DH: Can you sketch out your career at ICS and what your current role entails.

SB: I currently have the grand title of Deputy Secretary General, and working with our Secretary General, Guy Platten, I co-ordinate the agenda of the ICS Board of our 40 member national shipowner associations and help ensure that ICS policy making departments – which make representations to a wide range of intergovernmental bodies that impact shipping in addition to IMO – are delivering a consistent message. I have actually been at ICS for over 30 years – my only proper job except taxi driving and working in what was then the world’ largest pizza factory. For ICS, I originally worked on industrial relations and training issues, including what was then called the 1995 revision of the IMO STCW Convention and ILO meetings. I then moved into what we call ‘shipping policy’ which is primarily about maintaining the level playing field, free trade principles and matters like taxation and competition regulation, working with bodies such as the UN in New York, OECD and WTO. Today though, about 70% of my time is taken up with the CO2 reduction negotiations at IMO, which reflects how this is by far is most important issue affecting shipowners, as if governments get this wrong it could mess up the entire structure of the industry and its ability to provide the world economy with sustainable low-cost marine transportation.   

DH: You have been involved in the debate over how to reduce shipping’s carbon footprint for several years now. When do you think balance within senior levels in the shipping industry tipped towards accepting the need for decarbonisation? Is there a genuine commitment in the industry to achieve net zero or is it a superficial gloss?

SB: It’s been an incremental process, but the Paris Agreement of 2015 followed by the adaption of IMO in response to this of its first set of shipping GHG targets in 2018 made the direction of travel absolutely clear, as will the ambitious new targets we expect governments to agree at IMO this July. Given the truly huge enormity of the challenge, the shipping industry’s support for a net zero target for 2050 may sound to some with a more cynical bent as unrealistic virtue signalling, but we genuinely believe this is possible if governments provide us with the regulatory framework we need to achieve this.

Our support for this ambitious net zero target reflects the political reality that if we don’t make dramatic progress on GHG reduction now, we may be faced with the prospect of maritime transport being rationed and a chaotic piecemeal patchwork of unilateral regulation, with IMO as our global regulator being reduced to shadow of its current self. This is what is stake.     

DH: Are you frustrated by accusations by green campaigners and in the press that shipping is a particularly ‘dirty’ industry?

SB: Green campaigners have to do their job, which is campaigning to draw attention to important issues like climate change and we respect that, and actually have a fairly cordial relationship with the green NGOs at IMO. More frustrating is when certain governments that like to style themselves as “high ambition states” refuse to acknowledge the real progress that has been made by shipping on GHG reduction in the past 15 years, or the scale of the challenge – saying that something must be done without nuance or coming forward with calls for action with our workable technical solutions or taking steps to ensure the availability of new green fuels, without which the transition cannot happen.