0:00:00.572,0:00:02.023
A couple of years ago,

0:00:02.023,0:00:04.241
Harvard Business School chose

0:00:04.241,0:00:06.990
the best business model of that year.

0:00:06.990,0:00:11.054
It chose Somali piracy.

0:00:11.054,0:00:13.270
Pretty much around the same time,

0:00:13.270,0:00:19.103
I discovered that there were 544 seafarers

0:00:19.103,0:00:22.489
being held hostage on ships,

0:00:22.489,0:00:24.579
often anchored just off the Somali coast

0:00:24.579,0:00:27.007
in plain sight.

0:00:27.007,0:00:29.632
And I learned these two facts, and I thought,

0:00:29.632,0:00:32.073
what's going on in shipping?

0:00:32.073,0:00:34.644
And I thought, would that happen[br]in any other industry?

0:00:34.644,0:00:38.155
Would we see 544 airline pilots

0:00:38.155,0:00:39.785
held captive in their jumbo jets

0:00:39.785,0:00:43.272
on a runway for months, or a year?

0:00:43.272,0:00:47.098
Would we see 544 Greyhound bus drivers?

0:00:47.098,0:00:48.977
It wouldn't happen.

0:00:48.977,0:00:51.755
So I started to get intrigued.

0:00:51.755,0:00:54.269
And I discovered another fact,

0:00:54.269,0:00:56.252
which to me was more astonishing

0:00:56.252,0:00:59.337
almost for the fact that I hadn't known it before

0:00:59.337,0:01:01.996
at the age of 42, 43.

0:01:01.996,0:01:07.315
That is how fundamentally [br]we still depend on shipping.

0:01:07.315,0:01:09.660
Because perhaps the general public

0:01:09.660,0:01:12.785
thinks of shipping as an old-fashioned industry,

0:01:12.785,0:01:15.323
something brought by sailboat

0:01:15.323,0:01:18.708
with Moby Dicks and Jack Sparrows.

0:01:18.708,0:01:20.602
But shipping isn't that.

0:01:20.602,0:01:25.479
Shipping is as crucial to us as it has ever been.

0:01:25.479,0:01:30.082
Shipping brings us 90 percent of world trade.

0:01:30.082,0:01:34.647
Shipping has quadrupled in size since 1970.

0:01:34.647,0:01:37.639
We are more dependent on it now than ever.

0:01:37.639,0:01:41.398
And yet, for such an enormous industry --

0:01:41.398,0:01:44.875
there are a 100,000 working vessels on the sea —

0:01:44.875,0:01:48.268
it's become pretty much invisible.

0:01:48.268,0:01:52.557
Now that sounds absurd in Singapore to say that,

0:01:52.557,0:01:54.903
because here shipping is so present

0:01:54.903,0:01:58.285
that you stuck a ship on top of a hotel.

0:01:58.285,0:01:59.965
(Laughter)

0:01:59.965,0:02:01.981
But elsewhere in the world,

0:02:01.981,0:02:04.227
if you ask the general public what they know

0:02:04.227,0:02:07.063
about shipping and how much[br]trade is carried by sea,

0:02:07.063,0:02:11.680
you will get essentially a blank face.

0:02:11.680,0:02:13.713
You will ask someone on the street

0:02:13.713,0:02:15.436
if they've heard of Microsoft.

0:02:15.436,0:02:17.273
I should think they'll say yes,

0:02:17.273,0:02:19.468
because they'll know that they make software

0:02:19.468,0:02:21.363
that goes on computers,

0:02:21.363,0:02:24.508
and occasionally works.

0:02:24.508,0:02:28.113
But if you ask them if they've heard of Maersk,

0:02:28.113,0:02:30.814
I doubt you'd get the same response,

0:02:30.814,0:02:32.261
even though Maersk,

0:02:32.261,0:02:35.952
which is just one shipping company amongst many,

0:02:35.952,0:02:38.934
has revenues pretty much on a par with Microsoft.

0:02:38.934,0:02:40.415
[$60.2 billion]

0:02:40.415,0:02:42.338
Now why is this?

0:02:42.338,0:02:44.251
A few years ago,

0:02:44.251,0:02:47.523
the first sea lord of the British admiralty --

0:02:47.523,0:02:49.328
he is called the first sea lord,

0:02:49.328,0:02:53.823
although the chief of the army is not called a land lord —

0:02:53.823,0:02:56.266
he said that we, and he meant

0:02:56.266,0:02:58.948
in the industrialized nations in the West,

0:02:58.948,0:03:02.760
that we suffer from sea blindness.

