Hooray, a sector that is finally practicing what it preaches!
The shipping industry is finally going to cut its climate change emissions. That’s a big deal.
Member nations of the United Nations body charged with regulating shipping on the high seas adopted a first-ever strategy Friday to blunt the sector’s large contribution to climate change — bringing another major constituency on board in the international quest to cap the planet’s warming well below an increase of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
The strategy embraced by a committee of the International Maritime Organization would lower emissions from container ships, oil tankers, bulk carriers and other vessels by at least 50 percent by the year 2050 vs. where they stood in 2008. The group also said that emissions from shipping should reach a peak, and begin to decline, as soon as possible.
“IMO remains committed to reducing GHG emissions from international shipping and, as a matter of urgency, aims to phase them out as soon as possible in this century,†the group said.
Oh, wait, shippers are going to have this forced on them. They didn’t agree to cut its own “climate change emissions.” This is a forced solution by governmental bureaucrats who refuse to cut down on their own fossil fuels usage.
And that International Maritime Organization? Sounds like something all shipping companies are part of, right? Uh uh. It is a U.N. agency.
Of course
Yet despite the ambition of the current strategy for shipping, Rutherford’s group’s analysis shows that it may not be strong enough. The group says that to be consistent with the Paris agreement, shipping should emit no more than 17 billion tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions from 2015 onward but that the current agreement implies emissions between 28 billion and 43 billion tons. (No action at all, meanwhile, could have meant 101 billion tons.)
So, they’ll still want more and more. Surprise!
How will they do this? They do not really say. I supposed they have some sort of plan behind the scenes, but, you know what it will mean? Increased costs to you, the consumer.
It’s simple: just ban fossil fuel powered maritime shipping! After all, we made due with wind-powered ships before.
Sigh before.
Damn! Let me try this again. We made do with wind powered ships before.
Reason # zillion to end the UN.
The solution is simple: UN taxes on maritime shipping. They have always wanted independent sources of revenue that with no accountability. The only small problem is that everyone in the world can tell them to stuff it and they can’t enforce it.