Return of the windjammer - wind-propelled cargo ship - makes its media debut with considerable scepticism
 The latest fashionable enthusiasm to be thrust upon international shipping community is the supposed efficacy of wind power - however scant its real support is among those active in the industry.
Their reluctance to embrace the windjammer reborn, or the concept itself is not because of a latent luddism, which often afflicts industries that face game-changing technology that threaten to end a way of life forever.
Not at all. In all likelihood, wind power afloat will have a similar impact to wind power ashore - that is not very much. Ditto solar power, another disappointing fair-weather technology much beloved by bureaucrats.
Its core support is in the media, academic, bureaucratic complex. Each of its three elements support the other two with the academy acting as the filtration service for the personnel of the other two.
All three mutually re-enforcing agencies agree that more regulation is needed. The public must accept the imperatives of whatever is ratified by the Elders of Davos to face the fashionable fears that spawn a never-ending flow of new rules, regulations and unfunded mandates to govern life in ever more exacting detail. In this, shipping is hardly immune.
For this, the academics provide through state-funded studies to substantiate the fears that justify the new regulations. These fears are publicised by an increasingly feminised media, which uncritically accepts the need for new bans and mandates. As no woman can be credibly accused of cowardice, cowardice itself is no longer a fault but now re-categorised as a mark of intelligence.
"In recent years," say these latter-day windjammers, "the performance of wind propulsion technology has been strengthening. Installation costs are decreasing as the number of installations increase, and ROI (return on investment) is shrinking thanks to high fuel prices."
Let's examine these claims from International Windship Association (IWSA) published in the American Journal of Transportation. Yes, "the performance of wind propulsion technology has been strengthening". Which is true as far as it goes, which is to say not very far. Any advance on zero, however small, can certainly be counted as "strengthening." And that's what we are talking about.
The desirability of wind propulsion is based on two fears. The first is the alleged "high price of oil" and the other being the cost of CO2 emissions. Both are bureaucratic creations and have little to do with supply and demand.
And from these fears spring imperatives, accompanied by apocalyptic visions. The failure to respect the state-enforced counter measures are first met with derision and as they increase over time and intensity, and then with fines, house arrests and imprisonment.
The apocalyptic visions resulting from a failure to act keep changing because the time frame first given runs out and nothing like the promised apocalypse occurs. Long before its sell-by date, the official fashionable fear changes to something else.
So we move from "Famine 1975", predicting global starvation in 1965. And when that didn't happen, we moved on to "New Ice Age" and global cooling in the 1970s (the CIA backed that one), at which time the Club of Rome came up with its "Limits to Growth" computer model, suggesting we would be living in a horse-drawn world by the year 2000 when the world ran out of oil.
Of course, we have had a least two oil gluts since these dire predictions and have since dropped global cooling - though the Soviets hung on to it for an unfashionably length of time. We have since moved on to air pollution and now the massive campaign against carbon dioxide emissions, the very gas we exhale.
From where do these imperatives spring? While CO2 emissions are the big focus, the quick Google answer to question on what harm they cause becomes instantly vague. CO2 emissions "cause climate change by trapping heat, they also contribute to respiratory disease from air pollution".
But as far as international shipping is concerned the most cited reason to support a return to the days of wind and sail are the high price of oil. Another reason concern expected bureaucratic penalties for emitting CO2 once a European-style emissions trading scheme comes into force via the UN's International Maritime Organisation (IMO), which old seadogs will remember as IMCO, the International Maritime Consultative Organisation.
In assessing the justification of the demands of global shipping, which involved skyrocketing compliance costs, involving the purchases of ancillary equipment such a scrubbers, or the burning of unreliable and expensive low-sulphur fuel oil, not suited to standard ships engines. Worse still, the building of new ships with new fuel or dual-fuel engines with LNG, biofuels, ammonia and whatever else becomes the flavour of the month.
There was a time - 15 years go - when industry associations made sensible demands, such as demanding that regulatory authorities make a case for the need of new rules before they are enforced, but no longer. Perhaps, international shipping felt powerless in the face of having no sizeable constituency ashore to make such a case, or perhaps these associations dominated by a smaller number of ever larger companies decided to go woke because compliance costs drove smaller players to the wall and facilitated further consolidation of the industry and increased the market share as the bigger fish ate the smaller.
And when on reviews all the social imperatives, promoted, if not crafted by the media, academic, bureaucratic complex, we find their track record for accuracy to be appalling to non-existent. From global famine in 1975, which, of course, never came about, we find quite the reverse. Moreover, the third world has never been better fed, with the UN's extreme poverty eradication scheme reaching its 2020 goal in 2012.
Now consider the high price of oil. Oil shortages are entirely bureaucratically created because of the desire of the anointed elite to have us all rid ourselves of yucky fossil fuels. The US discovered that because of shale gasoil finds, American is self-sufficient without the need of another Persian Gulf barrel. Or it would be if the progressive politburo that has taken over the reins of government had not forbidden oil companies drilling where they are most likely to find oil.
That's not to mention American efforts to cap the price Russia sells oil to India. Whether US concerns about giving Russia greater advantage than it should have, given its invasion of Ukraine, is immaterial. The one thing this situation makes clear is that there is no shortage of oil, and whatever shortages materialise, are entirely created by the state for its own wokish reasons.
Undoubtedly, the windjammers will be in for a few eye catching grants to get their project in the papers and on the internet. But there is no way, these ships will carry the cargo volumes that will justify long voyages with large crews little cargo to pay for it all.
Despite the feel-good romantic aspects of the return of the windjammer, there is nothing to see here if one is looking for a game changer for international shipping. Not unless the wokish governments will take us back to the dire poverty of the 19th century world that truly made the days of wind and sail sustainable. |
