
To me it is almost self evident that the cars are a far more serious issue as
far as global warming goes though I grant that might not be clear to all
readers of the article. That is why I said that the article sort of misses the
point.

That does not mean that the pollution from these ships is not just as serious;
it is just serious for other reasons, and yes, it really is a big deal.

For my part, I don't think the article is trying to mislead or distract. The
author is simply falling victim to the current bias of talking​ about every
environmental problem in terms of global warming whether appropriate or not.

------
igravious
15 Biggest Ships Create More Pollution Than All Cars in the World (2013)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10716102](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10716102)

 _128 points by danboarder 457 days ago | 65 comments_

------
deepGem
Isn't it feasible for container ships to go electric ? They have such massive
surface areas for batteries. I thought of solar but then the container
loading/unloading aspects will become quite cumbersome, unless you could
somehow put solar panels on individual container roofs and load those on the
top. A logistical nightmare nonetheless.

A crude search yields this about Emma Maersk, one of the largest container
ships.

She is powered by a Wärtsilä-Sulzer 14RTFLEX96-C engine, the world's largest
single diesel unit, weighing 2,300 tonnes and capable of 81 MW (109,000 hp)
when burning 14,000 litres (3,600 US gal)[31] of heavy fuel oil per hour. At
economical speed, fuel consumption is 0.260 bs/hp·hour (1,660 gal/hour).[32]
She has features to lower environmental damage, including exhaust heat
recovery and cogeneration.[33] Some of the exhaust gases are returned to the
engine to improve economy and lower emissions,[34] and some are passed through
a steam generator which then powers a Peter Brotherhood steam turbine and
electrical generators. This creates an electrical output of 8.5 MW,[35]
equivalent to about 12% of the main engine power output. Some of this steam is
used directly as shipboard heat.[36] Five diesel generators together produce
20.8 MW,[35] giving a total electric output of 29 MW.[26] Two 9 MW electric
motors augment the power on the main propeller shaft

So you need about 285 Tesla Models P100D motors to power a ship of this size.
Doable I guess. Again, I'm no expert on shipping.

~~~
dredmorbius
No.

The combined power and capacity constraints make solar a nonstarter.

Specialised, high-efficience, very light, all-electric boats have been built.
They top out at about six knots, roughly 1/4 the speed of most shipping of the
1980s and 1990s (more recent ships have slowed somewhat to about 18-20 kt for
efficiency, called _slow steaming_ ).

We had a technology for low-fuel shipping, it's called _sails_ , and achieved
net speeds of 12-20 kt with cargoes. Commercial sail vessels actually operated
through the 1940s, in rare cases, as fuel costs and limitations were still
concerns. These ships could and did out-pace coal-fired boats.

They are, however, dwarfed by modern monsters such as the _Emma_.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustaf_Erikson](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustaf_Erikson)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windjammer](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windjammer)

~~~
usrusr
Thank you for the Wikipedia ride, now I'm kind of waiting for Larry Ellison to
enter grain shipping with ocean skimming carbon composite monstrosities ;)

(Or at least for a Neil Stephenson novel about that happening)

~~~
dredmorbius
Carbon-composite monstrosities? So ... Clipper Ships?

;-)

------
djsumdog
> Such schemes used to be thwarted by the difficulty of measuring exact fuel
> consumption on ships. New technologies allow more accurate readings.

Why is it so difficult to measure fuel consumption on ships?

~~~
Casseres
Former ship engineer here.

I only worked with Diesel, not HFOs.

Due to the rocking of the ship, it's hard to get an accurate reading of the
fuel in the tanks. Fuel is transferred from storage tanks to a day tank, and a
fuel meter can be used for that, but that only tells you how much you
transferred, not how much you consumed. Unless you always fill the day tank to
the exact same level (remember, hard to measure at sea) and at the same time
each day, you won't know exactly how much was burned in a 24 hour period. And
of course fuel consumption changes based on the ships speed.

