KTVU:

A mile-long sheen of bunker fuel oil drifted from a tanker anchored in the still waters of the San Francisco Bay Friday, triggering an emergency response by the U.S. Coast Guard, authorities said.

A Coast Guard spokesman said the agency got a report at around 8 a.m. reporting the sheen of drifting oil and tarballs streaming from the rear of Panamanian registered tanker Dubai Star that was anchored 2 1/1 miles south of the Bay Bridge.

Petty Officer 3rd Class Melissa Lee said a massive response was under way.

“The leak occurred when they were transferring bunker fuel (from a barge to the tanker),” she said. “We are evaluating the situation and have resources responding. “

Friends of the Earth has a petition calling for the use of bunker fuel to be discontinued:

Bunker fuel is a toxic, asphalt-like substance that is causing air pollution and global warming, harming marine life, and damaging human health and the environment. I join with Friends of the Earth in calling on Congress to require the cruise and shipping industries to end their use of this dirty fuel and transition to cleaner alternatives.

Friends of the Earth and Clean Air Task Force submit the following written testimony to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee last year:

This piece is reposted, with permission, from DC Bureau. Part One can be found here.

Although the original shipping emissions standards established in the MARPOL treaty went into effect in 2005, they were written in 1997, and getting the more stringent 2008 revisions past the onerous IMO regulatory process was a battle that exhausted the few environmental groups that even engaged in the first place. Furthermore, the rules still do not address CO2 or other global warming risks, and some observers fear it is now too late to make a push to change the rules again.

“When you look at that slow track” of revising the NOx and sulfur limits, said Jackie Savitz, a campaign director with the ocean-focused activist group Oceana, “in terms of global warming pollution we can’t have another twenty-year process. We don’t have that time to wait. So we’re pessimistic that the IMO will be the way to control global warming emissions from ships.”

But waiting has become standard for activists in this arena: the environmental provisions of MARPOL only became enforceable in the U.S. in January of this year, with the passage of the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships.

Those global warming emissions, setting aside the health impact of sulfur and nitrogen output, are themselves considerable ─ and they are growing. The April report prepared for the IMO’s environment committee, officially titled Second GHG IMO study 2009, found that combined domestic and international shipping accounts for about 3.3 percent of the world’s total CO2 emissions, more than railroad freight (0.5 percent) and airlines (1.9 percent) combined. Unfortunately, the report noted that the interaction of black carbon with snow melt “has not yet been calculated for ship emissions,” a glaring omission when viewed alongside the mounting evidence that black carbon is second only to CO2 in its global warming impact. According to an April 15 article in the New York Times on Third World sources of black carbon, the substance accounts for about 18 percent of the planet’s warming, while CO2 accounts for about 40 percent. No other pollutant comes close.

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This piece is reposted, with permission, from DC Bureau.

The shipping industry is an invisible and nearly unregulated environmental disaster, and if you haven’t heard much about its poor record, you’re not alone. Compared to power plants, cars and even commercial aviation, shipping has drawn little scrutiny ─ it gets few mentions in the media, and activist groups tend to focus their attention elsewhere. Seen as little more than an expensive tourist option or a humdrum conveyor of goods, the modern sea vessel is a mystery to the average person, either a love boat or a floating tractor trailer. If there were no pirates or seasick honeymooners, the shipping industry would barely register in the public consciousness.

This invisibility is unfortunate, because toxic shipping emissions bring about the premature deaths of thousands of people living near ports every year. Worldwide, cargo shipping pumps out more carbon dioxide (CO2) annually than the United Kingdom (UK). Most commercial ships are powered by a thick brew of sulfur and sludge called bunker fuel with a deserved reputation as one of the dirtiest energy sources on earth, even among industry representatives. Bryan Wood-Thomas, the vice president for environmental policy at the World Shipping Council (WSC), which represents many of the biggest shipping companies (including Møller-Mærsk, the world’s largest) in Washington, D.C., called bunker fuel “the residual crap that comes out of [oil] refineries.” It is so thick, he said, that “if you put a chunk on your desk, it would keep a three-dimensional shape.” Engineers need to liquefy it through super-heating before putting it into a ship’s fuel lines because it would otherwise clog them.

The high sulfur content of this fuel, which leads to sulfur-heavy emissions, is only one danger. Ships are prodigious emitters of several so-called criteria pollutants, those that are most heavily regulated under the Clean Air Act because they are the most dangerous to human health, including fine particulate matter (PM2.5), nitrogen oxides (NOx) and sulfur oxides (SOx), the last of which not only harms lungs but can lead to acid rainfall. In addition to these risks, many observers (including some industry representatives) consider shipping a low-hanging fruit in the battle against global warming. Arctic shipping lanes can mean a quick melting death for polar sea ice thanks to emissions of black carbon, a sooty residue that absorbs heat and settles on anything it touches. As David Marshall, an activist with the Clean Air Task Force, somewhat casually put it in an interview for this article, “If the Greenland ice shelf collapses, we’re looking at significant sea rise.”

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