Must do better
Posted on | December 2, 2009 | 1 Comment
Don’t die of ignorance was the strapline of an unpopular and largely ineffective health awareness campaign of the 1980s. That the same exhortation can still be still applied to the public’s perception of shipping’s contribution to pollution and global warming is enough to make you weep.
The Daily Mail, staunch defender of British middle class ‘values’ is the latest copy-chaser to corral howling inaccuracies, huge suppositions and massive conjecture and present them as facts in a one-sided ‘shipping is evil’ argument.
The Mail even found its own ‘expert’ – an environmental consultant to New Scientist no less – to claim that 16 ships “can produce as much lung-clogging sulphur pollution as all the world’s cars”. He bases this on the revelation that there are 54 tankers lying off the English coast – part floating storage, part arbitrage, though whether the other 38 emit any sulphur is unclear from the story.
Indeed, whether his sums: a nominal 16 of “the largest ships emitting 5,000 tonnes of sulphur a year” equivalent to “50 million cars emitting 100 grams of sulphur per year” multiplied up “a world fleet of 800 cars” are either accurate or meaningful is almost beside the point.
We have all seen versions of this PowerPoint and pointed out that it ignores tonne miles as well as the clean air regulation that forced the cleanup of car exhausts. The bizarre claims continued, citing Corbett and Winebrake’s ’60,000 deaths per annum’ study (scholarly but containing a enormous caveats) and some of the usual suspects who crop up when there’s a cheap quote and free publicity to be garnered, parlaying a weak story into a pre-Copenhagen pot-boiler.
But the real disappointment in all this? That the organisation best placed to tear a strip off this slapdash one-sided nonsense was only able to complain to the Mail that the article “portrayed shipping a bit unfairly”. The ICS, for it is they, did manage to lob in some balancing comments in a circular email to challenge some of the claims but by then, the damage had been done.
And really, shipping is going to have to do a lot better than this. This is not to single out or bash the ICS. But if a well-funded organisation, packed with experts and presumably retaining PR talent, cannot get a balancing article in a newspaper so obviously hungry for copy, then we should all be very afraid.
And why did the UK industry not join in condemnation en masse, leaving web comments, tweeting, blogging and writing letters of complaint? In this debate – and particularly post-Copenhagen – that is precisely what shipping’s opponents will do. Its proponents need to do better.
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One Response to “Must do better”
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December 3rd, 2009 @ 11:13 am
Some good points, especially with regard to the industry needing to engage in these conversations.
Where the facts are misrepresented, there need to be responses.
In terms of the Mail on Sunday article, you can find some good comments from INTERTANKO on the issue here:
http://commoditypodcasts.com/blog/2009/11/26/thoughts-on-that-article-about-16-ships-and-their-pollution/