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Ships fitted with ‘cheat devices’ to divert poisonous pollution into sea

independent.co.uk

141–150 of 155 posts

Re: Ships fitted with ‘cheat devices’ to divert poisonous pollution into sea

#141

Shipping is a pretty dirty industry, because of fuel quality they use and the general lack of oversight in the middle of the ocean. I was on the board of Corvus Energy ( http://corvusenergy.com ) while working in Norway, whose technology reduces CO2, SOx, NOx, and fuel consumption by up to 30%. One installation was the equivalent of taking 10,000 cars off of the road. Thankfully, there are developments in this space.…

High sulfur diesel is super nasty, and the shipping industry has to clean up, but it's not obvious how. I mean, let's say we forbid them from using high S diesel. What happens to this diesel then? Do we dump it in tailing ponds? pump it back into the ground? It's not obvious what to do with this. At least at sea S emissions are spread out minimizing impact (as opposed to localized) I'm not saying not to do anything.…

Electric cars give away fuel that ships can now use. Of course there’s nowhere to put fuel which shops used to use

Re: Ships fitted with ‘cheat devices’ to divert poisonous pollution into sea

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making it harder than it is. You can't pump any oil overboard anywhere, well above about 1 ppm if I remember correctly. In the industry you hear all the time about magic pipes being found during port state control and other inspections leading to extremely high fines and prison time. For reference, a magic pipe bypasses the oil separator making you able to discharge anything. Simply add another annex to MARPO…

MARPOL is utterly toothless and not enforced, and also only really covers 12 nautical miles from land.

Cool.. let's enforce it.

Re: Ships fitted with ‘cheat devices’ to divert poisonous pollution into sea

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's efficient in the sense that if you compare kgs of goods per km, but it's not efficient when you consider the great distances ships travel versus producing goods domestically, just to put those same goods on rail and trucks anyway.

If you consider the efficiency of shipping finished goods versus shipping the raw material (and, possibly, labor) necessary to produce the goods domestically, how does that affect the comparison?

This statement seems to assume the same shipping of raw materials isn't taking place elsewhere.

Ore goes from the mine, to the forge, the raw steel goes to the manufacturer. That probably requires a bit of shipping, doesn't matter which country it takes place in.

Re: Ships fitted with ‘cheat devices’ to divert poisonous pollution into sea

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wind cannot power modern transoceanic shipping. If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Stein's law. You seem to think that the present state of affairs is preordained or eternal. It is not. Today's shipping regime is an accident of current technologies, fuels, and environmental externalities. Future regimes will be shaped by their circumstances, constraints, economies, and values or awareness. They will be…

Yes, eventually the Earth will be swallowed by the sun, nothing lasts forever. The point remains, wind cannot power modern transoceanic shipping and neither can trees, deep phrases about the ephemerality of the world notwithstanding. Hopefully the future regime will be constrained by a means of locomotion that can sustain global commerce such that we don't have to roll back standards of living by the better part of a…

Timescales I'm considering are on the order of decades rather than billions or trillions of years.

You seem fixated on the status quo. Let go.

Re: Ships fitted with ‘cheat devices’ to divert poisonous pollution into sea

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, eventually the Earth will be swallowed by the sun, nothing lasts forever. The point remains, wind cannot power modern transoceanic shipping and neither can trees, deep phrases about the ephemerality of the world notwithstanding. Hopefully the future regime will be constrained by a means of locomotion that can sustain global commerce such that we don't have to roll back standards of living by the better part of a…

Timescales I'm considering are on the order of decades rather than billions or trillions of years. You seem fixated on the status quo. Let go.

Again, if "letting go" entails reducing shipping by orders of magnitude, then that is not something society is going to accept. People would go to war before suffering the economic devastation that would bring. If people need to let go of something, let's start with the phobia of nuclear maritime propulsion.

Re: Ships fitted with ‘cheat devices’ to divert poisonous pollution into sea

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Timescales I'm considering are on the order of decades rather than billions or trillions of years. You seem fixated on the status quo. Let go.

Again, if "letting go" entails reducing shipping by orders of magnitude, then that is not something society is going to accept. People would go to war before suffering the economic devastation that would bring. If people need to let go of something, let's start with the phobia of nuclear maritime propulsion.

Reality does not rely on society's acceptance or nonacceptance.

Re: Ships fitted with ‘cheat devices’ to divert poisonous pollution into sea

#147
post #40
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone read the "shipbreaker" novels by Paolo Bacigalupi. Good sci-fi that deals with this.

Now that are you talking about it, I probably got the idea unconsciously from "Tool of war", which is the 3rd book in Shipbreaker serie (haven't read the first 2 books)

You should read the first 2, it's a good series. Tool's character is different in the first two and not even really a main character in the first book.

Re: Ships fitted with ‘cheat devices’ to divert poisonous pollution into sea

#148
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Being bad to the environment' is not actually against the law, especially not in those terms. Perhaps you are confusing morality with law and trying to hold people liable for the former rather than the latter.

You on the other side, insinuate that asking companies to consider any moral obligations requires magic.

No, asking companies to consider moral obligations under penalty of law is what I think is wrong. The law exists to codify morality. If this is a moral concern, it should be against the law. We cannot expect disparate entities around the world, staffed by people with disparate values, to all magically think like an Anglophone Hacker News-type. In order to make expectations clear, morality that requires this level of behavioral modification ought to be law. In this regard, it has been turned into law, and whatever authorities we have have decided that this behavior is not illegal. Thus we conclude that the international maritime commission, which purportedly represents the will of the democratic countries of which it consists, does not believe this is immoral.

Re: Ships fitted with ‘cheat devices’ to divert poisonous pollution into sea

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, if "letting go" entails reducing shipping by orders of magnitude, then that is not something society is going to accept. People would go to war before suffering the economic devastation that would bring. If people need to let go of something, let's start with the phobia of nuclear maritime propulsion.

Reality does not rely on society's acceptance or nonacceptance.

[deleted]

Re: Ships fitted with ‘cheat devices’ to divert poisonous pollution into sea

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, if "letting go" entails reducing shipping by orders of magnitude, then that is not something society is going to accept. People would go to war before suffering the economic devastation that would bring. If people need to let go of something, let's start with the phobia of nuclear maritime propulsion.

Reality does not rely on society's acceptance or nonacceptance.

Society is a part of reality. What society will and will not accept is a limiting factor just like the limiting factor of energy density, hydrodynamic drag, etc. The reality is, society will keep burning fossil fuels until a cost effective substitute is provided.

I could turn around and say the same thing to you. Go take your proposal they were drastically cut international shipping and move containers with sailboats and biomass fuel to national leaders. You'll rapidly discover that reality disagrees with the feasibility of this solution.

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