Over a 24-hour period, a single cargo ship sitting at Long Beach with its engines running throws off more emissions than all the passenger car traffic in the Los Angeles metro area.
I’m sure that most cargo ships at Long Beach don’t keep their engines running for 24 hours at a stretch — not nowadays, anyway. But on the other hand, I’m sure that there are quite a lot of cargo ships sitting at Long Beach at any given time. Net it all out, and is it fair to say that the port of Long Beach is responsible for more CO2 emissions than all the cars in LA?
Update: Never mind. Barbara clarifies in the comments to her post that she’s talking mainly about SOx emissions, and that statistic isn’t surprising at all, since SOx emissions from cars are de minimis. This is what happens when you draft a blog entry offline, from an RSS entry, and don’t read the web page before posting. Lesson learned.