Slow is Good

From the New York Times:
By halving its top cruising speed over the last two years, Maersk cut fuel consumption on major routes by as much as 30 percent, greatly reducing costs. But the company also achieved an equal cut in the ships’ emissions of greenhouse gases.

“The previous focus has been on ‘What will it cost?’ and ‘Get it to me as fast as possible,’ ” said Soren Stig Nielsen, Maersk’s director of environmental sustainability, who noted that the practice began in 2008, when oil prices jumped to $145 a barrel.

“But now there is a third dimension,” he said. “What’s the CO2 footprint?”

Traveling more slowly, he added, is “a great opportunity” to lower emissions “without a quantum leap in innovation.”

In what reads as a commentary on modern life, Maersk advises in its corporate client presentation, “Going at full throttle is economically and ecologically questionable.”

That principle holds true in the air and on land. Planes could easily reduce emissions by slowing down 10 percent, for example, adding just five or six minutes to a flight between New York and Boston or Copenhagen and Brussels, said Peder Jensen, a transportation expert at the European Environment Agency.

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