Food for thought at SOS
Posted on | June 24, 2010 | No Comments
The shipping panel at the Sustainable Ocean Summit was typically catholic blend: trade bodies for shipping and carbon capture, a drillship operator, oil major and engine-maker.
Oh, and James Corbett, one of the academics whose research suggested that shipping’s SOx emissions were responsible for 60,000 deaths a year.
The work ethic was protestant though, and for an apparently disparate group, there was plenty of common ground, though not always agreement.
That the panel didn’t concern themselves much with market-based measures and the politics of climate change was a good idea since the former is mired in the swamp of the latter.
Instead as Corbett pointed out there was a wellhead of interest in green technology investment on technical and operational measures. Enough, perhaps to make the cost of compliance bearable. If the EEDI becomes ‘shipping policy’ then ‘national policy’ manufacturers can get the best technologies out into fleet and allow owners to generate return on investment.
Transocean’s Ian Hudson suggested that collaboration on energy efficient solutions could be improved almost immediately through collaboration. For all the hi-tech ideas out there, better would be a clearing house approach which promoted dialogue around efficiency and technology and enabled companies to make decisions without duplicating R&D effort.
Carbon Capture and Storage Association’s Judith Shapiro suggested the post-Copenhagen regulatory landscape could see the UNFCCC superseded, with a global solution traded for instruments tools which worked bilaterally or regionally between G8 countries. ICS’ Marine Director was heard to remark that he very much hoped she was wrong.
Food for thought then and proof that changing the mix can start to change thinking. Carbon is common to all the sectors and Corbett dangled an intriguing anecdote that I took, perhaps wrongly, as a reflection of the story so far. When running from an angry bull, he said it doesn’t matter how fast you can run when you are going in the wrong direction.
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