With climate sceptics in charge today, let's free shipping after robust two-sided debate
 Like much of the world, the US Trump-Vance administration is divided on global warming, but trends towards scepticism.
What makes this important to shipping is that so much of what shipping does, or is allowed to do, is governed by regulation based on the assumption that global warming or climate change is an existential threat to humanity.
But if global warming and/or climate change proves not to be a serious threat, then the expense, the multiplicity of onerous rules and regulations, bans and prohibitions are no longer justified because the catastrophic outcome they were was supposed to guard against no longer exists if it ever did.
Should such knowledge become widely known, it would not be welcome by those who make and enforce the rules and regulations. No longer would huge taxes be collected to sustain vast bureaucracies, scores of inspectorates levying fines, issuing licences and paying wages to millions of bureaucrats worldwide.
But the bureaucratic state is hugely powerful, even if its safety-first-and-always mantra was seriously challenged, because it still feels that it has the right to limit choices to those few regulators find acceptable.
These restrictions are based on the harm done, supposedly done, or might be done. Thus, to justify a ban on an old fuel, or outlaw a risk cheerfully undertaken by willing participants, or to permit a land use change without a costly environmental impact study is thought to be unthinkable.
What's often missing is any semblance of proof or evidence of actual harm done or likely to be done. Thus, bans are enforced because the exercise of free choice is thought to offend sensibilities of those who are pre-disposed to being offended.
First, let's look at the most widely accepted assessment of damage to be expected if nothing were done to mitigate global warming.
We asked Google for the sum of all fears of the worse outcome if unaddressed global warming were allowed to continue unimpeded - and one is told:
"Destruction of homes, loss of livelihoods, and fragmentation of communities. Increasingly dangerous and irreversible risks if we fail to change course, limiting of water availability and food security,
increase in heat-related mortality, heart disease, and mental health challenges."
One cannot help but be underwhelmed by such threats. They seems little more than the usual run of unpleasant events that accompany the life of Everyman. As for something to be frightened of, to spend billions of tax dollars, to mitigate seems silly in the extreme given the likelihood of such outcomes or the likelihood of success of one's mitigation efforts.
Further Googling determined how homes would be destroyed in the face of unbridled global warming. Google said they would collapse as the permafrost melted beneath their foundations. This may be a threat to Eskimos, Greenlanders and Laplanders, but few of us build homes on permafrost.
The Deep State, aka, the media, academic, bureaucratic complex, urges mankind to be fearful of climate change. But it is now opposed by a populist force bent on decimating it, headed by Donald Trump in the US, and perhaps Nigel Farage in the UK and Marine Le Pen in France. Such forces are coalescing around similar leaders throughout the Western world.
What was once a simple right-left divide between an ambitious clerical class and a lumpenproletariat set against the capitalist bourgeoisie, and its tame officialdom, is no longer. What has replaced it, starting in 1950 is a largely male set of Main Streeters, skilled workers in small businesses facing Wall Streeters linked to City of Londoners, all members of a university credentialed class, still tethered to a largely female lumpenproletariat voting bloc.
Like contiguous reefs of algae, the two sets in two countries, have outgrown their parental forbearers. Both in America and the UK, the traditional rightist hostility towards government has long since faded, as big spending state contracts became the major source of megabuck deals.
That led to the gravitation of the supposedly free market Republican/Conservative towards the state connected Democratic/Labour Party.
In response, patriotic American Main Streeters and the UK's High Streeters made much the same shift at the time in the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The largely female lumpenproletariat - welfare mums - stuck with the Democrats and the Labour parties.
The prevailing situation, with brief interruptions, has prevailed since the mid-1970s, in which the regulatory state has grown from a useful arm and tolerable nuisance to the point where it blocks whatever one wants to do and indicates what few courses one must take.
This leaves shipping - and virtually everyone hoping to make a buck in the free market - reason to hope. That's because there is now a government well-disposed to turn a forensic eye on climate change, ready to demand to be shown what evidence warrants curtailing of free choice - even free speech - not by the lights of enlightened bureaucrats, but in the judgment of elected representatives.
It is far from a slam dunk and it would be wise to think of the challenges ahead as Omaha Beach not as a Yorktown. Earlier, one found Google helpful in establishing the worst fears that would materialize if nothing were done about climate change.
But Google proved most unhelpful when asked for people who had debunked climate change or global warming. To that request, Google supplied dozens of references and video lectures of various professors to debunked those who debunked climate change and global warming.
Google was asked then for names and videos of "climate change deniers". This elicited a half dozen names - but nothing more.
This was followed by what Google had provided in the first go-round. The very same debunkers of climate change deniers.
While it is a vital first step to establish credibly and scientifically that fears of global warming are unjustifiably inflated, it is only a first step. This general understanding must be conveyed far and wide and dramatically publicised and readily made accessible 24/7 via internet facilities in a series of debates on whether one should fight climate change and the degree to which it must be fought. |
