Fossil fuels: dirty to use, dirty to transport

The accompanying graph illustrates how disastrously inefficient fossil fuels are: the international shipping industry is one of the world’s dirtiest: its emissions alone exceed those of a highly industrialized country such as Germany.

All the vessels, around 90,000 freighters, currently plying their trade on the world’s oceans, are powered by highly polluting heavy fuel oil. Each year, they burn around 370 million tons of heavy diesel, producing one billion tons of carbon dioxide (3.1% of the global total) and around 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide. The world’s five largest ships alone generate as much sulfur dioxide as 750 million cars.

And what are all these ships carrying? Well, 40% of them are carrying fossil fuels: coal, oil and gas. A brutally inefficient system: to extract and distill fossil fuels, we need to consume fossil fuels. To transport them, even more. And finally, their very consumption generates the most important problem facing the planet, with our very survival in the balance.

Eliminating the use of fossil fuels would mean not only a drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, but would have the secondary effect of avoiding the emissions derived from their extraction, processing and transportation. And where are these fossil fuels burned? Quite simply: of every barrel of oil, 42.7% goes…