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Comment by em3rgent0rdr | Hacker News Reader

"Burning massive quantities of bunker fuel. The result is a huge amount of CO2...commercial ships produce more than a million tons of CO2 every day."

Narrator is unnecessarily alarmist here, and sounds like we should be concerned about the contribution of cargo ships to the greenhouse. I would say we should celebrate the shipping industry for being so much more beneficial to humanity per unit of CO2.

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Um yeah bunker fuel is disgusting stuff. It's so bad, sometimes ships can't burn it in territorial waters due to local environmental regulations. It's not the CO2 in bunker fuel exhaust that makes it so terrible, it's everything else.

I don't see how it's alarmist to note the fact that they are by far and away one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gasses as a group. I think they could do better, and we wouldn't pay that much more as consumers for a lot of the goods, unless the biggest overhead really _is_ with shipping.

"they are by far and away one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gasses as a group."

Wrong. Shipping is the most efficient transportation of mass-distance per unit of CO2. Shipping's CO2 contribution is only %3-%4 of total CO2 produced by humans.

But in terms of particulate emissions it is very significant. Upwards of 60% of total sulphur emissions and accounts for over 60,000 deaths per year. At room temperature you can walk across the surface of the fuel. It is nasty stuff and the scale is quite large.

> they are by far and away one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gasses as a group

Not sure what you mean by "group", but animal agriculture beats all transportation (road, sea, air) combined when it comes to greenhouse gases and the greenhouse effect. There are a few different sources from the UN on this (plus some other sources with even higher numbers).

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