From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
AUGUST 4, 2022
By Paul Homewood
A shipping expert gives his views on the latest climate regulations for international shipping:
A new report found that more than 75% of ships will not meet the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) new Environmental social and corporate governance (ESG) index aimed at decarbonizing the industry. This means that many ship owners will be forced to slow ships down to reduce emissions but doing so could deepen the global food and energy crisis by reducing available ship capacity.
“IMO decarbonization targets will cause ships to slow down delaying food shipments and people will starve,” a global security analyst told gCaptain. “How many people will die as a result of the IMO’s ESG efforts is unknown at this time. I don’t think most shipowners even understand the severity of the EEXI threat but it could be millions of lives.”
IMO EEXI ESG INDEX
“Prior to any efficiency modifications, more than 75% of the fleet — including bulkers, tankers, and containerships — will not be compliant with the Energy Efficiency Existing Index (EEXI) that will enter into force next year,” said cargo analyst Joey Daly, in the new VesselsValue report.
The challenge of decarbonization will extend to all areas of shipping, and EEXI alone will present a myriad of challenges to owners, operators and financiers. Simon Hodgkinson, who heads loss prevention at West P&I, has suggested that the new rule could be one of the most significant new shipping regulations in years. He believes it has the potential to shift the entire industry.
The International Maritime Organization’s Energy Efficiency Existing Index is a voluntary, incentive-based system that encourages ships to improve their energy efficiency. The Index uses a vessel’s speed, cargo-carrying capacity, and other factors to calculate a numerical score. The higher the score, the more energy efficient the vessel. More specifically EEXI (Energy Efficiency Existing Ships Index) is a measure of a ship’s CO2 emissions per transport work. It is similar to the Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI), which has been in force since 2013, but applies to existing ships rather than new ones.
The Index is designed to motivate shipowners and operators to invest in energy efficiency measures that will reduce fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
Ships have to attain EEXI approval once in a lifetime, by the first periodical survey in 2023 at the latest.
Slow Steaming
Ship owners can meet the target by building new eco-friendly ships, investing in new decarbonization technology, and upgrading existing ships to burn cleaner fuels like LNG, or by slow steaming.
Slow steaming is a technique used by shippers to reduce fuel consumption and emissions by slowing down vessels. The process involves sailing at a slower speed, typically around 50% of the vessel’s maximum speed. This can be done by reducing the revolutions per minute (RPM) of the propellers.
While older ships can be retrofitted with devices to lower emissions and meet EEXI requirements, analysts say the fix most ship owners will take is just to go slower, with a 10% drop in cruising speeds slashing fuel usage by almost 30%, 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.
This strategy also reduces the amount of wear and tear on the vessel, which can help extend the life of the ship. But there is one ancillary effect: a potentially massive reduction in fleet capacity.
Full story here.
As I understand it, the new regulations are voluntary, so will likely be ignored by many countries. However, shipping lines ignoring the diktat may find themselves punished by banks and insurers, operating to strict ESG rules:
“As the IMO prepares to rate the energy efficiency of ships on a EEXI scale of A to E, shipping companies will come under increasing pressure to meet these targets not just from regulators but also from banks.
In 2019, a group of banks committed to efforts to cut carbon emissions when lending to shipping companies. This group of banks established the Poseidon Principles, a global framework that is consistent with IMO policies on environmental grounds. As of today, 28 banks have signed on to the Poseidon Principles.
The Poseidon Principles are fairly new but are already having a ripple effect on finance and insurance, as banks and other lenders begin to factor in a company’s carbon emissions when making lending decisions.
What this means for shipowners is that even if they find a way around the IMO’s ESG regulations, steaming at normal speeds could increase their carbon scores and have a negative effect on financing options and stock prices”
This demented obsession with decarbonisation brings a painful dilemma:
Slow steaming means in effect less global shipping capacity, leading to a potential bottleneck on supplies. As the article explains:
“Is a reduction of capacity really a troubling problem? Yes.
Nobody is calculating the price of a good ESG score in terms of human lives,” said one global security analyst who wished to stay anonymous. “The question is no longer if people will starve to death because of IMO decarbonization targets. The question is how many?”
