UN shipping talks stalled last week as slow-moving players, including Saudi Arabia, Brazil and the US, obstructed attempts to decide how the sector should begin to decarbonise.

The negotiations, which took place at the London headquarters of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), are part of a global process on how to cut shipping’s large and growing emissions.

Setting speed limits on ships and increasing operational efficiency were just two of the 15 proposals on the table for reducing emissions in the short term, meaning before 2023.

But much of the week-long environmental protection committee talks were spent debating the order in which different proposals should eventually be discussed, with little to no progress made on which of them should actually be implemented.

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Posted on - 2019-05-22

On 13 May delegates attending the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) week-long committee meeting on the marine environment and shipping were greeted by the Extinction Rebellion comically moving deckchairs on an imaginary sinking ship.

Good-natured climate protesters concerned that IMO is not doing enough to meet the challenges of climate change made their point, but when industry insiders start to question the commitment of the industry regulator then it is time to sit up and take notice.

Eirik Nyhus, Director Environment at DNV GL – Maritime, is clear, “Looking into IMO’s 2050 goals it is very clear that the need for carbon neutral fuels is paramount. Without them the reduction goals simply cannot be met, and to make them available in time the R&D work needs to start now, with trials and infrastructure/deployment efforts need to be scaled pretty rapidly.”

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Posted on - 2019-05-22

At 6.45am on March 1, 1954, the blue sky stretching over the south Pacific Ocean was split open by an enormous red flash.

Within seconds, a mushroom cloud towered 7.2 kilometres high over Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The explosion, the US government's first weaponised hydrogen bomb, was 1000 times more powerful than the "Little Boy" atomic bomb blast that flattened Hiroshima - and a complete miscalculation.

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Posted on - 2019-05-21