 |
Ballast water treatment: Regulations get tighter as time goes on - in an era of bureaucratic ascendency
One of the more burdensome aspects of regulatory quagmire ocean shipping faces today are demands for ever ascending standards of ballast water treatment. It was once enough to suck up ballast water in one part of the world and dump it in another.
No longer. The consequence of global trade is the transport of up to 12 billion tons of ballast water across the oceans every year. It's necessary and important to maintain a ship's stability, trim and structural integrity.
|
 |
Weighing prospects of international shipping under Joe Biden's new administration in the United States
While it might be sensible to adhere the policies of the departed Trump administration in the long run for the sake of world trade, short-term interests are probably better served by Biden administration which can be expected to make symbolic gestures against China while making no serious trouble for Beijing. And that should be good for shipping for two or three years at least.
Given the campus radicalism that has emanated from the White House and the 51 per cent approval rating for socialism among Democrats, as well as control of the House of Representatives and a de facto of Democratic majority in the Senate given that the deciding vote can be cast by its Democrat president, Vice President Kamila Harris, Republicans have little to cheer about.
|
 |
Northern Sea Route's viability appears to have found a role based on global CO2 curbs and the use of LNG
After the America's bureaucracy successfully counter-attacked and dislodged the de-regulating Trump administration, little stands in its way. With its ever-leftward march with a de facto majority in the US Senate and a solid majority in House of Representatives, it can do much as it pleases. Only a slew of liberty-loving judicial appointments and increasingly lonely Brexiteers oppose the radical rhetoric of the world's parliamentary left as it spurns traditional values and even questions the significance of gender and even rationality itself.
With global warming again on the front burner and the never-ending Covid crisis confining all but the elites and their favoured causes to virtual house arrest, there is a renewed interest in the Northern Sea Route over Russia. This has been brought about by global fuel emission restrictions necessitating the use of liquefied natural gas (LNG), which would be otherwise economically inaccessible in the Russian Arctic were it not illegal to buy and burn cheaper and more plentiful fuels.
|
 |
Digitisation lessons learned in the Covid crisis, but can we apply them to shipping thereafter?
A look through the "macroscope" since Chinese New Year, after world shipping undergoes its annual convulsion, we find the international Covid crisis has left the industry in a state few anticipated this time last year.
On one hand the world is a poorer place, having endured the worst recession since 1939 as one hopes it doesn't take World War III to pull us out of it as World War II did 80 years ago.
|
|
|
Mediterranean & Africa
Trade Specialists |
|
