ARSENIO DOMINGUEZ

DIRECTOR CHIEF OF STAFF DIVISION OF THE UNITED NATIONS ARSENIO DOMINGEUZ

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RED FLAG POLITICS - The IMO appears to be struggling to justify their inaction on acid oceans, rising sea levels and ocean plastic, raising the question as to whether or not they are being lobbied by stakeholders to sit on their hands and allow the situation to continue to harm the planet. We need to keep the world moving on clean energy for a sustainable future. The fact that the IMO appear to believe that they need not answer correspondence on these subjects, rather smacks of an admission as to the allegations. Would you not agree?

Who's in charge of what at the IMO ?

In our view the IMO has been dragging out tackling climate change. The management has been lackluster to say the least, allowing the world to warm, to melt our ice caps and create acid oceans.

Arsenio Dominguez is the Chief of Staff of the International Maritime Organization. He belongs to a group of intelligent people in whom we placed our trust to do the right thing. But, despite mass protests over the past 20 years, we are still reliant on fossil fuels for transport.

There was nothing wrong with ICEs while only a few people had them, but now almost every family in the developed world owns at least one set of wheels, and most ships are powered by them. The swept volume of such engines, multiplied by the distance traveled adds up to a many cubic kilometers of noxious gas pouring into the atmosphere every second, adding to the greenhouse gas bubble that envelops us.

Electric motors emit no noxious gasses. Wind turbine generators and solar panels provide pollution free renewable energy in great abundance. More renewables would eradicate the need to drill fresh oil wells and mine coal. Coal and oil are carbon locks that we should not be burning to release more greenhouse gasses. They should stay in the ground. Unlike cars, ships can be solar and wind powered.

We could start with solar and wind powered ferries and work up to cruise liners and cargo vessels. This should have been on the clean transport agenda 15-20 years ago. But only now they want more studies....

MORAL COMPASS - People don’t generally wake up one morning and decide, “I want to be enslaved by something difficult to manage and seemingly impossible to escape, because that sounds like fun.”

No, the road to depravity is a long one. It’s one traveled with many deliberate steps - steps that become easier and easier to take. Call it a moral compromise, an addiction, a weakness, or a sin - the destination in which they find themselves in poverty is one found by slowly compromising moral values while dancing with the devil.

The fact is that ship operators have been building bigger and bigger behemoths, to carry more and more containers, using heavy diesel oil as the fuel - all the while knowing that we were in a climate emergency. But also knowing that as they built their luxury cruise liners, they would use them to blackmail the IMO into extending the use of dirty fuels, using an economic argument that would not have existed if they have looked for alternatives in good time.

There’s a certain allure found in doing things we know that we shouldn’t do. We try to self-medicate as we binge on food; we seek stress relief with alcohol or cigarettes; we spiral downward in our addiction to drugs or pornography, always in search of the ever-elusive higher high; we allow frustration to morph into anger and eventually into bitterness and rage; we let one little exaggeration of the truth snowball into an unwieldy maze of lies; we become depressed and complacent as we stop engaging in life and pursuing healthy relationships or activities. We know full well the peril that comes with certain choices, yet once we dip our toes into that water, it becomes easier and easier to stay.

And that is how global warming has reached epidemic proportions. We are hooked on fossil fuels and promises of economic growth. All lies spun by corrupt politicians seeking election and businesses raking in the cash, when they should have known better.

And even though we can clearly see from the onset just how disastrous the destination will be, once we take certain actions, it becomes seemingly easier to pursue a little more and a little more and a little more… The downhill trip to despair is much more effortlessly travelled than the difficult climb back up to higher ground. It’s better to avoid a pushy door-to-door salesman by refusing to open the door in the first place than it is trying to get him to leave once you’ve invited him in.

Never open the door to a lesser evil. Unfortunately, we did that on several fronts at first not realising that the evil was evil: coal and oil; two drugs that are hard to kick. Coming off petrol and diesel engines is like going cold turkey, inhaling their carcinogens lead to cancer while the electorate is charmed by political porn stars like Putin and Trump.

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SEXY OR WHAT? - If these pictures turn you on, rehabilitation is going to be a long hard road. What amazes us is that anyone thought this kind of high was morally acceptable. We bit into the apple and ate to the core, without noticing how energy depraved we had become as we worshiped the $dollars that our snake charming political porn stars had promised as the path of righteousness. Salvation will be impossible with corruption in politics.

BLOCKERS TO ADVANCEMENT - Four of the G20, those with high incomes and expectations built on continuous growth and exploitation based on fossil fuels, could be behind the brake that smacks of the Locomotive Act of 1865. Can we expect that clean ships with zero carbon signatures will be forced to have a chap swim ahead of solar and wind powered vessels, carrying a red flag?

ALTERNATIVE CULLING - Health Service budget cuts mean that social care in the community is suffering, so that the elderly sometimes die from otherwise minor ailments from complications. The fact is that generally humans are living longer from better diets, housing and medicines. That is why the retirement age has been raised.

Fish in the diet has been shown to prolong life over meat eaters (red meat in particular) one reason the Japanese have so many centenarians. It could be argued that by not cleaning the oceans, population growth might be halted in the longer term when people develop cancer as a result of eating toxic fish. An unkind notion and inhumane, but surely treating cancer patients in large numbers will cost more than cleaning the oceans - unless future budget cuts mean suspending treatments - and that is the secret agenda.

Spending on cancer research might go to offset the rising toxicity levels of wild fish and consequential human suffering. The EU have pledged sums on their Horizon Europe budget for cancer research.

There are as yet no Government Health Warnings as to toxic biomagnification in seafoods, caused by marine plastic.

WORLD HEALTH 2012 - According to the World Health Organization 3 million people die each year as a result of air pollution. Exhaust fumes from diesel engines do cause cancer, a panel of experts working for the World Health Organization says.

It concluded that the exhausts were definitely a cause of lung cancer and may also cause tumors in the bladder. It based the findings on research in high-risk workers such as miners, railway workers and truck drivers. 

However, the panel said everyone should try to reduce their exposure to diesel exhaust fumes.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer, a part of the World Health Organization, had previously labeled diesel exhausts as probably carcinogenic to humans.

IARC has now labeled exhausts as a definite cause of cancer, although it does not compare how risky different carcinogens are. Diesel exhausts are now in the same group as carcinogens ranging from wood chippings to plutonium and sunlight to alcohol. It is thought people working in at-risk industries have about a 40% increased risk of developing lung cancer.

LINKS & REFERENCE

http://www.imo.org/

IMO's Management (Left to right) - Mr. Sung-Jin Kim, Head, Internal Oversight and Ethics Office; Mr. Hiroyuki Yamada, Director, Marine Environment Division; Mr. Lawrence Barchue, Assistant Secretary-General/Director, Department for Member State Audit and Implementation Support; Mrs. Linda Ryan, Director, Administrative Division; Mr. Kitack Lim, Secretary-General of the International Maritime Organization; Ms. Heike Deggim, Director, Maritime Safety Division; Mr. Arsenio Dominguez, Chief of Staff; Ms. Ariane Gireud, Acting Director, Conference Division; Mr. Frederick Kenney, Director, Legal Affairs and External Relations Division and Mr. Juvenal Shiundu, Acting Director, Technical Cooperation Division. What is wrong with this picture? The blue flag should be red.

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