When the ships stop, what then? - The Witches Kitchen
▻https://witcheskitchen.com.au/when-the-ships-stop-what-then
Isn’t it stunning? This is the current position of all the cargo vessels in the world. Just cargo vessels – I’ve set the filter to remove the passenger ships, the tankers, the fishing vessels, all the other types of sea traffic. The image comes from marinetraffic.com, a site that tracks vessels’ positions using AIS data. I’ve cropped it to Australia’s part of the world.
Ships are orders of magnitude more efficient than planes for moving cargo, but planes are so terribly polluting, that’s not saying much. Cargo ships use heavy fuel oil, which produces greenhouse gas emissions not only in the form of CO2, but also in the form of black carbon which has a warming impact much, much greater than CO2. The big ones use 250 tons of it each day. It’s hard to imagine that we can keep shifting stuff around the world like this and still avoid climate collapse. And one day, in the not too distant future, we are going to have to deal with climate collapse, avoid or adapt, like it or not. Avoid would be so much better and easier, alas. 🙁