WWF and Oxfam pushing for a shipping tax at Durban COP17 – since when do NGO's get to write tax laws?

Canada Revenue Agency 1999… Greenpeace…”no public benefit”.
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:qZZPd-1Ijv4J:www.ipa.org.au/library/review51-4%2520Its%2520Official%2520Greenpeace%2520serves.pdf+canada+revenue+agency+greanpeace+serves+no+public+benefit&hl=en&gl=ca&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiMn3kIOi3DzDPy7htbUe7SQs4LIbM1HSXBPjbBerkeL8ivIwRiVjDebt0Jl_Ir0G18TfvgybVZDbpRO4FKf267uSQjtxOIx43N6XhqkriiQBKds28Z4ewkt5p7wDmIvRPQEVVG&sig=AHIEtbRS0ufY8HGTBpdNnHbI25hO8SiygQ

The emissions from international trade are growing less than the growth in world trade. There are three reasons for this. First the average size is increasing of the larger vessels. Second, the most recent large vessels are designed to go at lower speed than those of just five years ago. Third, there have been great strides made in efficiency improvements.
The major incentive has been the hike in the oil price. Compared to that any 10% tax is just showmanship.
When you look at the carbon impact of food, you must look at the total impact per kg of food. In Britain it is popular to shop at Farmer’s markets. Here the biggest carbon impact per kg of food is the shopper doing a 20 to 50 mile round trip to the market, on top of their normal trip to the supermarket. Fresh Welsh lamb might be much more flavorsome than the frozen New Zealand variety, and travel only 100 miles instead of 10,000 +, but the carbon emissions to get it to my house can be much higher if I travel to a farmer’s market to obtain it.
If you want a rough comparison, a small van with one tonne of cargo will use around 250 times per tonne mile of the largest bulk cargo or container ships. This is despite the biggest of the super-efficient engines weighing 2500 tonnes, producing 100,000 bhp and consuming 15000 litres per hour.
For those who want to The largest supplier of the large ship engines is MAN Diesel and Turbo. The second largest is Wärtsilä.
http://mandieselturbo.com/0000857/Products/Marine-Engines-and-Systems/Low-Speed/Marine-Engine-Programme.html
http://www.wartsila.com/en/engines/low-speed-engines

Growing poverty is in their best interest. Stopping exports stopping jobs, raising import prices is good for them. The poor, overbeed, dark skin peasants, not so good. But the sooner these places are depopulated by these means, the sooner the places can become Parks for rich leftist.

“This paper shows that doing so is possible while ensuring developing countries face no net costs.”
Well yet another misrepresentation in a long list of misrepresentations.
Fuel is typically between 60% and 80% of operating costs. 10 years ago or thereabouts it was $120 a ton. Todays price, which includes a 460-$70 per ton low sulphur premium, is between $620 and $712 a ton for heavy fuel oils and for gas oils it is currently $920 to $1040 a ton.
The Greens have persistently categorised ships as “belching toxic fumes” and heavy fuel oil as “the bottom of the barrel”.
The fact is that despite saying that “A single ship can emit more in one year than many small island states.” or that shipping emits as much pollution as the third most polluting country, shipping is in fact one of the most efficient forms of transport. In fact the figures are somewhere in the range of 3-5% of total anthropogenic emissions. Any significant reduction will not significantly affect the overall burden but will be highly damaging.
The Greens have happily promoted a range of mutually exclusive policies, rather like backing multiple horses in a race, and some of their proposals have bordered in the idiotic.
On the one hand they want a tax on shipping or on bunker fuels but such a tax would not be universal and as has been pointed out many times the primary effect would be to divert shipping from treaty ports to non treaty ports. Calls for unilateral legislation by the USA would lead to an increase in pollution simply because ships would choose to bunker in Mexican or Canadian ports and then ship goods internally by road and rail rather than, as at present, using the great river systems.
Equally they have called for an end to using heavy fuel oils.
This would probably double costs because of the increased competition for MDO and MGO and at the same time, because of the refining costs, add between 2% and 11% to CO2 emissions.
And, for example, the claim that regulation will do no more than put 50cents on a pair of jeans is disingenuous.
Friends of the Earth claimed that switching to MGO or MDO (basically diesel, a refined product which HFO is not) would cost no more. But their comparison was with every vessel fitting exhaust gas scrubbing and assumed that all vessels would do one or the other. A false assumption because the choice is still to use HFO and exhaust gas scrubbing, at that time, was only a potentially affordable solution of r vessels conituously operating in an Emissions control area – e.g. ferries – and then only if they could offset some of the costs through emissions trading and other market based mechanisms, none of which has come to pass. Yet.
To say that shipping is unregulated is also wrong.
The IMO has been putting in place legislation for 30-40 years now and some years back MARPOL Annex VI 73/78 was finally ratified. This primarily limits sulphur emissions but also addresses NOX and COX.
In addition, the move to larger and more efficient vessels is making the industry more efficient and less polluting than otherwise together with a number of other initiatives such as the substantial advances in engine technology.
AT the moment, the claim that shipping is growing in leaps and bounds isn’t born out by the facts. At the ,moment there is excess capacity in the industry. but let’s let that one slide.
The claim that $25 a on is a minor added cost is not god enough. This is on top of all the other added costs and it assumes no change in the current fuel usage. Yet in 2012 not only does the North American ECA (Emission Control Area) come into force but they also will make a major reduction in the permitted sulphur content with no provisions as to how the demand will be met. The refiners have no intentions of introducing fuel de-sulphurisation so shipping is stuck with maximising the use of the available low sulphur fuels or switching to MGO and MDO. This switch will both increase CO2 emissions and potentially double the fuel price (at 60-80% of operating costs) for a significant number of vessels.
Fuel sulphur is a major factor with COX and NOX close behind. But fuel sulphur emission reductions benefit only those people who live all their lives in congested ports and who have the longest life expectancy ofn the planet, the best nutrition and best health care and may extend their lives by a couple of weeks. Maybe.
But what do higher fuel prices do?
Well, shipping cost is a key factor in the equation of low labour rates and low shipping costs that ensures third world countries can ship goods to the markets.
Some years back China made a fuel grab which pushed fuel prices up dramatically. Some US car manufacturers switched the supply of car seats from China to Mexico.
This is the effect of increased fuel prices. For some countries the price differential will effectively cut them off from their markets. The countries that will be the most seriously affected will be those where life expectancy is already low, where they have subsistence level living standards and poor health care.
But no one wants to measure and report on the losers. Instead they characterise shipping pollution as causing 60,000 deaths a year which is a canard. It affects life expectancy. Figure for the UK show that most particulates are consistently below the threshold level for harm and mostly only peak at rush hour – the majority of harmful particulates in the atmosphere are effective only when close to the source.
So just as warmists talk about the number of heat deaths hotter summer will cause but fail to account for the much greater number of cold weather deaths averted by warmer winters, so they don;t want to measure just how much damage changing trading patterns will cause to those people least able to withstand the changes.
So even a few dollars a ton extra on fuel prices have a major impact.