Tag: carbon

But country's shippers' body warns shipping emissions must be tackled on global scale. The UK government's independent body which identifies how the country can meet national greenhouse gas reduction targets, the Committee on Climate Change, the has recommended that greenhouse gas emissions from shipping should be included in future UK carbon budgets.Currently, the UK is committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050 based on 1990 levels, but to date international shipping and aviation are not included.The UK's Freight Transport Association (FTA) has welcomed proposals to incorporate the country's share of emissions from international shipping into the Climate Change Act, but has warned that maritime emissions reductions should be tackled at a global level through the International Maritime Organisation, rather then nationally or a regional level otherwise the UK's competitiveness could be damaged.Chris Welsh, FTA's General Manager of Global and European Policy, said: "We support in principle the inclusion of shipping emissions into the Climate Change Act. But shipping is a global industry and we must avoid taking on the burden of reducing emissions alone or else we will be put on an uneven footing with the rest of the world. This would be bad news for the ...

Global warming could be about to trigger a renaissance of the age of sail The Committee on Climate Change has called on the shipping industry to turn to wind power to cut the country's carbon emissions.It believes harnessing the natural energy could prove make shipping environmentally more friendly. Sail enjoyed its heyday in the 19th century when clippers crossed the seas carrying goods and passengers.The bulk of ships had three masts, though a few had five masts. However by the 20th century sail had been superseded by steam.Now the Committee wants the industry to go back to the future by "updating propulsion systems", which would see ships fitted with sails, including a new rigid design resembling aircraft wings or large "towing kites".The Committee's interest has been underpinned by a five-year study carried out by the Technical University of Berlin.It found that ships using sails as well as other conventional wind power achieved savings as high as 44 per cent.Shipping could also cut its emissions by using special paint on hulls to reduce friction and saving fuel by travelling slower."There is a wide range of technology which can be used to cut emissions," said David Baltson, the British Chamber of Shipping's ...

Environmental pressure will increase because shipping is seen to have an oversized carbon footprint Clarkson Research Services' (CRSL) managing director (CRSL) Martin Stopford told a delegates at seminar last week that high energy costs will push up the bunker prices while environmental pressure will increase because shipping is seen to have an oversized carbon footprint.Speaking at Moore Stephens' Op Cost seminar in London last week, well known shiooing ecenomist Dr Stopford outlined three themes for the 2010s: shipyard overcapacity; energy costs; and the environment. All were correlated, he said, and would lead to a renewed focus on costs.Heavy fuel oil, he said, is seen as "super dirty" and shipping is a growth industry so its emissions are increasing. But he cautioned that society has only accepted this at a "macro" level while micro-decision-making is only partially committed. He likened the situation to that of the 1980s.He said that shipbuilding overcapacity will mean cheaper ships and greater willingness to do innovative work while lower ship earnings will push the strategic focus towards cost control.Shipbuilding technology is very mature and so has no magic solutions. Cutting energy costs and carbon footprint will involve compromise and difficult choices. The options will include lower ...

Carbon pricing on the shipping sector is innovating and promising source European Union finance ministers have indicated support for the carbon pricing of international maritime and aviation transport.The ministers, meeting in Luxembourg, adopted conclusions on climate finance ahead of the UN climate change conference in Durban next month.At the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009, developed countries agreed to mobilise $100 billion per year by 2020 to help poor countries adapt to climate change and develop low carbon technologies. Since then, governments have been discussing the details of how to spend the money.Carbon pricing on the shipping and aviations sectors has been recognised as one of the most promising innovative finance sources by the upcoming G20 report on Mobilising Climate Finance.Development NGO Oxfam International, cautiously welcomed the conclusions of the meeting, but stressed that the EU should go further and "ensure that there are clear commitments that finance raised from these and other sources should be spent through the Green Climate Fund, agreed at last year's UN climate conference in Cancún, and not go through national budgets as it risks disappearing in national coffers".After the meeting Oxfam spokesperson Lies Craeynest said "a charge on dirty shipping fuels to finance climate action ...

Deep ocean was not an important source of carbon during glacial times After the last ice age peaked about 18,000 years ago, levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide rose about 30 percent. Scientists believe that the additional carbon dioxide -- a heat-trapping greenhouse gas -- played a key role in warming the planet and melting the continental ice sheets. They have long hypothesized that the source of the gas was the deep ocean.But a new study by a University of Michigan paleoclimatologist and two colleagues suggests that the deep ocean was not an important source of carbon during glacial times. The finding will force researchers to reassess their ideas about the fundamental mechanisms that regulate atmospheric carbon dioxide over long time scales."We're going back to the drawing board. It's certainly fair to say that we need to have some other working hypotheses at this point," said U-M paleoclimatologist David Lund, lead author of a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience."If we can improve our understanding of the carbon cycle in the past, we will be better positioned moving forward as CO2 levels rise due to anthropogenic causes," said Lund, an assistant professor in the U-M Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. ...

