So many papers have been submitted and so many arguments up for debate that MEPC chairman Andreas Chrysostomou has moved to put the debate and the discussion into the working group rather than plenary.

He also suggested that since the IMO committee charged with developing the mechanisms for environmental protection seemingly cannot agree on market-based measures that a group of experts could be empanelled to take the debate outside the meeting.

This went down very badly among the Kyoto non-Annex I countries and other serial doubters that have delayed the IMO debate on MBMs thus far but Chrysostomou is right: this problem needs a different take.

Such an expert group might not come with a better solution – though there is every chance that away from the pressure of an IMO committee, that it could. It might even come to conclusion that the MBMs proposed fall outside the criteria that the IMO has set – fair in operation, easy to administer, fraud-free etc.

What it needs is the freedom to make that decision. This cannot currently be found inside MEPC.

It need hardly be added that the clock is ticking and MEPC has a stack of other work to do, notably ironing out the bugs in the Energy Efficiency Design Index, Operational Index and Ship Efficiency Management Plan. Efthimios Mitropoulos opened the session by suggesting these could be finalised for adoption at MEPC61, wishful thinking to judge by the afternoon’s proceedings.

It must also find time to finalise the Emissions Control Area for North America, implore more countries to ratify the ballast water convention and agree technical guidelines for the ship recycling convention.

These are all making progress but GHGs will not. The afternoon of the first day offered echoes of the Annex VI debate on SOx, NOx and particulate matter: stalemate, punctuated by disagreements, not just on MBMs but on technical and operational measures too.

The IMO actually looks like a body that is aware of the consequences of failing to come up with solutions to achieve GHG reductions. Sadly half the members of its senior environmental committee seem prepared to take the chance of finding out what the alternative might be for themselves – taking the rest of the industry with them.

That seems to be the message that the shipping industry is channelling in the long run up to MEPC60 in March this year.

Since the end of the COP15 conference, there has been a feeling that the process will peter out. The news hasn’t helped.

Thanks to the airmiles clocked up by its leader and its false claims for glacial melting, the IPCC is being denounced as a hobbled organisation. The farce of the University of East Anglia’s ‘manipulated’ emails on climate change data merely adds tabloid fuel to the fire of righteousness.

I’m amazing and humbled by my co-contributor Michael Grey’s forbearance for not laying into this subject before now with his customary verve. We could hardly have blamed him.

So who is going to step forward and still make the case for green shipping? No? OK, here goes.

The first reason that the industry should continue on the path on which it has embarked is that the climate change sceptics and naysayers are at least as divided as the converts to the cause. There is simply no cogent argument against climate change, merely dissonant voices arguing that the science is open to question. This is debate that should be held in public – properly moderated – and needs to move beyond the anecdotal.

The second is that even without the ‘threat’ of climate change, shipping has evolved to be a brilliantly inefficient industry. It sometimes appears to do what it does inspite of itself, even though it has managed to transport more of almost everything around the world for next to nothing. Energy efficiency simply hasn’t been an issue until now so hasn’t made the agenda. The energy crunch will do what climate change fails to. Making the transport chain more efficient would benefit everyone except those who make money from its inefficiencies.

Lastly, even if climate change fails to appear at all, what would be the downside of a concerted move towards environmentally-friendly shipping? Would consumers paying closer to the ‘true cost’ of the goods manufactured and delivered – be they natural resources or running shoes – a bad thing? Rather, wouldn’t that give shipping a better story to tell the public about its role in world trade and globalisation; that it was prepared to reach beyond the bare minimum or the regulations.

Shipping might be confused but does it still need to act? Yes, arguably more so than ever. If it does not, the assumption must be that it is afraid to look its stakeholders in the eye and account for its record on safety, on environmental protection, on human rights and corporate social responsibility.

Let’s forget the various traders in carbon and concentrate on something rather more worthwhile, such as the engineers and technologists who, rather than the scientists, really will make the difference.

Speaking last week at a Maritime London gathering, Lloyd’s Register’s Marine Director Tom Boardley was able to give only a range of options, which might emerge from the Cop 15 chaos, as it was still work in progress.

But he was clear about the opportunities presented to his organisation by the perceived need for cleaner, greener ships. And all over the world of marine technology, bright people are considering how ships can be made more efficient, how to make the expensive fuel go further, and how to minimise the impact that a ship makes upon the environment.

There is a whole raft of improvement that can be made in the realms of fuel management, while engine manufacturers are already well advancd in the reduction of harmful emissions through a whole range of measures that will produce fewer of these gases without sacrificing speed. Thereare all sorts of improvements that seem possible and which will aggregate to substantial reductions in the environmental footprint, from hydrodynamic enhancements, to the vast arrays of solar panels on the garage roof of a large car carrier. Better paints, smoother underwater forms, more efficient propellers – it all will help.

On the operational front, there is a huge amount that can be done, and to existing ships, moreover, to smarten up charters so that ships do not steam at high speed between ports, only to wait ages for a berth at the destination. Last week there were more than 40 large bulk carriers swinging around their anchors off the New South Wales port of Newcastle, which is not known for its brilliant holding ground. How much wasted effort is encapsulated in that simple statement of fact?

There is, says Boardley, a new interest in the concept of the nuclear merchant ship, which might surprise some people and enrage others, but has a good deal of economic and environmental sense in the idea, of a merchant ship that will need refuelling but once in its operational life.

And then there is recycling, and a vast tonnage of ships which are less efficient and more expensive to operate, and which could be suitably disposed of. It is all grist to somebody’s mill, and will cheer up shipbuilders no end, even though the more hopeful are already offering“greener” ships! And really, nobody had to wait for the politicians to unravel something meaningful from Cop 15. It is there for the asking.

Environmentalists, it seems, hate trade, and various brickbats have been thrown, figuratively speaking, at international trade and the transport which facilitates it. How much better it would be if we could sit at home, not go anywhere, and eat our home grown vegetables (meat being hated too). Then we would not, besides all the noxious exhalations of ruminants, have to suffer from those out of the exhausts of ships, and the resultant climate changing effects.

It is, of course, all very rural, bucolic and charming, until we consider world population growth, which doubled between 1960 and 1999, and could well double again by 2050 (if we haven’t all drowned because of sea level rises).

All these additional people, largely emerging in the less developed parts of the world – are they to stay at home and subsist on their own home-grown produce? Perhaps they are to starve, because the trade which will enable the world’s population to avoid some Malthusian catastrophe, has been banned as unsustainable, with the carbon footprints of ships being regarded as intolerable in the post-Copenhagen dispensation?

The worry is, as our politicians make ever more expansive gestures to placate the massed environmentalists in the febrile atmosphere of Copenhagen, that the long consequences of the practical decisions taken in the heat of the moment will be ignored until it is too late. It is trade, technology and transport which will support the population of this world awhile yet, if only those who would seek to denigrate its contribution remember this useful truth!