Over the past several days, it has become clear that the European
powers that be have failed to
avert the economic disaster that
has lain in our path like a massive improvised explosive device in Afghanistan.
The conference that I'm speaking at, Mare Forum, holds a session in Italy each year.
This one is entitled "Optimism in the Air". The headlines, however, say "Banks Brace For Spread of Europe's Credit Crisis".
What is now happening is that nobody really knows what's happening. We do, however, realise that our lack of information about which European banks are vulnerable to sovereign debt problems, and therefore defaults on government bonds, means that virtually all lenders, including those to shipowners, will stop making short-term loans to one another.
This very likely will lead to a second…
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I'm in Rome to speak at a shipping conference (of which there are many these days), gazing down from Monte Mario, at a panorama dramatically backlit by periods of sun and brief showers of rain.
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News that Islamist insurgents captured the Somali city of Xarardheere over the week-end of May 1-2 raises a number of questions for shipowners and seafarers, though it provides few answers yet.
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The week before I joined my first ship, there was an encouraging headline in the local paper.
“Seafarers the scum of the earth, says judge”. He was, if I recall, dealing with the aftermath of what appeared to me a low-level riot in Southampton, with a Cunarder’s crew celebrating in an unrestrained fashion, in the course of which part of the city was wrecked.
Well, that was more than a half century ago, but it often seems that in a world even more dependent upon shipping for its food, fuel and fashionable consumer goods, the seafarers does not appear to have greatly advanced up the social scale.
Nobody knows any seafarers, so ships might be manned by Martians for all they believe. If they did, or if they had some inkling…
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The Gulf of Mexico drill rig disaster is casting a growing shadow on the discipline, if that's the correct word, of oil spill prevention, cleanup and response.
Not since the EXXON VALDEZ incident, more than two decades ago, has so much attention been focussed on "measures taken" and "lessons learned."
There will, we can be sure, be many lessons learned.. One is that the marine environment and its protection is of great political and economic significance.
When a few friends and I formed the North American Marine Environment Protection Association (NAMEPA), three years ago, it was with an awareness that the private sector, the government, engineers and scientists still had to reckon with the peculiar nature of oil spills, particularly those involving large quantities of the stuff.
What we have before us…
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