“We’re waiting on food goods like coconut milk and syrups, some spare parts for motors, we’ve got some fork lift trucks, some Amazon goods on there, all sorts,” said Steve Parks of Seaport Freight Services in England, awaiting 20 of the 18,300 containers aboard the recently freed Ever Given. Which of those things cannot be sourced from somewhere closer than Asia?
Oh, all right. Coconut trees don’t grow in Europe, where Ever Given is bound. But at least 80 per cent of the cargo on that gigantic container ship and the 370 vessels stuck behind it didn’t really need to be moved halfway around the world. The stuff could be made a lot closer to where it is wanted, which is how things used to work.
Now that the megaship has been freed, normal service will resume and 50-odd ships, bearing one-eighth of all the world’s international trade, will again pass through the Suez Canal daily. Egypt will doubtless reconsider its decision to leave the southern third of the canal single-lane, and everybody will live happily ever after.
Well, no. Putting huge amounts of dispensable, low-value stuff on massive container ships only makes sense to accountants. The life cycle of most of the goods that those ships carry is to be dug out of a hole in the ground, turned into consumer goods, shipped halfway around the world, and eventually buried in another hole in the ground.
The sole justification for this extreme manifestation of globalization is that wage rates are lower on one side of the world than the other. But it’s murder on the crews, mostly poor people from poor countries who aren’t even allowed ashore when the ships stop briefly in ports. And it’s hell on the environment, because almost all these ships are burning bunker oil.
Putting huge amounts of dispensable, low-value stuff on massive container ships only makes sense to accountants.
Bunker is the tar-like residue that remains at the end of the process of distilling and “cracking” petroleum, after lighter hydrocarbons like gas and diesel have been removed. Most cargo ships burn bunker. It’s so polluting that Ever Given alone produces as much pollution per day as 50 million cars driven the average daily distance.
A more relevant comparison, perhaps, is between shipping and aviation. Each accounts for about three per cent of total emissions of human origin, and both are hard nuts to crack.
Their shared problem is that you can’t easily electrify ships and planes. Electricity produced from nice, clean sources like solar or wind or hydro-power is little help because of the deplorable lack of long extension cables, and batteries are too heavy for planes and not long-lasting enough for many ships at sea.
That is why seaborne trade and commercial aviation were excluded from the emissions quotas countries signed up for. Instead, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the International Air Transport Association were asked to reduce the emissions of their own industries. With exactly the results you would expect.
The IMO promised a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from shipping for the first time in 2018: a 50 per cent cut by 2050. Not net-zero emissions by 2050, like 110 countries have pledged, but half that. Problem is, the IMO is not going to start enforcing emissions reductions until 2029 or 2030.
One way to cut maritime carbon dioxide emissions fast is to lower the speed of the ships; reducing speed by 10 per cent cuts its CO2 emissions by 27 per cent. But the best measure of all, until a new generation of wind-driven cargo ships matures, is to cut the volume of trinkets travelling by sea.
You can still have your cheap garden furniture and brand-name sneakers if you want, but make them closer to home and pay a little more. And put at least as much pressure on the world’s shipping industry for emissions cuts as popular opinion is already exerting on the aviation industry.
Gwynne Dyer’s new book is “Growing Pains: The Future of Democracy (and Work).”