The most troubling fact from our conversations with global security analysts was that millions could die before famine even sets in. “
And longer shipping times mean higher journey costs, despite the savings on fuel, adding to the cost of everything we import.
The alternative, of course, is to simply build more ships to bring shipping capacity back into equilibrium. The building of these ships will, of course, carry an enormous carbon footprint of its own, eliminating any potential savings from fuel efficiency for many years to come.
And China?
Any discussion about international shipping must take into account the role of China, who are believed to control the world’s second-largest shipping fleet by gross tons and constructed over a third of the world’s vessels in 2019.
Will they follow these rules?
One of the reasons for their global dominance of shipping lies in a complicated and opaque system of formal and informal state support that is unrivalled in size and scope, and which includes subsidised finance from state banks, who are unlikely to be concerned with ESG.
While China may pay lip service to these new regulations, given their total disregard for ESG in other industries, I would strongly suspect that they will just carry on building up their shipping industry, taking advantage of the West’s weakness.
And the West’s economic dependence on China will grow ever more dangerous.
Changing policy to make ESG compliance a violation of fiduciary duties would help, but that means removing green or suckup politicians.
Banking is the key group “to make ESG compliance a violation of fiduciary duties” but they’d be hard to touch as there is no economy without them
lending money. They got bailed out in the early 90’s & the late Oughties &
the same policy will continue, the only unknown being which banks will
survive. Having “green/suckup pols” makes it even more impossible!
Well, politics is the problem. The science is way less settled.
I guess they are trying to make Paul Ehrlich look good in the process of cutting off supply and depopulating.
Paul Ehrlich… Again? – Watts Up With That?
Row, row, row your boat slowly cross the Pacific … merrily merrily merrily … life is such a dream.
However life will not be quite so merry for the “untouchables” conscripted to row the boats. But it is a Communists wet dream of “full employment”. Why a crew of 12 can be replaced by a crew of 1,200 men!
But to ensure gender equity, shouldn’t it be 600 men and 600 women?
You forgot the alphabet soup!
Yes. It must be a Queer Boat … and … a LOVE Boat. Because Love is Love
Take those large cargo transport vessels and install 2 rows of masts down the deck and add a bunch of sails
with the 57 genders (or is it more by now?) it’s about 21 of each for gender equity.
Make it a rowboat – Roman galley like 😀
Divo should be played into the background, Whip it, whip it good!
“…in to shape
Shape it up…”
Go Forward. Move ahead. …
Make the Chinese go slow. I want to see that now.
China halts climate, military ties over Pelosi Taiwan visit – ABC News (go.com)
All they need is an excuse…any excuse
Let people die to reduce emissions, the new normal, thanks Greens and climate bastards…
The whole purpose is to reduce global population. Modernization achieves this but it is slow, taking several generations. The WEF can’t wait that long.
We are the carbon they want to reduce.
A switch back to sailboats should do the trick…
Here we go
Nice and slow
With CO2 no!
In their day, clipper ships were pretty fast. Much faster than the diesel Liberty ships of WW2. Their disadvantage was requiring a much bigger crew to handle the sails and maintain the rigging.
That disadvantage could be fixed by autonomous automation.
Just think, thousands of little “rodets” scurrying around the ship to keep things just spiffy! While the operator snoozes away somewhere else on the planet.
“What kind of terrorist is he?”
“A Terrifying Terrorist”.
I’m just being pedantic.
Clipper ships had to circumnavigate the entire world rather than sail back and forth across the oceans. They did so to take advantage of the high following winds in the roaring 40s and furious 50s. Clipper ships could go faster than a Liberty ship but only on downwind. They were far slower upwind as to go upwind as all sailboats have to zig zag. To maximize the time on downwind required circumnavigating the globe which was a much longer distance. Look up “clipper route”.
Steam ships were much faster from port to destination and back, faster yet after the Panama and Suez Canals were built. Diesel ships are even faster. Diesel ships can cross the Pacific without having to divert far away from the fastest route to refuel with coal. So even if the top speed of a clipper was higher than a Liberty ship, the Liberty would have been faster roundtrip.