0:03:02.760,0:03:04.404
We are blind to the sea

0:03:04.404,0:03:07.330
as a place of industry or of work.

0:03:07.330,0:03:09.623
It's just something we fly over,

0:03:09.623,0:03:12.628
a patch of blue on an airline map.

0:03:12.628,0:03:15.953
Nothing to see, move along.

0:03:15.953,0:03:19.598
So I wanted to open my own eyes

0:03:19.598,0:03:22.675
to my own sea blindness,

0:03:22.675,0:03:26.045
so I ran away to sea.

0:03:26.045,0:03:28.396
A couple of years ago, I took a passage

0:03:28.396,0:03:30.770
on the Maersk Kendal,

0:03:30.770,0:03:32.112
a mid-sized container ship

0:03:32.112,0:03:35.340
carrying nearly 7,000 boxes,

0:03:35.340,0:03:37.237
and I departed from Felixstowe,

0:03:37.237,0:03:39.000
on the south coast of England,

0:03:39.000,0:03:41.161
and I ended up right here in Singapore

0:03:41.161,0:03:42.654
five weeks later,

0:03:42.654,0:03:47.558
considerably less jet-lagged than I am right now.

0:03:47.558,0:03:50.800
And it was a revelation.

0:03:50.800,0:03:52.995
We traveled through five seas,

0:03:52.995,0:03:55.542
two oceans, nine ports,

0:03:55.542,0:03:58.289
and I learned a lot about shipping.

0:03:58.289,0:04:00.007
And one of the first things that surprised me

0:04:00.007,0:04:02.394
when I got on board Kendal

0:04:02.394,0:04:05.139
was, where are all the people?

0:04:05.139,0:04:06.759
I have friends in the Navy who tell me

0:04:06.759,0:04:09.898
they sail with 1,000 sailors at a time,

0:04:09.898,0:04:13.237
but on Kendal there were only 21 crew.

0:04:13.237,0:04:16.114
Now that's because shipping is very efficient.

0:04:16.114,0:04:19.178
Containerization has made it very efficient.

0:04:19.178,0:04:21.272
Ships have automation now.

0:04:21.272,0:04:24.001
They can operate with small crews.

0:04:24.001,0:04:25.790
But it also means that, in the words

0:04:25.790,0:04:28.250
of a port chaplain I once met,

0:04:28.250,0:04:30.295
the average seafarer you're going to find

0:04:30.295,0:04:34.434
on a container ship is either tired or exhausted,

0:04:34.434,0:04:37.213
because the pace of modern shipping

0:04:37.213,0:04:39.534
is quite punishing for what the shipping calls

0:04:39.534,0:04:41.965
its human element,

0:04:41.965,0:04:44.417
a strange phrase which they don't seem to realize

0:04:44.417,0:04:46.821
sounds a little bit inhuman.

0:04:46.821,0:04:49.496
So most seafarers now working on container ships

0:04:49.496,0:04:53.573
often have less than two hours in port at a time.

0:04:53.573,0:04:55.211
They don't have time to relax.

0:04:55.211,0:04:57.455
They're at sea for months at a time,

0:04:57.455,0:04:58.770
and even when they're on board,

0:04:58.770,0:05:00.072
they don't have access to what

0:05:00.072,0:05:04.506
a five-year-old would take for granted, the Internet.

0:05:04.506,0:05:07.332
And another thing that surprised me[br]when I got on board Kendal

0:05:07.335,0:05:10.317
was who I was sitting next to --

0:05:10.327,0:05:15.576
Not the queen; I can't imagine why[br]they put me underneath her portrait --

0:05:15.576,0:05:18.345
But around that dining table in the officer's saloon,

0:05:18.345,0:05:20.173
I was sitting next to a Burmese guy,

0:05:20.173,0:05:23.438
I was opposite a Romanian, a Moldavian, an Indian.

0:05:23.438,0:05:25.675
On the next table was a Chinese guy,

0:05:25.675,0:05:28.717
and in the crew room, it was entirely Filipinos.

0:05:28.717,0:05:31.677
So that was a normal working ship.

0:05:31.677,0:05:33.700
Now how is that possible?

0:05:33.700,0:05:35.592
Because the biggest dramatic change

0:05:35.592,0:05:37.436
in shipping over the last 60 years,

0:05:37.436,0:05:39.948
when most of the general public stopped noticing it,

0:05:39.948,0:05:42.567
was something called an open registry,

0:05:42.567,0:05:45.372
or a flag of convenience.

