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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.
as “suffering.” In climate terms this would include climate refugees, forced to flee their homes for less damaged locations. Here, the actions of a particular group in response to crisis serve primarily to displace it—to ensure that the costs are borne by other, less powerful people. Neoliberalism was a response to an economic crisis. The crisis was brought on by the economic stagnation of the 1970s created by a fall in profitability. As we have stressed, it was not the only possible response, so we are not in any way suggesting that neoliberalism was a
the future. Because of inadequate and ad hoc planning for the future loss of land to rising sea-levels and sudden-onset disasters, there is an increased risk of PICs’ citizens becoming ‘climate refugees’ instead of ‘climate migrants’ who have followed a coherent and dignified migration policy to relocate. For many Pacific peoples, the label
important. For example, climate change is causing migration, where the immediate motive for moving away is, say, crop failure that puts at risk the vital need for nutrition. However, migration also puts agency needs at risk since loss of population can decimate a community or region and so leave in tatters the social structures within which agency needs are met. The result can be a failed state. Furthermore, individual climate refugees are at high risk of loss of satisfying of their own agency needs because they have left the social structures that had provided it to some
people made homeless and jobless by increasingly intense and frequent natural disasters?’ asks Naomi Klein. ‘How will we treat the climate refugees who arrive on our shores in leaky boats? How will we cope as fresh water and food become ever more scarce?’ 16 These difficult questions about planetary justice cannot be separated from the climate crisis we face. This is a recurrent theme in postcolonial scholarship. ‘There is an explicit kinship between plantation slavery, colonial predation, and contemporary forms of
. https://slate.com/technology/2010/12/india-is-fencing-off-its-border-with-bangladesh-what-will-that-mean-for-millions-of-potential-climate-refugees.html [accessed 11 June 2018]. BBC News. ( 2018 ), Rakhine: What sparked latest violence? [online] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41082689 [accessed 15 January 2018]. Balzacq , T. , S
such a socio-ecological apocalypse, demonstrated by the large numbers of climate refugees and mounting socio-ecological problems in the poorest parts of the world or, rather, experienced by the poorest part of the world’s population (Miller, 2017 ; Parenti, 2011 ). The apocalypse has already happened for them. The fear of the consequences of climate change in one place is paralleled by already
the nuclear weapon states is far from unimaginable (Carpenter, 2015 ; Larsen and Kartchner, 2014 ). Our relationship with the rest of nature is in a parlous state, with some arguing that climate change is contributing to conflict around the globe and creating large numbers of climate refugees. Throughout the world ugly forms of nationalism are reappearing. The words of Bertolt Brecht, from his play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui , referring to the persistence of fascism, appear eerily prescient today: ‘though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the
comprises a series of low-lying atolls some 7,200 kilometres due east of Papua New Guinea, has been particularly active on the issue, calling on the governments of New 123 State-directed advocacy 123 Zealand and Australia to accommodate an influx of climate refugees from Kiribas once it is swallowed by the sea. In 2014, he also announced the purchase of a Fijian island in preparation for the eventual evacuation and relocation of the Republic of Kiribati. The development of China’s climate change programme International gatherings may have helped convince Chinese
warning us to prepare for over 100 million people internally displaced and millions more climate refugees forced into migration in the very near future. 40 The rate, manner and ferocity with which human beings are consuming resources and food is literally destroying our web of life, constructed over billions of years, upon which all of us, human and more-than-human, depend for