Exactly right – the bozos who advocate the supposed efficiency of modern automated sailing freighters can doubtless point to the wonderful efficiency of wind turbines (yes I am being sarcastic). Now think about the tonnage of a bulk carrier compared to a tea clipper.
More trivia. The most famous tea clipper race was between the clippers Ariel and Taeping, which left China on the same tide and raced to London with the first of the new year’s tea crop, arriving in the Thames within 20 minutes of each other and splitting the prize money – but the first tea of the season had arrived several days earlier, by steamer through the Suez Canal. And that’s what happened to the clippers…
A French company is planning to build a second larger sailing cargo boat following a not that successful venture with a smaller boat.
The new boat will be able to carry up to 350 tonnes of cargo and will be 50 metres long. This is pushing up against the upper size of and scale of a sailing boat.
Compare that to a modern container ship that can carry over 20,000 Twenty foot Equivalent Unit (TEU) containers.
I don’t think the clippers had the load capacity of the slower ships.
My brothers are involved in a project in CostaRIca to build a “sailing cargo ship”. It seems to involve an incredible amount of prime timber. As I understand it is a “demonstration” project and will support itself by people paying to go on cruises.
https://thecostaricanews.com/sailing-without-polluting-costa-rica-builds-the-maritime-transport-of-the-future/
Wouldn’t those proposed people have to get to Costa Rica somehow first? Seems like if the Elite are attempting to reduce global travel, tourism might take a hit.
One has to wonder how Klaus Schwab successfully signed up so many businesses and corporations to the ESG scam. Intimidation and threats are obvious but promoting religion over competition and profit is counter intuitive to business. At some point the blowback from the people over being forced to embrace ESG must make it collapse. I foresee businesses at some point becoming more profitable using an anti ESG platform.
ESG is technically against US corporate and securities law. It can be ‘practiced’ by investors like Blackrock, but but not by corporate boards or officers, who’s sole duty is to maximize shareholder returns. ESG does not remotely relate to that.
How many sons and daughters of Congresscritters sit on corporate boards around the world? How many of those sit on multiple boards. Just because it’s written somewhere that corporate boards have a “duty”, it doesn’t mean the office holder doesn’t serve something else.
You nailed it! The fourth Reich is coming!
I dug into this a bit before commenting. IMO is a UN subsidiary set up to globally regulate maritime shipping with respect to:
It operates thru member nation treaties, just like UNFCCC for climate change.
The operable atmospheric pollution treaty is MARPOL annex 6, which deals only with NOx and sulfur, requiring lower sulfur marine diesel or ship exhaust sulfur scrubbers by about now. Both add shipping cost but are perfectly feasible technically. Enforced in the US via 33 USC§1901-1905 via a JV between EPA and Coast Guard.
As Paul’s post quotes cite, the so called new IMO EEXi on ‘carbon emission’ shipping efficiency is voluntary. There are NO enforcement mechanisms. So the feared impacts simply will not happen. Sort of like the Paris Accord. Just more Green hopium.
“…the so called new IMO EEXi on ‘carbon emission’ shipping efficiency is voluntary….” This the identical verbiage used in Agenda 21. But if you read between the lines they will use intimidation, ostracizing, trade barriers, and the like to enforce it. It’s like the Mafia charging you for protection.
I should have added one additional note about annex 6 allowing two methods of meeting the stricter SO2 standard. For smaller ships and older big ships, the economics say buy low sulfur diesel. For bigger newer ships it is probably best to retrofit sulfur dioxide stack scrubbers—just like all coal US power plants now have.
“So the feared impacts simply will not happen…”
Mmm, but, but “how many people will die … it could be millions…” millions I tells ya.
What’s this? Brown hopium?
It’s confusion on your part.
In the next 80 years (by 2100) 7.5 billion people will die from any of a couple thousand methods…
War
Cold
Heat
Alcohol
Cancer
@$$holes with bombs
Accidents
Held up by XR
Murdered
Old Age
Heart failure
Etc…
Why is a changing climate any different?
2 comments:
Everyone will be worse off.
So it’s ESGD with D added for depopulation.
The equivalent of a 55 MPH speed rule for shipping. The promulgates of these rules have no clue about thermodynamics.
