It's also worth noting - for those that will inevitably use this to defend driving - that the environmental effects of cars extend way past dioxide emissions.

That would run counter to the goal of these articles, which is to trivialize the importance of pollution from cars and make environmental activists look like fools.

The original title is "Green finance for dirty ships", and the article uses the phrase "oxides of nitrogen and sulphur", rather than just "oxides".

If anyone still doesn't know that CO2 is the biggest total contributor to global warming in recent times, I wouldn't put the blame squarely on this article.

There is a shitload of politically-motivated anti-scientific propaganda out there written with the intent of confusing people into believing falsehoods about climate change. And there are a shitload of people who fall victim to it. Contributing to that misinformation is not a good thing.

As something of environmental activist. No. These kinds of articles are useful because they highlight areas for campaigning that otherwise can be overlooked.

Ocean shipping isn't a particularly big contributor to climate change, so "they highlight areas for campaigning that otherwise can be overlooked" is just another way of saying "they distract you from more important stuff."

And why would they want to do that?

They're politically invested against action taken to mitigate climate change, and the best way to push those policies is to convince people that climate change isn't important and the people who say it's important are either idiots or lying.

The Economist? You clearly don't read it. It's strongly in favour of action against climate change. They sometimes disagree about the best actions to take, and mostly oppose subsidies for renewables, but they certainly don't say it's not important.

Why? I thought Carbon Dioxide was one of the most innocuous oxides released by engines, both in environmental and health effects.

That's true. As a pollutant, carbon dioxide is almost entirely innocuous, except for its behavior as a greenhouse gas. In that role, carbon dioxide is the most significant driver of global warming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Natural_and_ant...

Methane is worse.

A methane molecule is 72 times worse than a CO2 molecule in terms of "global warming potential" over a 20 year time scale and around 7 times worse over a 500 year time scale). However, we put a lot more CO2 into the atmosphere than we do methane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Global_warming_...

Doesn't that indicate methane is the low hanging fruit? I guess that assumes it's the same cost to prevent / recapture 1 molecule of methane vs. CO2... But if the next 20 yrs are the most crucial, methane sounds like a great target.

seems likely; after that, technology will hopefully have stabilized our energy sources

Gram for gram or tonne for tonne, most other stuff is much worse. But mile for mile and kWh for kWh, the relative quantity of CO2 more than makes up for its relative harmlessness.

(Except maybe in dirty ships where there is much more of the nasty stuff per tonne of CO2 than in the exhaust gases of any other mode of transportation - they are basically using the skies over international waters to dispose of refinery waste that would be impossible to legally burn anywhere else)

The total volume of emitted carbon dioxide, of which land vehicles are a major contributor, is a significant factor in global climate change. An insufficiently specific headline that can be read to imply otherwise is thus misleading.