State by State, Ship by Ship

It looks to me as if, in the same way that universal health care advocates have adopted a sequentialist model, hoping to inch toward universal coverage one program at a time, global warming policy advocates have adopted a similar strategy.  Cities like Portland have adopted emissions standards on their own, and states like Florida are now attempting to impose caps on how much energy can be used.  Of course, most of these measures are destined to be little more than costly failures — quick hits to the economy that don’t even manage to significantly reduce warming — but the goal, I suspect, is to create a snowball effect by piecing together a patchwork of regulations that some enterprising politician (hoo boy!) will step up to "fix."  And today, it looks like environmentalists have moved from pushing for local regulations to pushing for industry specific regulations.  According to the New York Times:

The California attorney general and a coalition of environmental groups have called for federal regulation to curb heat-trapping emissions from the worldwide fleet of about 90,000 oceangoing ships, including container ships, tankers and cruise ships.

The regulations, sought in separate petitions to the Environmental Protection Agency, would apply to United States territorial waters.

…The group’s petition, whose participants included the Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of the Earth, argues that “the sheer number of these ships, coupled with operating practices that use fuel inefficiently and poor government oversight, results in carbon dioxide emissions” equal to the emissions of 130 million to 195 million cars.

Sounds like a lot, sure, but it’s not.   Marine vessels only cause about 3 percent of the world’s emissions, and this regulation would slice off only a tiny bit of their output.