Tools are at hand to extricate shipping from this one-way world - if well deployed
 What world shipping - and most everyone else - must worry about today is not only freedom of access to artificial intelligence (AI), but its objectivity.
Already we have seen what happens when it becomes monopolized by a one world-view and programmed to operate as a partisan Ministry of Truth. One can include Google in this that already exhibits egregious faults one suspects of AI gone bad.
For example, when asked for sceptical views on climate change alarmism, Google provides views that are sceptical of climate change scepticism. It prioritizes one side and buries the other without reference to the obvious intent of the questioner. Or indeed without regard to what half the population thinks, based on electoral results.
What must be appreciated is that climate change alarmism is the core issue afflicting international shipping as the industry finds itself in a world in which public debate has only one acceptable side.
And when it comes to climate change, and its impact on international shipping, the comparison is close to George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four than any of us would like. Here we find fictional Winston Smith erasing inconvenient bits of history in the Ministry of Truth as we easily imagine Google doing today. What's wanted is something like the Star Trek robotic character Data to dispassionately give us the upsides and downsides without fear or favour. It would be even more re-assuring to have competing Google-like search engines take over the space the way competing newspapers once did.
More currently relevant to shipping is what appears to be a quixotic quest for net-zero, the screaming imperative of bureaucracies worldwide and their media and academic allies. Specifically, it involves the power grab of "cap and trade" and "carbon trading".
All of which must be to protect us against dreaded climate change.
So what's there to fear, we ask our AI bot Co-pilot. "Unchecked climate change leads to rising sea levels," it said, "extreme weather, floods, droughts and wildfires, mass extinctions and threatens food and water security. Human health suffers. Economically, it destabilises communities, damages infrastructure, and exacerbates inequality. Social tensions rise as migration increases and resources dwindle. Without urgent action, the compounding effects risk making parts of the planet uninhabitable."
Much of this is debatable, and when you look at it, it’s not very scary. What's more it is based on projections, computer models that are reliably unreliable. The Club of Rome eco alarmists of the 1970s said we would run out of oil by the year 2000, and we would be living in a horse-drawn world.
And every day or so, there is a properly post-nominalled expert debunking this and that scarifying claim. What's missing is a debate between the two sides so the wider public can determine who is telling the truth, or at least approximate the risk and say what is justified to mitigate whatever is happening, if indeed something must be done at all.
Among the many climate change sceptics that are seldom heard from are Richard Lindzen, ex-MIT atmospheric scientist; William Happer ex-Princeton physicist; Judith Curry, former chairwoman, atmospheric science, Georgia Tech; Steven Koonin, former undersecretary for science, US Department of Energy; John Christy, professor of atmospheric science, University of Alabama; Rodger Pielke, professor of environmental studies, University of Colorado; Nils-Axel Morner, ex-Stockholm University, head of Paleogeophysics and Nit Shaviv, astrophysicist, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Occasionally, they pop up at Congressional hearings, now that Republicans are in power, to make their points, that climate modelling is unreliable, CO2 does more good than harm as it said to be greening arid lands, and that while the world is warming, it is not warming in an alarming way. Ditto for sea levels rising. But the solid wall of bureaucrats is not listening.
If these things are debatable, why are they not debated? Why? Because the established "Truth" (aka Science) cannot be questioned, because the established truth is the foundation upon which all plans of the central planners are based. If they were have no foundation, the myriad of rules and regulations would collapse like a house of cards. And hundreds of thousands of agents from agencies worldwide would lose their jobs.
While catastrophic climate change is the screaming bureaucratic imperative and dominating fiction that governs all. Its teeth have long menaced international shipping, but is seriously advancing with a cap and trade scheme.
Nine government funded professors who collaborated on an article for The Conversation, a left-leaning, publication, said:
"Moving people and things around the world by sea has a big climate impact. The shipping industry produces almost three per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions – roughly the same as Germany – largely due to the movement of container ships, bulk carriers and tankers.
"Under international rules, these emissions are not included in any nation’s greenhouse gas reporting. That means they often escape scrutiny.
"Unlike cars, international shipping can’t shift to using low-emissions electricity – the batteries required are too big and heavy. So clean fuels must play a role.
"A proposed shake-up of the global shipping industry would encourage the use of clean fuels and penalise shipping companies that stick to cheaper, more polluting fuels. Should it proceed, emissions from global shipping would be regulated for the first time," said their article in The Conversation.
What is the proposed carbon levy all about?
"The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) is the United Nations body responsible for regulating international shipping. It recently approved a draft plan to tackle the shipping sector’s contribution to climate change through a type of “cap and trade” scheme," says the professorial piece.
But contrary to what the professors assume, and which has been widely assumed, the United Nations, and its subordinate agencies, do not "regulate international shipping". That is the right and responsibility of the sovereign member states - not the UN.
Granted, it can be a near pro forma process in western states to have it morph into domestic law. Once an unelected civil servant delegated to represent his country at a UN high agency council votes for the measure, then the prime minister or president can make it domestic law.
But not in the US, where all foreign treaties, and rules and regulations emanating from such accords, must be approved by the US Senate. But as the AI bot Co-pilot says: "UN protocols and conventions have been rolling out steadily over the past decade, but very few have made it through the full US Senate approval process."
Thus, continue the professors: "The plan would involve setting a limit, or cap, on how much each shipping company can emit. Companies must then either buy credits or be penalised if they go over their limit. Companies that stay under their limit – for example, by using cleaner fuels – would earn credits, which they could then sell."
Unlikely as it sounds, this is how Canada's new prime minister Mark Carney, a principal apostle of the World Economic Forum - by being greener than thou, plans to make millions for Canada by selling carbon credits.
This is the Brave New World in which we have entered. |
