Weighing the credibility of experts given their track record in the Covid crisis - and now slow steaming?
 In an unusual "collaboration" with the venerable British news agency Reuters, the "Elders of Davos", aka, the World Economic Forum, itself a collaboration of the highest government and business officials, produced an article entitled "Why Shipping Might Be About To Get a Little Bit Slower".
Underlyng the article's apparently benign message to stave off global warming and its supposedly deadly consequences, is the insistence that shipping must turn away from fossil fuels and "go green" and slow down.
Concealed in the seemingly harmless verbiage contains the plainly discernible - "or else". That is, if that shipping lines do not stop burning carbon-emitting fossil fuels, the bureaucratic class has ways and means to make them slow down into unprofitability.
Of course, the major big five shipping lines, the Mediteranean Shipping Co (MSC), Maersk, CMA CGM, Cosco and Hapag-Lloyd are okay with the CO2 emission bans. They even call for thorough enforcement of the new eco order. If new rules have the effect of driving up compliance costs, then so be it. Driving small fry out of business and so the bigger lines will take market share is merely the way of the world. Such are the new realities.
Having bigger companies take over the smaller ones has become something of a theme of the last decade. Starting in 2014, Chile's CSAV (Compania Sudamericana de Vapores) merged with German shipping giant Hapag-Lloyd. In 2015, Cosco absorbed China Shipping. Then CMA CGM acquired APL via NOL of Singapore. Korea's Hanjin Shipping then declared bankruptcy with HMM taking its customers. Then Maersk bought Hamburg Sud as Japan's NYK, "K" Line and MOL container operations merged into ONE, the Singapore-based Ocean Network Express. Then Hapag-Lloyd bought UASC (United Arab Shipping Co) and Cosco acquired Hong Kong's OOCL (Orient Overseas Container Lines).
So further mergers and acquisitions will surprise no one.
It is well to remember that this situation and the Covid crisis, as well as the mindless rush to reduce CO2 emissions were brought on by Elders of Davos, or their ilk in the bureaucracies of the world. Be they communist or capitalist, the Covid crisis was most severe where the university-trained bureaucracies were the most powerful. Where they were the most absent - sub-Saharan Africa, Muslim lands, central Asia or where locals were focussed on something else, like in Burma, Russia and Ukraine, Covid and its endless variants were hardly mentioned.
Like global warming, Covid is an official craze treasured because it gives bureaucrats unbridled power. As a genuine threat, in and of itself alone, it sinks into insignificance. That's because it Covid is a disease that kills those who are expected to die anyway, those who are very old or suffer from catastrophic illness.
What is unacknowleged is that the death rate among this category of person is likely to increase for at least a decade to come because the war babies of the 1940s and '50s, and the later baby boomers can be expected to die between 2020 and 2030 as they reach their 70s and 80s. Thus, soaring death rates can be expected with or without Covid.
It now appears that the Covid scare was deliberately fostered. Inflating the scare gave the health and safety crowd police powers enabling them to put entire populations under house arrest and impose endless mandates that few dared question.
As no one knew what the bureaucracy was going to do next. Shutting down the ports and factories was feared. Those in charge of such operations, made and shipped out as much as they could as soon as they could. Coincidently, the unintended conquence of this was a parallel ecommerce explosion. As people could not access services - bars and restaurents - spending money on things soared while spending on services plunge. So the consumer appetite for things factories, ports, trucks and trains handled grew exponentially as a result This soon clogged marine terminals and rail yards throughout America and Europe.
Keeping the crisis ball on hop, new age communists in the west, aka "progressives", took over the government of the US and pressed on with their anti-fossil fuel, green-new-deal agenda with accompanying confusing campaigns championing the rights of sexual deviants. Such tactics helped prevent opponents of the progressive green new dealers from focusing on any one thing that might concern the public more.
The more eye-catching the cause, the more attention was diverted from other causes more relevant to the majority, or even sections of the majority who were not nearly as fearful of global warming or opposed to fossil fuels as the Deep State felt they should be.
Ridding the world of fossil fuels is what concerns us here. The pitch of the today's highly placed causeniks of the World Economic Forum is to discourage using older fossil fuel burning ships until their natural lives run out. Scrap your perfectly good ships, they say, go straight to alternate fuels.
This advice from the enemy - for that's who they are - ignores that these approved fuels are unavailable in the quantities needed and are far more expensive than standard bunker. Their use is more suited to the companies that can afford them, those that can pay top dollar when they do become available.
Of course, there is the entire question that as been suppressed of whether the causeniks are right about the threat fossil fuels and CO2 poses, indeed whether global warming is real, and if it is, how serious a problem is it?
Say the Elders of Davos. "Faced with uncertainty about which fuels to use in the long term to cut greenhouse gas emissions, many shipping firms are sticking with ageing fleets, but older vessels may soon have to start sailing slower to comply with new environmental rules.
"While older ships can be retrofitted with devices to lower emissions, analysts say the quickest fix is just to go slower, with a 10 per cent drop in cruising speeds slashing fuel usage by almost 30 per cent, according to marine sector lender Danish Ship Finance.
"They're basically being told to either improve the ship or slow down," said Jan Dieleman, president of Cargill Ocean Transportation, the freight division of commodities trading house Cargill, which leases more than 600 vessels to ferry mainly food and energy products around the world.
Is it not time to demand answers? Who is giving us this advice that is damaging to our immediate interests, and why are they doing so. And when a "why" is demanded, that means a "why" in detail. Not that 97 per cent of scientists say so, not when it turns out that that included only 97 per cent of scientists green new dealers chose to ask. It is time to stop surfing on waves of unexamined assumption as we have done, and subject experts to a long and grueling questioning, and not allow plainly evasive answers to pass unchalleged as parliamentary and congressional hearing so often do.
Perhaps next month's mid-term election might set us on the right course. |