0:05:45.372,0:05:47.959
Ships can now fly the flag of any nation

0:05:47.959,0:05:50.911
that provides a flag registry.

0:05:50.911,0:05:53.186
You can get a flag from the landlocked nation

0:05:53.186,0:05:55.310
of Bolivia, or Mongolia,

0:05:55.310,0:05:58.285
or North Korea, though that's not very popular.

0:05:58.285,0:05:59.708
(Laughter)

0:05:59.708,0:06:01.819
So we have these very multinational,

0:06:01.819,0:06:06.600
global, mobile crews on ships.

0:06:06.600,0:06:09.312
And that was a surprise to me.

0:06:09.312,0:06:12.429
And when we got to pirate waters,

0:06:12.429,0:06:15.555
down the Bab-el-Mandeb strait[br]and into the Indian Ocean,

0:06:15.555,0:06:17.307
the ship changed.

0:06:17.307,0:06:20.450
And that was also shocking, because suddenly,

0:06:20.450,0:06:22.664
I realized, as the captain said to me,

0:06:22.664,0:06:24.666
that I had been crazy to choose to go

0:06:24.666,0:06:27.718
through pirate waters on a container ship.

0:06:27.718,0:06:29.709
We were no longer allowed on deck.

0:06:29.709,0:06:32.305
There were double pirate watches.

0:06:32.305,0:06:36.582
And at that time, there were those [br]544 seafarers being held hostage,

0:06:36.582,0:06:38.550
and some of them were held hostage for years

0:06:38.550,0:06:41.321
because of the nature of shipping[br]and the flag of convenience.

0:06:41.321,0:06:43.403
Not all of them, but some of them were,

0:06:43.403,0:06:48.117
because for the minority[br]of unscrupulous ship owners,

0:06:48.117,0:06:50.662
it can be easy to hide behind

0:06:50.662,0:06:55.661
the anonymity offered by some flags of convenience.

0:06:55.661,0:06:59.600
What else does our sea blindness mask?

0:06:59.600,0:07:01.919
Well, if you go out to sea on a ship

0:07:01.919,0:07:03.914
or on a cruise ship, and look up to the funnel,

0:07:03.914,0:07:06.783
you'll see very black smoke.

0:07:06.783,0:07:09.318
And that's because shipping

0:07:09.318,0:07:11.905
has very tight margins,[br]and they want cheap fuel,

0:07:11.905,0:07:14.076
so they use something called bunker fuel,

0:07:14.076,0:07:16.592
which was described to me[br]by someone in the tanker industry

0:07:16.592,0:07:18.758
as the dregs of the refinery,

0:07:18.758,0:07:22.015
or just one step up from asphalt.

0:07:22.015,0:07:25.412
And shipping is the greenest method of transport.

0:07:25.412,0:07:27.755
In terms of carbon emissions per ton per mile,

0:07:27.755,0:07:30.726
it emits about a thousandth of aviation

0:07:30.726,0:07:32.841
and about a tenth of trucking.

0:07:32.841,0:07:36.077
But it's not benign, because there's so much of it.

0:07:36.077,0:07:38.607
So shipping emissions are[br]about three to four percent,

0:07:38.607,0:07:40.782
almost the same as aviation's.

0:07:40.782,0:07:42.171
And if you put shipping emissions

0:07:42.171,0:07:45.551
on a list of the countries' carbon emissions,

0:07:45.551,0:07:47.164
it would come in about sixth,

0:07:47.164,0:07:49.278
somewhere near Germany.

0:07:49.278,0:07:53.296
It was calculated in 2009 that the 15 largest ships

0:07:53.296,0:07:55.891
pollute in terms of particles and soot

0:07:55.891,0:07:57.291
and noxious gases

0:07:57.291,0:07:59.869
as much as all the cars in the world.

0:07:59.869,0:08:01.269
And the good news is that

0:08:01.269,0:08:03.464
people are now talking about sustainable shipping.

0:08:03.464,0:08:05.951
There are interesting initiatives going on.

0:08:05.951,0:08:08.206
But why has it taken so long?

0:08:08.206,0:08:10.553
When are we going to start talking and thinking

0:08:10.553,0:08:14.589
about shipping miles as well as air miles?

0:08:14.589,0:08:17.394
I also traveled to Cape Cod to look

0:08:17.394,0:08:21.321
at the plight of the North Atlantic right whale,

0:08:21.321,0:08:23.477
because this to me was one[br]of the most surprising things

0:08:23.477,0:08:25.433
about my time at sea,

0:08:25.433,0:08:27.230
and what it made me think about.

