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Almost everything you consume, from your weekly supermarket trip to the presents you order online, arrives by cargo ship. Shipping is the engine of the world economy, transporting eleven billion tonnes of goods each year. Despite the clear environmental crisis, shipping emissions have doubled since 1990 to more than one billion tonnes of CO2 – more than aviation, more than all of Germany, or even France, Britain, and Italy combined. As the shipping industry is forecast to grow threefold by 2050, full decarbonisation is urgent to limit catastrophic climate change. To understand whether there are any realistic alternatives to the polluting status quo of the container shipping industry, in 2020, Christiaan De Beukelaer spent 150 days as part of a sailing crew aboard the Avontuur, a century-old two-masted schooner fitted for cargo. This book recounts both this personal odyssey and the journey the shipping industry is embarking on to cut its carbon emissions. It shows that the Avontuur’s mission remains as crucial as ever: the shipping industry needs to cut its use of fossil fuels as soon as possible. Otherwise, we will face excessive global warming and the dire outcomes that will bring. The book explores our path to an uncertain future. It argues that shipping symbolises the kind of economy we’ve built: a gargantuan global machine that delivers the goods at an enormous environmental cost. Merely eliminating carbon emissions or improving efficiency won’t solve the underlying issue. If we can’t make shipping truly sustainable, we can’t solve the climate crisis.
my being a researcher at first. But I turned out to be as big a weirdo as they were. I managed to throw them off the scent.’ Using Captain’s Skyroam internet connection, we were able to take turns connecting our phones and pulling in our messages and emails. Sail cargo ships have a strong online presence, for they mostly sell an idea rather than goods. Beyond the chatter and carefully crafted images, the time and energy spent on making cargo transport under sail happen can scarcely be captured on Instagram. Our
nineteenth century. A range of newly built sailing cargo ships aim to incorporate these labour-saving innovations. Some major shipping companies aim to build new sailing vessels for cargo transport, but they remain in various stages of ‘technological readiness.’ So, despite a history of thousands of years of sail, commercial shipping has failed to seriously consider this option for decades. Zephyr & Borée’s Canopée , under construction at the Nepture Marine Shipyard in Szczecin, Poland, TOWT’s two eighty-metre 1100-tonne vessels
chains that rely on shipping. 8 Shipping companies expected the global economy – and with it demand for shipping – to contract as a result of pandemic-induced lockdowns. While they cut capacity, that contraction didn’t quite materialise. Stuck at home, people consumed more than ever. Demand for goods and thus cargo transport surged, driving freight rates to tremendous heights, creating a perfect storm of strained supply chains due to high demand, low capacity, and a crew change crisis that proved difficult to resolve
labour practices in coffee or banana plantations. Neither will small sailing vessels decarbonise the shipping industry. ‘Where are we headed?’, July 18, 2020 These small vessels have helped to get us talking and reading about maritime cargo transport. We’re talking now; but it’s high time to decide. What action will we take? I don’t believe it’s as easy as picking one option over another. Green growth or degrowth? Innovation or tradition? Big or small? Hydrogen
considering that Mærsk CEO Skou defended the company’s expansion of air freight capacity ‘saying it would be customer demand not Maersk’s push into air freight that would decide how much cargo was transported by aircraft.’ 22 That’s right, while Mærsk claims to be a leader in shipping decarbonisation, it invests in the most polluting and most difficult to decarbonise means of cargo transport. The tension between the abstract target of full decarbonisation and the lack of a clear and realisable pathway also dominated The Economist
infrastructure that saw the boom in oil-fuelled ships. After the war, they became virtually the only means of maritime cargo transport. The rise of the oil-burning ship and the associated shifts in logistics depended on military innovations, both technologically and organisationally. 19 How surprised would Alan Villiers and Nakhoda Nejdi be to see the revival of sailing cargo vessels? In defiance of economic logic and regulatory constraints, long-dead sailing cargo vessels are now being offered a new life. While the Avontuur and sister
against the climate crisis, against the culture that drives it. Embracing wind propulsion for cargo transport is one such alternative. It can clearly operate without the use of fossil fuels, as it had for thousands of years prior to the discovery of the steam engine. While windmills have made a comeback as turbines generating electricity, sailing cargo ships remain a tiny niche. When Jorne Langelaan, Andreas Lackner, and Arjen van der Veen looked for investors in 2007, to help them launch the Tres Hombres as a sailing
a lot of work to do. Growing demand for shipping contrasts starkly with the needed reductions. This means not only that the impacts of immediate consumption should come down drastically in rich countries, but also that the ‘invisible’ emissions of industrial production and cargo transport need to come down significantly. To meet these targets, changes are required in the way we live, move, and consume. With fewer than sixty thousand citizens, the Marshall Island’s domestic regulations, no matter how ambitious