"It takes 15 of the world’s largest container ships to equal all the pollution created by cars on earth."
The winningest professional surfer of all-time, one Robert Kelly Slater, found himself Instagram, yesterday, as Americans flocked to the polls and decided it was time to share a bit of information about climate change. The autodidact is, of course, widely knowledgable across multiple fields. Slater is smarter than most doctors, a mathematics whiz and an expert in Sino-American relations just to name but a very few.
Regarding the climate, though, the legendary snowboarder Jeremy Jones had posted a carousel of images highlighting the differences between Trump’s policy positions and Harris’s and urged his many followers to vote with the climate in mind.
Slater, in any case, teed off, “So you think Harris winning is gonna change the planet’s climate in a noticeable way? It takes 15 of the world’s largest container ships to equal all the pollution created by cars on earth. And there are thousands of those ships. Any policy they can get her to memorize and speak on is not gonna change anything in any tangible way and surely not stopping avalanches, as old as time itself. But if we all fight about it here it might just fix it.”
Nobody at the time of his comment was fighting though the floodgates certainly opened thereafter with many Slater fans praising the 11x world champion’s intelligence and fortitude.
The only small problem, Slater was spewing misinformation like a coal fire. Jones, a climate activist for many years and founder of the non-profit Protect Our Winters thanked the 57-year-old Pipe Master for joining the conversation though pointed out that “The CO2 output from all the cars on the planet in a year is approximately 3.05 billion tons of CO2. The 15 largest cargo ships in the world collectively produce 4.13 to 4.96 million tons of CO2 annually.”
Hmmmmm.
Slater’s skepticism, and smoke blowing, might have been borne from sincere confusion even though, as mentioned, he is smarter than most doctors. It might also have been borne from the fact that he is actively trying to sell energy-hungry wave pools to Middle Eastern petro-kingdoms. Do you have any thoughts on that?
If we all fight about it here it might just fix it.