Fred Pearce is a vigorous and determined British climate and science reporter whose pieces don’t disguise his personal opinions. He’s a campaigner only too happy to share his outrage as he disturbs the status quo. The Tracker finds his pieces generally refreshing in their candor, and The Tracker also gently advises Pearce’s readers to take a deep breath before deciding whether to believe such accounts in their entirety.
For instance:
He has a fine and rollicking piece in The Daily Mail in the UK, under the hed “How 16 ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world.” One might be forgiven for thinking somehow he means pollution as in all pollution as in as much CO2 and soot and and oxides of nitrogen and of sulfur and of ozone and of everything else that comes out of smokestacks and tailpipes.
But no, it’s just sulfur pollution that he means. Plus, perhaps, as the ships he describes are all huge bulk freighters run by enormous diesel engines, one might mistake “cars” for “vehicles” and thus surmise that he includes all the world’s diesel trucks in this particular competition. He does not say.
But perhaps it becomes conceivable that all the world’s cars, most of them burning gasoline or as held in the UK, petrol, and thus using fuel that tends to be exceedingly low in sulfur, are out-billowed by the plumes that rise over a mere 16 huge ships combusting sulfurous bunker fuel many times fouler than what typically comes through a hose at a filling station.
Thus, he may have compared apples to oranges here. Maybe it is no surprise that cars, by this one metric, are outdone by ships.
But even with all those cautions, the story is quite commendable. Something really ought to be done – even if the piece is true only in a narrow sense – to stiffen the fuel requirements on huge freighters and tankers.
– Charlie Petit
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