Take a look at your standard t-shirt. Where does it come from?
Sure, the label says "made in Turkey", or Mexico,
or Bangladesh… but that's only part of its epic journey.
The cotton probably comes from Lubbock, Texas; It's then woven, treated, bleached,
and dyed across the ocean, in China; cut and sewn into a t-shirt in Bangladesh;
sent back to the U.S.; a couple of pictures later and,
if you bought it online, it travels across another ocean, say to Berlin, where it's sold for €4.99.
It sounds like madness, but it's actually shipping.
Shipping is so cheap that it has become irrational.
"For example, it rains 24/7 in Belgium. Yet, we buy water that is bottled in the South Pacific."
"Fish gets caught in the North Sea, then goes frozen to Asia, where it's filleted and sent back."
But there's a hidden cost to these absurdities. The full price of shipping is being paid by the environment.
[ocean waves in the background]
In relative terms, shipping is very efficient.
Moving goods by sea can emit more ten times less C02 than by road,
doing it by air is several times more polluting still.
But in absolute terms, it's an absolute nightmare.
"It's the sheer distances that mean that those emissions stack up and become a problem."
Lucy is a Shipping Policy Officer at Seas at Risk, an association of NGOs working to protect oceans...
and she lives on a boat.
Part of the time...
The other part I live in a room in Brussels." [laughs]
Can I get a quick peek of the actual boat?
"Wait, if I duck you can see it… Weee!" [laughs]
"80% of ships are burning heavy fuel oil, which is a really thick viscous, polluting fuel.
It's kind of it's one step away from tarmac."
This creates very dangerous gasses that contribute to air pollution.
Their engines are very noisy too. Ships' low rumble is ubiquitous in the ocean
and it disrupts animals' ability to communicate and find prey.
And then, of course, there’s CO2.
The industry emits more than all the coal plants in the U.S, and just a fraction less than aviation.
But while these sectors are regularly denounced, shipping has escaped scrutiny.
"Shipping is the only sector that doesn't pay for its carbon pollution."
Faig Abbassov leads the shipping program at Transport and Environment, an NGO campaigning for cleaner transport.
"It's the only sector that doesn't pay taxes on fossil fuels it uses. It doesn't pay VAT."
"Recently, global leaders agreed to impose a 15% global
minimum taxation rate. There was one sector that was exempt. That's shipping."
One reason regulators turn a blind eye to shipping is that the industry has become almost invisible.
[messenger ringing sound]
Hey Aditi, how are you?
"Good. How are you?"
I have a question for you today.
"I'm nervous!"
[laughs]
I asked my colleagues to guess how many goods are transported by sea, in percentage.
"Something like..."
"...40%, 50%"
"A bit more than 50%, a bit more than half!?"
"70%... maybe?..."
"60-70%?"
" I'll say 40%"
"Actually, 90% of global trade travels by ship."
Rose George is the author of "Ninety Percent of Everything", a book about the workings of an invisible
industry that puts clothes on your back, gas in your car, and food on your plate.
"What struck me when I started writing my book was this phrase, 'sea blindness.'
It's a brilliant phrase because it's absolutely true. I think what personifies it most
is if you're sitting in a plane and you have one of those airline maps in front of you,
often there's no the sea is just a blank, it's just a bit of blank blue."
"And quite ironically...
There's nothing as big that has been created by humans that can move."
These things are massive. If you wanted to use a train instead of one of these big ships,
the train would need to be 70 km long to hold all the containers!
When travelling by sea was more dangerous and ports were closer to our cities,
ships were more present in our lives.
"You might use a car, you might get on a bus or even on a plane.
But unless you live in a port city,
you never see a ship. And it has been out of sight, out of mind type of situation."
The invisibility applies to the people working on these ships, too.
At least 544 seafarers were held hostage by Somali pirates in 2010,
with hardly any breaking news.
"And if you look at the last year, particularly in the pandemic, nobody was talking about the seafarers
that were stuck on board for ten, eleven, twelve months because they weren't allowed ashore.
They were also really far down the list of people to be vaccinated.
So again, they couldn't come ashore."
But this invisibility is useful, too.
Especially if you want to hide this disturbingly black smoke on the water.
[guitar music plays]
Enforcing regulations can be very messy.
If something goes wrong on a Japanese-built tanker, owned by an American company,
sailed by a Filipino crew, managed by a Cypriot, sailing from China to Canada in international waters...
who do you blame? Well, maybe… Panama?
"Panama, Marshall Islands, Liberia, Bahamas, Malta. Those are five countries which you
don't really hear on a daily basis, right?
They are not big powers in global politics or even economics.
They are the kingmakers when it comes to shipping."
That's because of a system called “flag of convenience”.
The practice began during the prohibitionist era.
Selling alcohol in the U.S. was illegal,
so shipowners started transferring their ships to Panama’s register so they could serve drinks to their passengers.
"People always say that shipping is lawless or the oceans are lawless,
they're not lawless. The law of the sea is several hundred pages long.
But the problem is that there is very little enforcement.
Any modern ship owner can rent a flag from any country in the world, fly that flag on his or her ship.
And then that ship is a little piece of that country, so is governed by that flag."
That's why a landlocked country like Mongolia can have its own fleet.
It's a convenient system that has resisted change thanks to powerful lobbying.
The International Maritime Organization, or IMO,
is the only organization that can set the policy of the whole sector.
It's a UN agency tasked with, among other things, fighting climate change –
but it has done the opposite.
"There are multiple reasons. First of all, at the IMO, member states are normally represented
by their ministries of transport. They want to promote shipping, aviation and so on and so forth.
Climate and environmental challenge that has not been traditionally speaking their domain.
That's the domain of the Climate Ministry or Environmental Ministry.
So this is a kind of structural problem."
Furthermore, policies are rarely put to vote. The IMO prefers to rule by consensus,
which effectively gives loud voices a veto power.
"And number three, the industry has powerful lobbying associations
that literally sit in national delegations. And, in many cases, put pressure on the governments."
A third of the IMO representatives are not politicians but businessmen,
the highest number in any UN agency.
"For example, in the past ten years, the German delegate to the IMO was very ambitious.
And then the person got a call from the ministry saying that you need to dial down
because one of the German shipping companies wasn't very happy
about the ambition that Germany was driving at the IMO."
[music plays]
"We've managed to build ever bigger ships to exploit economies of trade that have enabled
industries to create the €1 bikinis and T-shirts that are just so cheap that people think of them
as disposable. And that's been facilitated by cheap shipping that doesn't pay for its pollution."
"When it comes to emissions, there is absolutely no excuse for
how slow the shipping industry has been to address that. It's absolutely shameful."
But momentum is building to finally regulate shipping.
"It's recognized that we can't solve climate change without also solving
the emissions problem from shipping."
The European Union is taking a leading role to force companies to reduce emissions.
And innovation can be a huge help.
"We believe technologies such as batteries for short-distance vessels, green hydrogen,
or green hydrogen-based fuels can fill that gap and fully decarbonize the sector."
But it takes timing and effort to turn a tanker around. The IMO has shown neither.
"Shipping hasn't shown that it can move swiftly when it comes to reforming itself."
"We think that it's possible. It is doable, but it's not going to happen on its own. There needs to
be regulations that mandate to switch to those sustainable behaviors, sustainable technologies."
"The shipping companies need to adapt."
Hi, thanks for watching. We'll keep an eye on promising technologies
for the shipping industry, so stay tuned. And if you enjoyed the video,
don’t forget to like, share and subscribe. We have more videos like this coming out every Friday.