Let me add the development of the "Open Ministry" is also open. We welcome all interested developers and pull requests! You can find the source code at https://github.com/avoinministerio/avoinministerio . The tech stack is currently simple Ruby on Rails hosted on Heroku, with few associated tools like MailChimp. At the moment the developers hang out at Flowdock channel https://flowdock.com/, you'll certainly get an invitation by request.

As the service has been just launched we just squash bugs and keep service up and running, and hopefully we'll survive the Slashdot effect (which surely will be toned down by Finnish only website). On the (open) roadmap there are things like

• o higher engagement with users by following ideas and discussions, and perhaps
• o multi-lingual site (though the nature of online discussions usually work out better in one main language).

Join us, help us! Hack the law!

There is more to it than just the amount of emissions. There might be massive effects on global warming. Or more like it, the opposite of it, the global cooling.

I can not pick the sources for these claims, but most of ship engines generate loads of pollution, especially plenty of very small particles. Also lots of sea gets evaporated into air. Now, to make clouds you need these small particles to gather moisture. The clouds are like a natural white shield, reflecting plenty of energy back to space. The clouds will not reduce amount of IR absorption by carbon dioxide, but they do lot to reduce the effects, like cool down the local environment when they rain down.

It might be beneficial to reduce the amount of pollution generated by the big boats, as these pollute most of their time on the oceans and cloud forming effects on oceans are not that clear like for the land. But plain order "reduce ship pollution" might easily reduce local cloud forming on "smaller seas" like Mediterranean or North sea.

The most important idea here is, that there are no very direct and easy decisions to be made without taking into account very complex set of effects.

Yes, maybe we can save 50M cars worth of pollution, but maybe we should not save that on sea or it will get hotter on the land. Or maybe we will reduce the pollution near big ships that usually will grows plenty of plankton, which in turn will consume surface water carbon, reducing toxicity of sea water before dropping to the depths effectively moving carbon from atmosphere to the bottom of the sea.