ShareThis
To some, the idea of allocating a portion of international shipping emissions to an individual nation is pedantic, to others it can even be vexatious – heralding unilateral action and disruption of an inescapably global system. However, the fact that shipping is a global system should not stop an individual or a country trying to estimate their own responsibility.
This is a key element of the CCC’s recent study on UK emissions, to try and quantify the problem so that it can anticipate the consequence of inclusion of shipping in its carbon budgets on the other sectors of the economy. Without this consideration, the UK’s climate change act would be disingenuous and any route map to fulfil the act’s objective at best inefficient and at worst ineffective.
So last week, when the CCC published their report, it was both a relief and a disappointment. They do advocate that international shipping is included in UK’s 2050 target and future budgets. But to calculate what this responsibility means, they have adopted two different methods in order to give lower and upper bounds estimates – a bottom-up model based on ship activity (11 Mt CO2 in 2006) and a top-down calculation based on tonnes of goods unloaded and corrected with a fudge factor (16 Mt CO2 in 2006). We could quibble about whether the numbers are right, but I’m more interested for now in whether the method is right.
Complete post at:
http://www.bunkerworld.com/forum/blogs/64/107986/Tristan-Smith/Whose-shipping-emission-is-it-anyway
No comments:
Post a Comment