This is a good, short explanation on how we measure tanks on ships:
[http://benvalle.com/Level.html](http://benvalle.com/Level.html)

Edit: there is probably a lot of money to be made if someone can come up with
a very accurate tank measuring method. I've seen some tanks use ultrasound to
detect the level in a sounding tube, but sometimes those can be distorted if
the "liquid" sticks to the sensor. Maybe some kind of 3d mapping? However not
all tanks have an unabstructed free surface in order to prevent the free
surface effect from capsizing the ship:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_surface_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_surface_effect)

2nd edit: Maybe not, since measuring at sea isn't as important as measuring in
port when the ship is not rocking and the products are being transferred
to/from ship. I'll leave the first edit since it might be interesting to
people.

~~~
mtanski
> Due to the rocking of the ship, it's hard to get an accurate reading of the
> fuel in the tanks.

Would it not be possible to install a flow rate monitor between the engine and
the day tank? If so it would be possible to estimate with okay precision flue
usage for any given time period.

I Apologize for the naive question, because I imagine there's a reason it
isn't done already.

~~~
Casseres
Yes, and that is probably part of the "new technologies allow more accurate
readings."

I've only been on one ship built in the last decade that had that, and you
could read the number on a computer screen. (FYI, the computer systems and
automation on ships are a joke, if you can do it better than the current
companies, you could make some money. Also, tangentially related to why we'll
never have fully-automated ships. Stuff breaks, and ships lose money every day
they're in port for repairs.)

However not all fuel that goes to the engine ends up being burned. Fuel is
always being pumped through the fuel line at a high pressure, and only a
fraction of that is burned when the cam system actuates the injectors to
inject fuel into the engine cylinders. The rest of the fuel is returned to the
tank.

As for the ship I was on that had a more accurate measurement, I don't know
exactly what was measured. I can only speculate it was the fuel in minus the
fuel out.

~~~
tawm
Just to add on to your very good point, the reason these ships aren't (always)
equipped with flow meters is also that they're quite expensive. My last vessel
had one,the one before relied on tank soundings and what we know about
consumption.

------
richdougherty
"The problem, he adds, is one of incentives. Ship owners, who would normally
borrow for such upgrades, do not benefit from lower fuel bills. It is the
firms chartering the vessels that enjoy the savings. But their contracts are
not long enough to make it worthwhile to invest in green upgrades. The average
retrofit has a payback time of three years, whereas 80% of ship charters are
for two years or less."

"Hence the interest in new green-lending structures. ... The idea is to share
the fuel savings between the shipowner and the charterer over a longer
contract, giving both an incentive to make the upgrades. Such schemes used to
be thwarted by the difficulty of measuring exact fuel consumption on ships.
New technologies allow more accurate readings."

This is the exact same problem that arises in landlord/tenant relationships
when it comes to things like insulating a property. Insulation might be
relatively cheap and pay itself back in a few years. But the landlord doesn't
have an incentive to insulate because the benefit goes to the tenant. The
current tenant also won't insulate because they'll probably leave before they
can realise all the benefit of their investment.

In theory, landlords or shipowners should have an incentive to invest, since
it should improve their property and therefore allow them to increase their
rents or charter fees, but for some reason this doesn't happen. Possibly
consumers can't accurately assess the value of improvements so they are
reluctant to pay more.

The measurement devices mentioned should allow both parties to have a more
accurate way to share in the benefits.

It's a complicated dance of incentives and information...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry)

~~~
lsseckman
Wish they had gone into more detail on this. It seems like a solid competitive
advantage for the owners to offer lower fuel consumption & therefore a cheaper
charter. Easy.

Anyone know if there are similar upgrades that can be applied to smaller
ships?

------
Bud
This comment thread illustrates why HN posters shouldn't presume to write
their own headlines for an article unless they really know what they are
doing.

------
rs999gti
Maybe it's time to re-examine using nuclear reactors on cargo ships?

