EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

From reductionism to systems thinking: How the shipping sector can address sulphur regulation and tackle climate change

Paul Gilbert

Marine Policy, 2014, vol. 43, issue C, 376-378

Abstract: The shipping sector is required to reduce fuel sulphur content to 0.1% in Emission Control Areas by 2015 and to 0.5% globally by 2020. Although this is demanding, a greater challenge for all sectors is climate change. However, the three options to comply with sulphur regulation do little to address this challenge. With a deep-seated change to the type of fuel burnt in marine engines, this should be seen as an opportunity to explore co-benefits of sulphur and carbon reduction – instead of taking a short-sighted approach to the problem. It is argued here that the upcoming sulphur regulations should be postponed and instead, a co-ordinated suite of regulations should be implemented that tackles cumulative CO2 emissions and localised SOx emissions in chorus. This would ensure that less developed, yet more radical, step-change forms of propulsion such as wind, battery and biofuels are introduced from the outset – reducing the risks of infrastructure lock-in and preventing the lock-out of technologies that can meaningfully reduce absolute emissions from the sector.

Keywords: Shipping; Climate change; Mitigation; Sulphur; CO2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X13001516
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:marpol:v:43:y:2014:i:c:p:376-378

DOI: 10.1016/j.marpol.2013.07.009

Access Statistics for this article

Marine Policy is currently edited by Eddie Brown

More articles in Marine Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:marpol:v:43:y:2014:i:c:p:376-378