I don’t usu­ally give much cre­dence to Daily Mail articles—given the paper’s edi­to­r­ial stance and propen­sity for junk food news—but I made an excep­tion for one penned by Fred Pearce, New Sci­en­tist’s envi­ron­men­tal consultant.

Still not com­pletely free from sen­sa­tion­al­ism, Pearce looks at the pol­lu­tion emit­ted by the ship­ping indus­try, par­tic­u­larly some of the world’s largest con­tainer ships.

Because of their colos­sal engines, each as heavy as a small ship, these super-vessels use as much fuel as small power stations.

But, unlike power sta­tions or cars, they can burn the cheap­est, filth­i­est, high-sulphur fuel [bunker fuel]: the thick residues left behind in refiner­ies after the lighter liq­uids have been taken. The stuff nobody on land is allowed to use. […]

Thanks to the IMO’s rules, the largest ships can each emit as much as 5,000 tons of sul­phur in a year – the same as 50 mil­lion typ­i­cal cars, each emit­ting an aver­age of 100 grams of sul­phur a year.

With an esti­mated 800 mil­lion cars dri­ving around the planet, that means 16 super-ships can emit as much sul­phur as the world fleet of cars.

Before I come to any per­sonal con­clu­sions on this, I would like to see fig­ures on the envi­ron­men­tal effects of the fea­si­ble alter­na­tives. After all, the scale of these con­tainer ships is staggering:

The only ships men­tioned by name in the arti­cle, the Emma Mærsk and the seven other Maersk PS-Class ships, are all the equal largest con­tainer ships in the world. All are a few feet shy of quar­ter a mile long, have gross ton­nage of over 150,000 and can hold upwards of 11,000 ship­ping con­tain­ers. I find these fig­ures hard to comprehend.

via The Browser