[https://www.flexport.com/blog/nuclear-powered-cargo-
ships/](https://www.flexport.com/blog/nuclear-powered-cargo-ships/)

~~~
Tharkun
Unless you can design a nuclear cargo ship that's safe from being commandeered
by pirates|terrorists|nutjobs, this will never happen.

------
seizethecheese
Warning: I'm totally ignorant on the subject.

It seems like oil gets refined with gasoline going to cars and heavier fuels
going to ships. Can we really say that cars are so much cleaner? Their fuel is
surely subsidized by a market for the heavier fuels.

~~~
maxerickson
A lot of the heavier fraction is cracked into gasoline.

Refineries play both sides of the market, specializing to take certain types
of oil as input and then working their process and the various destination
markets to maximize their return.

Here's one entry point:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracking_(chemistry)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracking_\(chemistry\))

------
Radle
"Carrying more than 90% of the world’s trade, ocean-going vessels produce just
3% of its greenhouse-gas emissions." The article says itself, shipping is
super efficient.

~~~
caseysoftware
So combine that with the next sentence:

 _By burning heavy fuel oil, just 15 of the biggest ships emit more oxides of
nitrogen and sulphur—gases much worse for global warming than carbon
dioxide—than all the world’s cars put together._

So _all_ of the world's cars produce less than 3% of greenhouse gas emissions?

Sounds like we should work at optimizing _other_ parts of the system.

(Eg. When you're trying to improve speed/throughput of a system, you focus on
the bigger chunks first, not where < 3% of the work is done.)

~~~
vickychijwani
You're ignoring the possibility that cars may emit only tiny amounts of
sulphur and nitrogen oxides, compared to ships whose emissions are largely
made up of those gases. That would be consistent with both sentences, although
I don't know if it's true. EDIT: Looks like that is indeed true, see this
thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10716251](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10716251)

------
wcoenen
The article seems to imply in its first paragraph that sulfer dioxide is a
greenhouse gas. But doesn't SO2 have a _cooling_ effect on the climate?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_sulfate_aerosols...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_sulfate_aerosols_\(geoengineering\))

------
WalterBright
I read 30 years ago that some cargo ships were being equipped with computer
operated sails, which would substantially reduce fuel use. I wonder what
happened to that.

~~~
lsseckman
Seems sails for ships this size would either be unwieldy in port, too little
volume for much impact in locomotion, or too costly to maintain.

------
ianai
These ships could be nuclear powered - like subs/other vessels are already.
That ought to make a huge impact on carbon footprint.

~~~
brianwawok
Oh that is good, right through pirate infested waters with no armed crew?

~~~
kevincox
You can make non-weaponizable nuclear power.

~~~
brianwawok
And non explodable? Citation?

~~~
ianai
Yes, and it's not like staffing ships with security would hurt anybody's cost
structure. Especially once they're not filling it with oil.

------
reacweb
Increase the price of petrol. Many conflicts in the world are related to
petrol. A significant part of military budget can be seen as a subsidize to
petrol. There should be enough taxes to compensate all these hidden costs.

~~~
alphapapa
Wouldn't increasing the price increase scarcity, making it an even more
contentious resource, thereby increasing conflict? On the other hand, a widely
available, cheap resource is not worth fighting over.

------
hendler
Checkout "Freightened" \-
[https://vimeo.com/202104276](https://vimeo.com/202104276)

------
pfarnsworth
What would be the economic repercussions if these ships were immediately shut
down?

~~~
dredmorbius
90% of everything.

[https://www.worldcat.org/title/inside-shipping-the-
invisible...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/inside-shipping-the-invisible-
industry-that-brings-you-90-of-everything/oclc/879349083)

------
tener
Why not just tax them for the excessive pollution?

------
ajarmst
The lede is false and misleading on its face. Excluding "carbon dioxide" from
your list of "oxides" when discussing (and comparing with) automobile
greenhouse gas emissions is absurd. The misleading claim is also clearly
intentional, so none of the other claims can be accepted at face value. (No,
shutting down 15 ships would not do more to address greenhouse oxide emissions
than banning automobiles world-wide.) More than disappointing, and never
should have been published.