The black smoke that rose from the explosion pumped more than 1 million pounds of black carbon During the 2010 BP/Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil spill, an estimated one of every 20 barrels of spilled oil was deliberately burned off to reduce the size of surface oil slicks and minimize impacts of oil on sensitive shoreline ecosystems and marine life. In response to the spill, NOAA quickly redirected its WP-3D research aircraft to survey the atmosphere above the spill site in June. During a flight through one of the black plumes, scientists used sophisticated instrumentation on board, including NOAA's single-particle soot photometer, to characterize individual black carbon particles.The black smoke that rose from the water's surface during the controlled burns pumped more than 1 million pounds of black carbon (soot) pollution into the atmosphere, according to a new study published last week by researchers at NOAA and its Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) in Boulder, Colo.This amount is roughly equal to the total black carbon emissions normally released by all ships that travel the Gulf of Mexico during a 9-week period, scientists noted.Black carbon, whose primary component is often called soot, is known to degrade air quality and ...

Applying a carbon price of $25 per tonne to shipping or 'bunker' fuel Escalating greenhouse gas emissions from international shipping could be tackled by applying a carbon price of $25 per tonne to shipping or 'bunker' fuel, according to a new report from Oxfam and WWF.The report shows that the EU could broker a deal on a carbon price for shipping fuel at the United Nations' climate change conference in Durban, South Africa later this year.As well as controlling emissions from shipping, the proposal would also raise around $25 billion a year by 2020 to help tackle climate change in developing nations, say the charities. The revenues raised could also be used to compensate developing countries for higher import costs arising from the carbon price.The report, Out of the Bunker - Time for a fair deal on shipping emissions, says the proposal would tackle two of the major issues facing the Durban conference - agreement on future emissions cuts and finance to help developing nations.International shipping is currently responsible for around 3% of total global emissions - more than Germany and twice that of Australia - but has remained resistant to regulation, although the industry did recently agree to some ...

London-based body launches 'manuals' on the two main options for market-based measures Underlining its difference of opinion with most other national shipping associations, the UK Chamber of Shipping has urged the international shipping industry to keep the door open on all options to drive a reduction of its carbon emissions. The UK Chamber has welcomed the advances made by the International Maritime Organization to promote the reduction of shipping's carbon emissions through technical efficiencies but in a statement says it believes that it will prove necessary for the industry to go further - through the adoption of economic (or 'market-based') measures to meet governments' expectations and targets. The statement said: "International opinion is divided on the best model for reducing the shipping industry's carbon emissions. Some support the idea of a greenhouse gas (GHG) contribution fund, in which shipping companies would contribute as part of purchases of bunker fuel. Others prefer an Emissions Trading System (ETS), in which shipping companies would buy a shipping allowance or 'emissions unit', which they would then surrender according to their actual carbon emissions." The International Chamber of Shipping's (ICS) director external relations Simon Bennett told that the vast majority of national shipping associations within ...

Black carbon alone contributes at least 30 % You have probably heard about melting Arctic ice and the drastic decrease in glacier size. You may have seen it yourself during a trip to a favorite spot, and mourned the loss of beautiful snow covered views.And while you may be aware that the increase in greenhouse gases is to blame, at least in large part, for our planet's warming, you may not realize that a substance called black carbon is an accomplice, affecting everything from polar bear habitat in the Arctic to glacial fed drinking water in the Himalayas.A recent peer-reviewed study found that "Most of the change in snow and ice cover -- about 90 percent -- is from aerosols. Black carbon alone contributes at least 30 percent of this sum."Black carbon is an aerosol produced during poor combustion of carbon-based fuels (as opposed to carbon dioxide, which is produced in all circumstances), and together with organic carbon is one the major components in soot.Sources include diesel engines in various types of vehicles, furnaces, cook stoves, and forest fires, as well as some industrial processes. Some 25% to 35% of emissions occur in China and India (from combustion of wood, ...

Plankton accounts for a very significant flux of carbon from the surface ocean The world's oceans support vast populations of single-celled organisms (phytoplankton) that are responsible, through photosynthesis, for removing about half of the carbon dioxide that is produced by burning fossil fuels - as much as the rainforests and all other terrestrial systems combined.One group of phytoplankton, known as the coccolithophores, are known for their remarkable ability to build chalk (calcium carbonate) scales inside their cells, which are secreted to form a protective armour on the cell surface.On a global scale this calcification process accounts for a very significant flux of carbon from the surface ocean, and hence coccolithophores are an important component of the global carbon cycle, as cells die and the calcium carbonate sinks to form ocean sediments.In an article published in PLoS Biology on 21st June, a team of scientists from the Marine Biological Association and Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the UK and the University of North Carolina Wilmington, USA report the unexpected finding that coccolithophores use a similar mechanism to the one previously characterised in vertebrate cells, to facilitate calcification. They found that this process may be directly affected by the current increasing levels of ...