This world has never in our lifetime been as fruitful and productive as it is today. Why can’t these alarmists see that?
Because the alarmists have an inverted moral system. They believe abundance of good things is evil. In effect– to quote the Bible– they call evil “good” and good “evil”. (Isaiah 5:20, for those interested.)
Because of a religion-based affliction with a guilt complex because life is so good for developed societies.
The only alarmist here is an un-named “global security analyst” who is postulating on the basis of no evidence what-so-ever that “millions” of people will die. Just imagine the ridicule that they would get here if they made the same claim about global warming.
Mr. Walton, I’ll grant that the “millions” claim is speculation at best. With that said, I would trust the words of a industry member over the words of government officials any day. The “global security analyst” has better insight into the delicate stability of shipping than the government does. A million or more deaths is a high claim but not impossible if shipping is grossly affected by the ever-tightening grip of ESG.
let us sing to the glory of Klaus Schwab and George Soros:
They’ve got the whole world
in their hands
They’ve got the whole wide world
in their hands
They’ve got the whole wide world
in their hands
They’ve got the whole wide world in their hands
They’ve got you and me
in their hands …
I think David Bowie wrote a more apt one.
The Man who sold the World.
PUKE…Now I’ll never be able to get that stain out of my mind’s eye
I wonder if that’s part of the long term game plan.
In the longer term the most likely outcome will be an expansion of the number of ships in the global fleet to offset the effect of running slower. The net result will probably be more emissions and higher costs to consumers, just like other stupid green regulations.
Back to the days of sailing ships. Or maybe Flettner Rotors will be back.
Looks like they started driving up prices for the bunker C heavy oil that is used extensively as fuel in shipping. In late 2019 they had driven the price per barrel of bunker C fuel higher than a barrel of gasoline.
As they push for ultra-low sulfur fuel oil for shipping, expect prices to go up more, like they did for ultra-low sulfur diesel for trucks and cars
That’s mainly the effect of sulphur regulations. Not so long ago, HMFO could contain as much as 4% S. Now the limit on the high seas is 0.5%S, and just 0.1% in emission control zones. It takes a lot of processing with hydrogen to reach those levels, adding enormously to cost.
China and Russia will certainly ignore this, so will be able to dominate world trade and decide who gets timely deliveries and who gets the slow service.
Just as well my place of residence has such a huge amount of high quality coal, but is the government smart enough to apply pressure?
Hopefully Rud is right and it has no effect, but it would be easy to monitor with the shipping records. Not as easy to hide as the practice of supplying Ivermectin while claiming compliance with the dictates of the Lords of Vaccine.
Atomic Insights, Show #294 – Mikal Boe, Core Power Founder and CEO
“Mikal Boe has spent 30 years in and around the commercial shipping industry. Several years ago, he began wondering how his industry was going to meet the increasingly stringent rules for air pollution and CO2 production that were being implemented by governing regulators, especially the International Maritime Organization (IMO). ………….
……… On this episode, Mikal Boe explains how he and his team made their choices and how they plan to take a step by step approach to achieving their goal of giving the commercial shipping industry a viable, competitive nuclear propulsion option.”
Nuclear seems to work fine in maritime use, from carriers to ice breakers to subs.
What works for the military out to work for industry.
Commercial cargo ships get by with as few human crew members as humanly possible. One key goal of the Core Power technical approach is to significantly reduce the number of crew members devoted to propulsion reactor operations, as compared with reactors used aboard military vessels.
So how would this be monitored? “I steamed at reduced speed”.
Ooh boy, where do I start on this. Decarbonization has major attention in the shipping world, judging from the myriad of conferences and publication in this topic going on for the past few years. Shipping accounts for 3% of global anthropogenic emissions, or 0.14% of all CO2 emissions in the world given that natural emissions surpass anthropogenic emissions by 21:1. In other words, a drop in the ocean that is going to make no measurable difference if eliminated.
One of the problems with slow steaming is that shipping contracts do not allow it as they often stipulate that the ship must arrive as soon as possible. There are experiments being done with virtual arrivals to mitigate this.
