Shipping is by far the biggest transport polluter in the world. The fuel used is the cheapest and most polluting fuel available for the world’s 90,000 ships that burn approximately 370 million tons of fuel per year, emitting 20 million tons of sulfur oxides.
The Guardian has reported on research showing that in one year, a single large container ship can emit cancer and asthma-causing pollutants equivalent to that of 50 million vehicles. The low-grade bunker fuel used by the worlds 90,000 cargo ships contains up to 2,000 times the amount of sulfur compared to diesel fuel used in automobiles.
California’s dependency on foreign suppliers for California’s energy needs, as well as the West Coast military operations, has increased imported crude oil from foreign countries from 5 percent in 1992 to 58 percent today of total consumption as noted in the California Energy Commission chart.
Any high school student can easily observe from the California Energy Commission data that California imports of crude oil from foreign countries via large oil tankers were the highest in the state’s history in 2018 at almost 370 million barrels of crude oil for the year.
At 2 million barrels of crude oil per super oil tanker, that’s more than 180 polluting oil tankers per year that Newsom supports unloading at West Coast ports because of his refusal to produce crude oil in-state.
The Governors’ multiple restrictions on in-state oil production leaves California and its economy unnecessarily reliant on foreign governments for the states’ crude oil needs and creates a national security risk for all of America. Increasing dependency on foreign countries to meet the growing crude oil demands of the state while kneecapping abundant California oil production is next-level stupidity of whoever is advising the Governor.
Governor Newsom’s call on the global community to end reliance on crude oil, represents total blindness to the fact that crude oil is the feedstock to refineries for the manufacturing of products that have led to California and all the developed countries to being healthy and wealthy.
Under Newsom’s plan to rid California of crude oil and all its manufactured products, such a plan would severely impact the supply chain of manufactured derivatives that are the basis of more than 6,000 products, and ground the military, and mothball the airlines, cruise ships and merchant ships, as well as eliminate the medical industry that are totally reliant on the products made from petroleum derivatives that are manufactured out of crude oil.
Read the rest of this piece at CFACT.org.
Ron Stein is an engineer who, drawing upon 25 years of project management and business development experience, launched PTS Advance in 1995. He is an author, engineer, and energy expert who writes frequently on issues of energy and economics.
Photo credit: courtesy CFACT.org
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