~~~
rayiner
This is why I don't consume news anymore except in connection with HN, Reddit,
or Twitter.

I'm convinced that one of the reasons journalists do such a crappy job of
reporting on science is that they _don 't even realize_ that describing
methodology and assumptions is more important than the punch line.

~~~
massysett
I'd understand if you said you replaced the popular press with academic
journals or books by scientists. But Reddit and Twitter? That's an
improvement??

~~~
rayiner
If you scroll down on Reddit (and especially HN), there is usually a top
comment providing missing context.

------
marcusarmstrong
IMO, the title should note that "oxides" does not include "Carbon Dioxide".

~~~
mikeash
That would run counter to the goal of these articles, which is to trivialize
the importance of pollution from cars and make environmental activists look
like fools.

~~~
mortehu
The original title is "Green finance for dirty ships", and the article uses
the phrase "oxides of nitrogen and sulphur", rather than just "oxides".

If anyone still doesn't know that CO2 is the biggest total contributor to
global warming in recent times, I wouldn't put the blame squarely on this
article.

~~~
mikeash
There is a shitload of politically-motivated anti-scientific propaganda out
there written with the intent of confusing people into believing falsehoods
about climate change. And there are a shitload of people who fall victim to
it. Contributing to that misinformation is _not_ a good thing.

------
hellbanner
Flagged, use the given title from the page.

------
holydude
Which makes danes one of the biggest hypocrites on planet earth.

~~~
flexie
Danes are not 'one' but 5.6 million, they don't all share the same opinion on
the environment, on shipping, or on Maersk. But I agree that Danish
governments have succeeded in making Denmark appear much more environmentally
progressive than is generally the case and that is a form of hypocrisy.

~~~
holydude
Not only that but look at their taxes and tariffs for cars. That is hilarious!

------
jerkstate
you know what's even more interesting, it seems like shipping fuel is heavily
subsidized. The international price for bunker fuel is about $330 per ton. Oil
is $50 per barrel, a barrel is about 300 lbs, so 7.5 barrels make a ton.
That's $375. Why is the refined product cheaper than the raw product?

edit: many have responded calling residual fuel a "waste product" \- it is
useful and being used so calling a waste product strikes me as semantically
incorrect. If it were being sold opportunistically, like a large proportion of
it was going to waste but some was being sold, I would agree with that, but it
seems like it's all being sold, right?

~~~
mschuster91
> Why is the refined product cheaper than the raw product?

Because bunker fuel is the absolute waste that remains after the refinery
distills all the valuable lighter fuel components (from pretty heavy kerosene
all up the way to gasoline and even lighter).

The stuff basically has no other use except as fuel for tankers... what
refineries are doing here is, basically, selling waste they'd otherwise have
to spend money to get rid of it. (On a sidenote, I can't imagine how one could
get rid of bunker fuel except pumping it back where it came from)

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jerkstate
Come to think of it, the same is true for gasoline. No other use for it than
to run combustion engines. Turns out we are all doing those oil companies a
pretty big favor, unless we used their product, they would have to pump all of
those distillates back into the ground.

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mschuster91
> No other use for it than to run combustion engines.

Ordinary gasoline is a powerful solvent and cleaning agent. This is,
interestingly enough, the reason that Bertha Benz refueled her car in the
world's first long-distance automobile journey, in a pharmacy - it was sold as
"Waschbenzin" at the time, which translates to "washing gasoline".

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malchow
Would anyone care to link to evidence that carbon dioxide causes an increase
in temperatures? I'd be curious to read some of this literature.

~~~
malchow
Downvoted twice already –– I'm just asking for some simple links to the
literature.

~~~
upofadown
The downvoting is probably because your comment has nothing to do with the
content of the article and is an obvious attempt to distract from the actual
issue with an irrelevant discussion.

