The EPA is proposing regulations to control emissions from large ships:
The United States took a critical step towards protecting Americans from harmful ship emissions by becoming the first country to ask the International Maritime Organization to create an emissions control area (ECA) around the nation’s coastline, the EPA announced today at a joint news conference with the Coast Guard and New Jersey elected officials.
According to the EPA’s data, the creation of an ECA would save up to 8,300 American and Canadian lives every year by 2020 by imposing stricter standards on oil tankers and other large ships that spew harmful emissions into the air near coastal communities where tens of millions of Americans live, work, play and learn. The United States is proposing a 230-mile buffer zone around the nation’s coastline in order to provide air quality benefits as far inland as Kansas.
...Under this program, large ships such as oil tankers and cargo ships that operate in ECAs will face stricter emissions standards designed to reduce the threat they pose to human health and the environment. These standards will cut sulfur in fuel by 98 percent, particulate matter emissions by 85 percent, and nitrogen oxide emissions by 80 percent from the current global requirements.
To achieve these reductions, ships must use fuel with no more than 1,000 parts per million sulfur beginning in 2015, and new ships must used advanced emission control technologies beginning in 2016.
According to one article, the old rules were not working very well, in part because they did not regulate non-U.S. ships:
The announcement comes a week after the EPA's inspector general issued a report concluding emission regulations for large vessels haven't protected human health. The report concludes the EPA has only moved to regulate nitrogen oxides from U.S.-flagged ships, but hasn't taken a position on foreign-flagged vessels, which produce 90% of the emissions in U.S. ports.
I didn't see anything in the news reports on this story regarding how foreign shippers feel about all this, but it certainly has the potential for some trade conflict.
(As a side note, the reference to places where people "live, work, play and learn" is an interesting variation on the Appellate Body's famous statement in Hormones about "the real world where people live and work and die"!)
