ECA, Pink Floyd and Leonard Cohen

This post was published in the April 20th 2009 issue of Canadian Sailings.

With the recent proposal by Canada and the United States for a North American Emission Control Area, Pink Floyd’s “Is There Anybody Out There?” comes to mind. When reading the submission to the International Maritime Organization, one may also think of Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” lyrics: “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded, everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.”

Pink Floyd comes to mind because marine did not really participate in the debate. Yes, many spoke, but they did not speak with one voice and therefore were not heard. Many looked at the proposal but few, if any, stepped back and looked at the ECA picture holistically.

Map 1, from the submission, is the proposed ECA, which covers the coasts but not Arctic waters. The Great Lakes would have ECA status as well. What will happen on the East Coast? Some bulker traffic that now goes into the Lakes will shift to Churchill (no ECA) and container traffic that comes to Montreal may go to Halifax (shorter sailing distance in the ECA) and Churchill. Why would a ship pick up grain in Thunder Bay (Map 2, black-dotted line) if it can sail into Churchill (red line) on heavy fuel oil? On the Great Lakes, the ECA will bring about a modal shift to land transport. This shift will increase local air pollution, accidents, etc.

Leonard Cohen comes to mind because the data used by Canada and the U.S. is flawed and at times seems twisted to suit the purpose.

The pre-emptive reason for the ECA is that up to 8,300 lives will be saved. In a July 2008 article in Air & Waste Management Association’s EM magazine, Environmental Protection Agency scientists state that “linking changes in emissions to human exposure and health end points (respiratory related hospital admissions, mortality effect estimates) remains to be a major area of research.” So this projection is not science but opinion.

A second article in the same issue addresses improving exposure assessments with models, going from global to regional to urban to local to human scale. Looking at air pollution from this angle, pollution starts concentrated at the tailpipe and then thins out. Therefore, as a person at the local street level, we are exposed to concentrated emissions from road and rail before they thin out into the atmosphere. This concentrated local pollution has a greater effect on our health because pollution is delivered more efficiently to our lungs. The same is true for the crane operator in a port; he has to breathe the stack emissions before they spread out.

Could data be custom-made to support the ECA ­proposal? Is it really possible that marine contributes more than 100 per cent of the excess in critical loading (Environment Canada graphic) in the Athabasca oilsands area? I find it difficult to believe that ships calling Vancouver and/or Prince Rupert would affect the air quality in the oilsands to such a degree. Who would have thunk?

Why not take the time to consider the bigger picture? Are we affected as badly from marine emissions as the people living around the Mediterranean or the Suez Canal or the ports of Hong Kong or Shanghai? Is our Highway H2O in the same league, traffic wise, as the English Channel?

And, ultimately, how will the proposed ECA affect the global environment? Will it improve humanity’s condition? Will it slow the melting of the polar ice caps and the Greenland ice cover? Will it slow global warming? The answer is “no” on all these counts. Worse, the ECA will actually help to speed up the melting of the ice because of increased traffic in the Arctic and thereby contribute to faster-rising sea levels, which in turn will affect millions more people in poor, low-lying areas of this world. World Health Organization research indicates that today, 115,000 deaths per year can be attributed to climate change and rising sea levels. How much will the faster-rising sea levels, caused by the proposed ECA, increase these numbers? Why not listen to WHO and first address climate change, as it sees this is the more pressing problem.