The debate in Tradewinds about scrubbers is just fascinating in its lack of understanding of the urgent demands of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Katowice Climate Change Conference and the Paris Climate agreement.
In the latest, Paul Marsh of Navig8 states that ocean pollution from scrubbers is "completely insignificant".
The scrubber enthusiasts have found a loophole to continue to burn the dirtiest fuel existing in the industrial world — by filtering the exhaust gases and discharging the waste into the oceans. Mr Marsh and his colleagues seem to think that just because he is a doctor of technology he is to be more trusted than the rest of us with just a vast experience of all aspects of shipping.
It is not so. For whatever the doctors of this world say, we will have to stop using the oceans as the waste deposit site of our industries. The waste from scrubbers contains SOx, NOx, particulate matter, soot and oil residues, as well as carcinogens. And do we really know what that may lead to? We do not!
The doctors of the tobacco industry stood up and ridiculed the concerns about cancer and the doctors in the drug companies missed out on Thalidomide resulting in thousands of deformed babies — in spite of all their doctors assuring us that the drug was very suitable for pregnant ladies. And remember all the asbestos we had in our ships.
But the main objection to scrubbers as the fastest route to riches in shipping is that scrubbers make it possible to use the cheap heavy fuel oil, otherwise forbidden, and create a financial advantage to the colleagues burning low sulphur fuel. Cheaper fuel automatically leads to higher speed and higher emissions of greenhouse gases. The scrubber ships will increase their GHG emissions by about 30-35% and that is what cannot be tolerated in a united world. There is a broad acceptance of the IPCC report that "we must halve our GHG emissions by 2030 and eliminate them completely by 2050, or we are killing all mankind."
The 15-year-old Swedish schoolgirl and climate activist Greta Thunberg made a broadly reported plea in a meeting with the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. She said: We have asked the politicians to deal with the emission problems for 25 years without any effect. Now we will bypass the politicians and go straight to the media and the general public to force the emission reduction to take place and save the world.
So the ships which will be polluting the world and the oceans will have to expect that Greta, Greenpeace and other green organisations will highlight these polluters and that will lead to charterers avoiding such polluting ships. And the proposed profits from filtering air pollution and turning it into ocean pollution will have missed the point.
The winners in the coming years will be the carbon neutral vessels, which have not only replaced fossil fuels for minimal emissions but also save enough fuel in the process to be economically superior to other ships.
Lars Carlsson is partner and director of Windship Technology, a former chairman of Intertanko and former chief executive of Concordia Maritime.
