Clean Air Task Force News

The United States will join an international effort to achieve zero emissions by 2050 in the global shipping industry, climate envoy John Kerry announced ahead of a summit of world leaders President Joe Biden will host this week."We're going to look to the ocean to continue to help reduce pollution," he told a conference hosted by the Ocean Conservancy on Tuesday.The United States will join Saudi Arabia as the only two countries to formally pledge to work toward the International…

The commitment by governments to require international shipping to decarbonise and at least halve its greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 is a welcome and potentially game changing development, the Clean Shipping Coalition (CSC) has said. But the lack of any clear plan of action to deliver the emissions reductions, including urgently needed short-term measures, is a major concern, according to the group of NGOs with observer status at the UN’s International Maritime Organisation (IMO). After two weeks of difficult talks, countries attending the IMO meeting in London agreed to require the shipping sector to reduce its emissions by “at least 50% by 2050 compared to 2008”. This falls short of the 70-100% cut by 2050 that is needed to align shipping with the goals of the Paris agreement.

In large part, the wide-ranging reaction to President Barack Obama's signature effort to cut power plant carbon emissions could have been written months in advance. Key Republicans and many industrial groups decried it as a job-killing war on coal that would drive up power prices; environmentalists and many Democrats hailed it as a landmark measure making good on Obama's pledge to tackle climate change. Behind the bombast, however, more measured voices found a proposal that was not as severe as critics had feared nor as ambitious as proponents had hoped for. Basing the average 30 percent reduction on the year 2005 - near a high point for such emissions…

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday took a step toward a wider strategy to address climate change, releasing five technical papers that will help it decide whether or not to regulate methane emissions from the oil and gas sector. The "white papers" follow the White House's announcement in March of a plan to reduce methane emissions both domestically and internationally through incentive-based programs and the administration's existing authorities. The suggestion drew a rebuke at the time from the main oil and gas lobby group, the American Petroleum Institute, which said its members were already taking steps to cut emissions.

While the international shipping industry already is under acute pressure to reduce emissions, a new study – which claims that worldwide 60,000 deaths each year are attributable to pollutions from ships – could help to increase public pressure further. The study, published in the American Chemical Society’s publication Environmental Science & Technology (ES&T) (DOI: 10.1021/es071686z) was produced by a team led by James Corbett of the University of Delaware and James Winebrake of the Rochester Institute of Technology, provide some of the first estimates of premature mortality from exposure to particulate matter, nitrogen oxides (NOx), and sulfate in global ship emissions.