Andrew Craig-Bennett questions who let the marketing people loose on a question of science and engineering. He has serious issues with the words net and zero.
Merchant shipping is a wonderful business to be in. We all know that. It has traditions, it has customs, it has rules, and these are pretty much the same wherever you go, which is as it should be in the original and genuine global business. There is almost infinite scope for ingenuity, and often solid rewards for hard work, wherever you are in the world. Shipping needs all sorts of skills. We know that liner shipping and passenger shipping must be marketed, by marketing people, and lots of them are jolly good at their business. Their business isn’t navigation, maintenance, or engineering; their business is selling space on liners and in cruise shipping it’s selling dreams. That’s all fine. Engineers can’t sell container space or cruise cabins. They have different skills. So…
Who let the marketing people loose on a question of science and engineering?
They would be fine doing the jobs they know how to do, but, in the wrong job, they add nothing to the question of slowing the shipping industry’s contribution to man-made global warming, and they are getting badly in the way of any hope of making sense of it. They ‘toil not’, here, but they most certainly do spin.
Net zero means just the opposite of what it wants us to think it means
A month ago, I looked at one of the spin doctors’ offerings – the wretched dual fuel business. Dual fuel is a nonsense; we all know that it means “Heavy fuel oil, unless we really have to run on something else”. Let’s look at the next of the spinners and liars’ offerings – net zero.
This one really is a gem. ‘Net’ is a word that implies the minimum, excluding all non-essential considerations, the final number. And that number is zero, so net zero must be the best possible outcome, right?
We all know better than that, but weasel words have a way of taking over our thought processes, which is why the spinners use them so often. Net zero means just the opposite of what it wants us to think it means. It really means, not zero at all, but a large number, from which another number, not always an honest one, certainly not one that can be properly checked, will be subtracted, to get to a fictitious zero.
It’s a feat of dishonesty which makes all the little cheats that our industry has used down the centuries, from tonnage hatch to homogenous intake, via BS&W and disponent owner, look quite respectable, by comparison.
The only number worth looking at is the plain one, without any legerdemain involving people getting paid to plant trees, and suchlike. “Does this system, be it a propulsion system or anything else, emit anything that tends to increase the heat absorbed by the atmosphere and the oceans (remember “and the oceans”) and if so, by how much, in measurable units?”
Weasel words have a way of taking over our thought processes
Anything that talks about net zero includes a fiddle factor. The people who make their livings by supplying fiddle factors will object their stock in trade being called fiddle factors, but that is exactly what net zero is; a fiddle factor, and unlike, say the constant (which isn’t constant, as it grows as a ship gets older) this is a fiddle factor with real, and bad, consequences. It absolutely does not belong in an industry in which brokers claimed that “My word is my bond”.
We need to speak about real things and use real, measurable, quantities, if we are to get anywhere. At the moment half the people who should be taking action are not doing so because they think it’s all a con and they think that because they are not stupid, they can see that the emperor has no clothes and they are not deceived by net zero or by carbon capture and storage. according to the reports published in splash247.com .
Oh yes, carbon capture and storage. Brought to you by people who say that we can’t store vitrified nuclear waste safely, anywhere, but we can pump carbon dioxide, a gas at atmospheric temperatures, down an exhausted oil well in perfect confidence that it will stay there for ever.
