Ocean Rebellion protesters demonstrated outside the International Maritime Organization on Monday, the first day of a meeting of the Marine Environment Protection Committee.
Smoke and flames accompanied a staged a heavy fuel oil slick as three activists portrayed fossil fuel lobbyists in front of two besuited corpses and a banner that read “On a Highway to Hell”.
The demonstration was aimed at pleading with the MEPC to enact stronger decarbonisation measures and ended with “dirty scrubbers” arriving to clean up the “oil heads” mess with “greenwash”.
“The IMO is failing in its duty to meet the Paris Climate Agreement. It must act now to halve shipping emissions before 2030, advise against any fossil fuel subsidies and start severely taxing shipping fuel,” Ocean Rebellion said.
The IMO continues to ignore its duty to govern shipping emissions by allowing ships to burn heavy fuel oil and significantly increasing shipping’s contribution to CO2 emissions rather than reducing them in line with the Paris Agreement, the organisation added.
The group also railed against the use of LNG as a cleaner fuel because it is a fossil fuel and because methane emissions that are considered worse than those from CO2.
Ocean Rebellion added that the IMO was failing in its duty as a UN organisation to meet the Paris Climate Agreement.
The group said the demonstration illustrated how the IMO’s refusal to tackle shipping pollution ahead of 2030 is destroying the seas, and chances of keeping near to the 1.5C temperature rise demanded by the Paris Climate Agreement.
TradeWinds reported on Friday that a working group meeting closed with signals that most nations are gravitating toward ramping up decarbonisation targets to zero emissions by 2050.
In a joint statement, environmental groups also said national delegations showed that they are prepared to phase out shipping emissions by the middle of the century and there is growing support for the regulator to adopt an ambitious target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
The joint statement was made by green groups Clean Shipping Coalition, Ocean Conservancy, Seas at Risk, Clean Arctic Alliance, Pacific Environment and Carbon Market Watch.
Read more
- Ocean Rebellion protest stages oil slick and death of oceans outside IMO
- IMO nations gravitate toward zero emissions amid ‘surprise’ support for strong 2030 targets
- Monjasa’s Anders Ostergaard: Don’t fret over the green fuel transition
- IMO must send ‘strong and ambitious’ signal to cut carbon, says European Commission
- Carbon price breakthrough to raise up to $60bn is closer, says IMO’s Kitack Lim
