CMAC meetings

I sat in on two days meetings on the environmental side of this spring’s CMAC meeting in Ottawa, April 28&29.

In the Ballast Water working group a comment was made that no ballast Water Treatment System had been tested, specifically in fresh water. The assumption was voiced that therefore reliable performance of such systems was not guaranteed. RWO have submitted their application for approval and it is expected that approval will be issued at the July MEPC session.

• The system was tested in Bremen, Germany, a fresh water port, and it performed as expected.

In the Air Emissions working group, Environment Canada summarized the benefits from an ECA, referring to some 159 lives saved with total health benefits of $ 900 Million per annum.

The health problems are, to a large degree, caused by particulate matter. The latest Environment Canada statistic shows PM from marine transport at 10,404.9t out of 18,377,707.2t for all of Canada. Marine represents 0.056% of the total. Dust from paved and unpaved roads (generated primarily by vehicle traffic) is about 11,450,000t or 62.3%, which is considered an “open source”. PM totals for vehicles including tire break lining wear (but without open sources) comes to about 13,800t, which is about the same as marine transport. What I see is that the ECA proposal addresses the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back" in pollution, ignoring the potential increase in greenhouse gas emissions from a modal shift and also ignoring the increased PM emissions for road and rail traffic. With the ECA submission, we address a narrow emission sector and ignore the climate changing millions of tons of PM, which accelerate the shrinking of snow and ice cover.

Environment Canada gives some interesting graphs on Canadian pollution, which may provide some additional reference as to how skewed the ECA proposal is.

At the standing committee on the environment, Environment gave a presentation on the current Bill C-16. Below is the link to the bill, and underneath a link to an opinion by one of the marine lawyers.

Bill C-16

Osler opinion

If the industry was concerned about Bill-15, the amendment to the migratory bird act, I feel 16 indicates that this is Bill 15 on steroids.

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.