Whether a vessel has actually slow steamed is easy to find out. All ships over 300 gross tons have a mandatory Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponder on board that transmits, among other items, their position and identity. When moored this is down to every six minutes, but in fast maneuvers or when carrying dangerous cargo, this can be every two seconds. There are extensive satellite networks that pick up this public information and publish this. See for example the MarineTraffic website.
According to UNCTAD data, there are currently 102 899 registered vessels in the world’s merchant fleet, not counting fishing vessels. Of these vessels, 7362 are registered in China (excluding Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan) and 2875 in the Russian Federation. Compare that to a country like Liberia that has 3939 vessels registered, or Panama with 8025 vessels. Ship owners will register their vessels wherever it is economically most advantageous and this will definitely become a factor with decarbonization.
In the end, fuel efficiency is a good thing to strive for. A balance must be found between saving fuel and the cost of shipping. CO2 should not be a factor in this, overall human wellbeing should.
Shipping contracts vary according to the nature of the shipment and other factors. Where a boat is bare back or time chartered the charterer is free to give vessel orders as they see fit. Even spot charters for a specific voyage may contain speed up clauses at additional cost and a target lower speed, or provision to cover time spent at anchor at charterer request (a separate issue compared with demurrage payments awaiting a berth in port). The latter is now quite common with LNG shipments, since winter gas now commands a large premium to prompt delivery: it pays to store the gas on the ship until there is access to storage onshore. Previously LNG shipments had been on accelerated voyages to try to increase the rate of supply.
Other bulk cargoes are often speeded or slowed in reaction to demand changes at the destination. Same with car transporters.
Container traffic is rather different, in that the cargo is usually owned by many different shippers or importers. There the key is not missing a berthing slot, which can lead to extensive delays waiting for another one. Speeding up is often undertaken to ensure a vessel meets its appointed time at a busy port.
Another primary-school level “report” by some rich guy’s kid that would not otherwise be able to find a real job? I don’t mind stupid people making fools of themselves in public, but these turds are being paid with pour taxes.
If your harbour packs/unpacks ten ships a week, what the hell difference does it make how long they took on their journey? Even if all ships sailed at half speed, they will still arrive at the destination in the original order, with the same cargo, needing the same machinery to transfer it.
Can somebody please explain to me how this will cause “starvation” for longer than the first three weeks, after which all the shippies will be arriving at their destinations, delivering all that chocolate and soy milk without which we all gonna die!!! …and another !
Apologies for the invective and shouting…
P.S. Wasn’t the guy pushing ESG slapped down hard a few weeks back, when it became apparent he is using his scam to blackmail corporations? I believe a number of big names have actually started legal proceedings against him?
The charges are that he is using his profits from the scam to bankroll legal persecutions against corporations, blackmailing them into joining him, or risk being slandered in the Press. Apparently, it is very costly to defend yourself against the little twit’s assaults, courtesy of the corrupted courts, who have taken some kind of moral stance against the air we breathe.
Moral stance, you know, that thing that turns a normal family man and the mother of his children into “the greatest danger our democracy has ever seen”?
Any legal eagles here, not beholden unto the “Independent Judiciary”? What says you?
Then again, the judiciary has become to justice what health care has become to life.
If each ship can only make half as many trips per year, then you need twice as many ships. This time, it will be three weeks late; next trip it will be nine weeks late, etc.
Building a ship has a huge carbon footprint, and you would need twice as many crew, who would have to remain at sea twice as long between ports, and you would want to pay them the same amount per voyage, or less per day; that might make recruiting crew more difficult.
But we can’t build twice as many cargo ships because we are already facing a shortage of vessels to build and connect offshore wind farms and these should surely take priority! 🙂
Build new ships? No, you won’t, just deploy all the ships standing around after the owners were sanctioned or their ships confiscated by Federal Law Enforcers.
Just kidding. But I must remind you ships are not delivery vans that navigate with Google, they are bound to specific routes where they load as well as offload. You don’t send an empty ship halfway around the world to go fetch a new load. The circulation will slow down, but then, can you name a port that is actually keeping up with the existing traffic?
In a stupid, stupid world where you “…slow a ship down “half by reducing the revolutions of the screw by half…” it does not matter anyway, because the population needing those deliveries will be gone, and the primitives taking over the deserted buildings can eat each other.