0:08:27.230,0:08:30.383
We know about man's impact on the ocean

0:08:30.383,0:08:32.815
in terms of fishing and overfishing,

0:08:32.815,0:08:34.623
but we don't really know much about

0:08:34.623,0:08:36.806
what's happening underneath the water.

0:08:36.806,0:08:39.411
And in fact, shipping has a role to play here,

0:08:39.411,0:08:43.057
because shipping noise has contributed

0:08:43.057,0:08:46.250
to damaging the acoustic[br]habitats of ocean creatures.

0:08:46.250,0:08:49.242
Light doesn't penetrate beneath[br]the surface of the water,

0:08:49.242,0:08:51.869
so ocean creatures like whales and dolphins

0:08:51.869,0:08:54.173
and even 800 species of fish

0:08:54.173,0:08:57.064
communicate by sound.

0:08:57.064,0:08:58.777
And a North Atlantic right whale

0:08:58.777,0:09:01.984
can transmit across hundreds of miles.

0:09:01.984,0:09:03.947
A humpback can transmit a sound

0:09:03.947,0:09:05.885
across a whole ocean.

0:09:05.885,0:09:07.840
But a supertanker can also be heard

0:09:07.840,0:09:09.911
coming across a whole ocean,

0:09:09.911,0:09:12.475
and because the noise that[br]propellers make underwater

0:09:12.475,0:09:15.812
is sometimes at the same frequency that whales use,

0:09:15.812,0:09:18.846
then it can damage their acoustic habitat,

0:09:18.846,0:09:20.536
and they need this for breeding,

0:09:20.536,0:09:22.187
for finding feeding grounds,

0:09:22.187,0:09:24.710
for finding mates.

0:09:24.710,0:09:27.551
And the acoustic habitat of the[br]North Atlantic right whale

0:09:27.551,0:09:30.901
has been reduced by up to 90 percent.

0:09:30.901,0:09:35.513
But there are no laws governing [br]acoustic pollution yet.

0:09:35.513,0:09:38.769
And when I arrived in Singapore,

0:09:38.769,0:09:43.673
and I apologize for this, but I [br]didn't want to get off my ship.

0:09:43.676,0:09:46.635
I'd really loved being on board Kendal.

0:09:46.635,0:09:48.530
I'd been well treated by the crew,

0:09:48.530,0:09:52.071
I'd had a garrulous and entertaining captain,

0:09:52.071,0:09:56.143
and I would happily have signed up[br]for another five weeks,

0:09:56.143,0:09:57.974
something that the captain also said

0:09:57.974,0:10:00.247
I was crazy to think about.

0:10:00.247,0:10:02.491
But I wasn't there for nine months at a time

0:10:02.491,0:10:04.446
like the Filipino seafarers,

0:10:04.446,0:10:06.685
who, when I asked them to describe their job to me,

0:10:06.685,0:10:09.007
called it "dollar for homesickness."

0:10:09.007,0:10:10.485
They had good salaries,

0:10:10.485,0:10:13.516
but theirs is still an isolating and difficult life

0:10:13.516,0:10:17.205
in a dangerous and often difficult element.

0:10:17.205,0:10:19.291
But when I get to this part, I'm in two minds,

0:10:19.291,0:10:22.216
because I want to salute those seafarers

0:10:22.216,0:10:24.403
who bring us 90 percent of everything

0:10:24.403,0:10:28.069
and get very little thanks or recognition for it.

0:10:28.069,0:10:30.790
I want to salute the 100,000 ships

0:10:30.790,0:10:32.113
that are at sea

0:10:32.113,0:10:34.646
that are doing that work, coming in and out

0:10:34.646,0:10:37.875
every day, bringing us what we need.

0:10:37.875,0:10:40.895
But I also want to see shipping,

0:10:40.895,0:10:44.374
and us, the general public,[br]who know so little about it,

0:10:44.374,0:10:46.414
to have a bit more scrutiny,

0:10:46.414,0:10:48.518
to be a bit more transparent,

0:10:48.518,0:10:51.790
to have 90 percent transparency.

0:10:51.790,0:10:54.691
Because I think we could all benefit

0:10:54.691,0:10:56.796
from doing something very simple,

0:10:56.796,0:10:59.878
which is learning to see the sea.

0:10:59.878,0:11:02.036
Thank you.

0:11:02.036,0:11:06.344
(Applause)