Weaponizing transparency: Before complying to CO2 bans, let's see if the cure is worse than the disease
 One can understand the advantage to the counterintuitive support big business gives to the politically correct "wokeness" movement, and the soaring compliance costs that new rules and regulations throws up.
The higher the compliance costs, the harder it is for smaller business rivals to meet them. And if rivals go out of business, big business is there to absorb the market share. For some, it's win-win. We had seen this before. In the last decade, the number of major independent shipping lines has been reduced by half from 20 to 10.
But with the current fuss over CO2 and decarbonization, has it all gone too far? That dystopian verse comes to mind:
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
"Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
"Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
"Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."
Such is the situation the corporate world faces today as what they have been supporting to make a better cleaner world, is in fact paying danegeld protection money to keep the peace with hungry bureaucracies of the world, always greedy for more money and power.
In this process bureaucrats transfer powers from the private to the public sector. Bureaucrats are now trading on their own account, not as civil servants we suppose them to be, but as civil masters of all they survey.
It is clear that ruinous things have been done in the name of saving the planet. Big business, the Maersks, MSCs and CMA CGMs and the Hapag Lloyds, have benefitted from going with the flow in Greta Thunberg's current Children's Crusade, but now have gone too far and they are at risk being eaten by the woke monster they have been so cheerfully feeding.
Yet they rush on regardless. Said BMW chief executive Oliver Zipse: “Without significantly increased efforts by all stakeholders - including member states and all involved sectors - the proposed target is simply not viable.”
Said International Chamber of Shipping secretary general Guy Platten: ”It’s difficult to see what extending the EU ETS (emissions trading scheme) to shipping will achieve towards reducing CO2, particularly as the proposal only covers about 7.5 per cent of shipping’s global emissions."
This misses the point. Why do we think reducing CO2 is necessary? That is, or at least should be the question. Ask Google for the harm done by CO2 in the atmosphere, and this is what you get:
"The harm may include headaches, dizziness, restlessness, a tingling or pins or needles feeling, difficulty breathing, sweating, tiredness, increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure, coma, asphyxia, and convulsions. The levels of CO2 in the air and potential health problems are: 400 ppm: average outdoor air level."
Is that the dread threat we are protecting ourselves against, enough to put petrol prices beyond reach of the average person. Is that enough to justify restoring air travel as preserve of the rich?
By fighting this, the industry - all industry everywhere from the CEO to the third assistant oiler - is saving itself - or attempting to, as the battle is far from won - from rule by bureaucrats, who have such a love of the four freedoms that they have expropriated them entirely for themselves.
The EU’s ambitious goal is cut emissions by 55 per cent in 2030 compared to levels in 1990, up from a previous target for a 40 per cent reduction. The EU seeks a "transformational overhaul that will change how people drive and fly".
To get there, the EU seeks to phase out combustion-engine cars by requiring emissions from new cars and vans to fall by 55 per cent from 2030 and to zero by 2035, and new taxes on aviation fuel. The EU wants shipping ensnared in carbon market, aka carbon tax system, already the world’s biggest.
We clearly do not know where we are going in this eco craze, certainly not the slightest clue of where we shall end up. We do know that virtually every dire prediction environmentalist have made have come to naught. The Maldives are still with us and not under water as feared, and there are still snows atop Mount Kilimanjaro and the Suez Canal is not worried about being made obsolete by the Northern Sea Route over Russia.
And as far as the fear of carbon dioxide is concerned, it the best Google can do to tell us of the dangers is that we "may" suffer headaches, dizziness, restlessness, a tingling or pins or needles feeling, difficulty breathing, sweating, tiredness, increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure, coma, asphyxia, and convulsions," it hardly seems worth bothering about. Certainly nothing to justify a statist "transformational overhaul that will change how people drive and fly".
As we - in this case the worldwide shipping community - does not know where were are going except deeper into a maw of state regulation, we can at least determine where we are,
That involves having shipping lobbies demand what the dangers of the various environmental dangers actually are, and boldly refuse to accept the world according to Greta Thunberg.
Let's stop fussing over whether it will only be a European scheme or a global one under the UN's International Maritime Organisation. In this case, they are merely the good cop and bad cop on the same force, anxious to bag another source of taxation and exact fresh controls on shipping eliminating what little freedom of choice there is left.
That means examining, and publicising a forensic audit on all environmental claims - including a cost/benefit analysis of the various eco threats that need to be addressed. This will be furiously resisted as it was when former President Donald Trump's EPA appointee, Scott Pruitt, demanded that all scientific findings upon which regulations would be based be open to outside peer review beyond the coterie of in-house scientists who never saw a regulation they didn't like. This initiative was condemned by these scientists as "weaponizing transparency".
To save itself and the freedom of the seas, such action must be taken. Before we know where we are going, we must first insist on knowing where we are. |
