- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/20648679
Were electric ferries not a viable option?
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The whole article is wild, but in a bad way: They are comparing a bigger ferry with a smaller one? They are claiming that LNG from fucking Qatar is “green”? They are calculating upstream emissions from LNG into the footprint of one ferry, but don’t include the upstream emissions of the diesel fuel?
The person who posted this to [email protected] is someone who’s spent some small amount of time defending articles which are clearly propaganda designed to make people mistrustful of anything “green.”
I think there’s a pretty good chance that the whole reason for the article’s framing, which as you point out is pretty wild and nonsensical, is that it lets them make it sound like “green” is bad and fake, and that’s the goal of the article. I definitely think there’s a good chance that it getting posted on Lemmy is happening for that reason.
someone who’s spent some small amount of time defending articles which are clearly propaganda designed to make people mistrustful of anything “green”
Fwiw, that’s not the reason I crossposted it. I don’t know the motivations of the original poster.
that’s the goal of the article.
While granted, the headline is baity, the final section of the article seems fairly solution-oriented.
Yeah, I wasn’t trying to attack your motivations specifically. The other poster was the one with a small history of suspicious postings.
It’s not just the headline that’s baity… the whole framing is a little weird. I don’t think anyone in the modern day thinks of LNG as a “green” fuel. It’s just a fossil fuel. I did look into the ship a little bit, and apparently this crap about LNG being a “low-emission” fuel as compared with diesel was supposed to be a big deal for constructing it, so maybe the article is pointing out a fair counterargument. It just raises my hackles a little bit whenever I see an article which if you glance at it quickly could leave you with an impression, “And that’s why green is fake!”
They are claiming that LNG from fucking Qatar is “green”?
The BBC are putting “green” in scare quotes. I.e., this is what politicians/owners claimed about the ship.
They are calculating upstream emissions from LNG into the footprint of one ferry, but don’t include the upstream emissions of the diesel fuel?
Upstream emissions from LNG tend to be higher than either petrol, diesel or pipeline gas.
US LNG is likely more damaging to climate than even coal.
If a biogas facility were to be developed, one option would be to repurpose the Grangemouth oil refinery where hundreds of jobs are currently under threat.
This seems like a great way to kill two birds with one stone.
Fossil fuels are essentially a massive hack: They allow us to use energy stored by plants over millions of years. Biogas/biomass are reverting that hack: They only allow burning energy from plants/animals that lived quite recently.
Hence, biogas/biomass is a nice addition but there’s never going to be enough of it to power even a significant subset of our fossil-powered world.
The much better idea is to be more clever about energy usage. Hence electric motors, which convert significantly more energy into motion rather than heat. Hence the catamaran build style that reduces energy usage, etc.
We don’t need it to power a particularly significant subset though, just the stuff that’s least practical to take off of hydrocarbon power. The ferry is already built and the islanders need the ferry service. There are going to be edge cases like that in which a carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuel will be useful for a while.
The ferry is already built
“It’s already built” is a terrible argument for keeping anything that produces several times its production emissions during its useful lifetime.
There are a couple billion cars and trucks and heatings that are already built. Somehow, suddenly you’re at a very significant subset of fossil fuel consumption.
Well it only produces that scale of emissions if running on LNG or diesel, right? If it’s running on biogas, that’s another matter. So is it more costly (both in terms of money and resources used) to replace the ferry or to set up biogas infrastructure?
Biogas can be largely emissions-neutral — but only if you don’t scale it up. E.g. collecting biogas from municipal organic waste is a good thing. But collecting it from farm animals directly or indirectly from feed production is worse, because you might just be helping factory farms greenwash their ops.
It’s a larger ship than before.
The size of Glen Sannox is a factor in its carbon footprint, but so too is the liquified natural gas (LNG) fuel which is less climate-friendly than previously claimed.
One expert on transport emissions told BBC News that if the “upstream” carbon cost of importing LNG from Qatar is included in the emissions calculation, it might be better to run the new ship on diesel.