In the end, all the small operators will go bankrupt, and the big ones will ignore all regulations, happily accepting the ten thousand buck “fine” once a while. Fines they never pay, anyway, the case is always “on appeal” year after year after year…
It is time to hang the independent judiciary, then we can sue the real perpetrators.
The question is no longer if people will starve to death because of IMO decarbonization targets. The question is how many?
nobody will starve as a result of decarbonization targets.
Well, that settles it then.
Try telling that to the Sri Lankans
Death by blinders, right Griff.
“In reality the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.”
― Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution
“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
― Joseph Stalin
“You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves.”
― Joseph Stalin
They’ll starve to death from how those decarbonization targets are met (AKA no fertilizer) and indirectly from a lack of Atmospheric fertilization due to reduced CO2 by meeting those targets and how that will in turn affect food production
So, super slow steaming will mean more container cargo shipped by air freight to meet tight timelines. Where’s the carbon savings then?.
The trans Siberian rail alternative between China and Europe somehow has less appeal at the moment. And in winter, your cargo will have to tolerate temperatures of minus 40 or less (same in F and C).
It will probably mean more cargo will be shipped on Chicom vessels, since they won’t abide by ESG rules, and will give you the fastest service.
The carbon savings will happen on the other side of the equation, ie millions dead.
From the article: “This demented obsession with decarbonisation”
Yes, it is demented.
Jumping though all these dangerous, harmful hoops to control CO2 when there’s no evidence CO2 needs to be controlled. That’s demented.
Idiocracy on a worldwide scale.
So, western civilization will continue to commit slow – then all of a sudden – suicide while the rest of the world goes about its business.
The dirty little secret about so-called “energy-saving” or energy efficiency” schemes: they cost far, far more money than they might save in the cost of fuel saved (if any). It is solely a virtue signalling exercise meant to appease the Climate Mafia attempting to rule the world.
Artificial gravity generator technology is the best way to go. It promises virtually free electricity and a powerful energy prime mover. Ill keep working on it.
Sad to say, I sorta’ agree with some of this, but for very different reasons – and not at all because some quango wants to decarbonise shipping to “SAAAAAVE THE EARTH!!!”
My agreement stems from Canada’s Grand Banks. Once the most valuable fishing ground in the northwest Atlantic ( – trivia:
1) the Grand Banks were the progenitor of the Catholic Church’s dictum that fish be eaten on Fridays, as a venal way of improving the fortunes of Spanish and Portuguese fishermen who summered on the Banks
2) a tiny street in St John’s Nfld called “Hill o’ Chips” is the oldest street in North America)
, today the Grand Banks are nearly devoid of fish. Canada stopped the massive overfishing decades ago, but cod populations on the Banks have never recovered, due apparently to the noise passing shipping makes; cod must hear each other to spawn. I suspect many other fishing grounds around the world suffer the same effect; and I would love it if ships slowed down (and consequently made a lot less noise) passing the Banks – the few cod which remain would speedily repopulate. Done worldwide, this could help many fish stocks to recover – and hopefully put a crimp in the overflowing jellyfish population.
Just me, though – and nobody cares what I want 😉
We had to destroy the village in order to save it .
A ‘few’ poor unfortunate human lives lost is only collateral damage or required sacrifice to the Climate Religion .
They can deal with that , the stormy seas must have slowed those ships down .
News flash: China just ditched climate cooperation so you can label this ex-ESG from now on.
China halts climate, military ties over Pelosi Taiwan visit – ABC News (go.com)
“China has ENDED climate cooperation with the dishonorable United States! From now on, we will burn ALL THE COAL we WANT, oh wait…”
That ought to get Biden’s attention. Him being a True Believer, and all.
We had military ties with the Chicoms? How does that work? They steal our technology and we let them get away with it? Is that how we cooperate?
That’s pretty much how we have cooperated.
“And China?”. China will work behind the scenes to promote this nonsense understanding the weakness of western woke “leaders” as a way to further undermine our economies while they themselves completely, and wisely, ignore EEXI guidance. Just like China and Russia support green NGOs to help spread propaganda to useful idiots in the west.