A more immediate solution than converting ships to other power sources (e.g. nuclear, fuel cell, etc) is burning cleaner fuel (e.g. diesel vs bunker). But even on existing ship engines that have high pollution emissions, you can add scrubbers that are very effective at cleaning the stack exhaust...this is just like has already been done with many landbased dirty-stack industries. And note that there are scrubber designs that don't just wash the dirt into the ocean, the dirt can be removed from the exhaust, stored (does not take up significant onboard space) and later disposed of properly in a non-polluting manner.
|