WEBVTT 00:00:00.572 --> 00:00:02.023 A couple of years ago, 00:00:02.023 --> 00:00:04.241 Harvard Business School chose 00:00:04.241 --> 00:00:06.990 the best business model of that year. 00:00:06.990 --> 00:00:11.054 It chose Somali piracy. 00:00:11.054 --> 00:00:13.270 Pretty much around the same time, 00:00:13.270 --> 00:00:19.103 I discovered that there were 544 seafarers 00:00:19.103 --> 00:00:22.489 being held hostage on ships, 00:00:22.489 --> 00:00:24.579 often anchored just off the Somali coast 00:00:24.579 --> 00:00:27.007 in plain sight. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:27.007 --> 00:00:29.632 And I learned these two facts, and I thought, 00:00:29.632 --> 00:00:32.073 what's going on in shipping? 00:00:32.073 --> 00:00:34.644 And I thought, would that happen in any other industry? 00:00:34.644 --> 00:00:38.155 Would we see 544 airline pilots 00:00:38.155 --> 00:00:39.785 held captive in their jumbo jets 00:00:39.785 --> 00:00:43.272 on a runway for months, or a year? 00:00:43.272 --> 00:00:47.098 Would we see 544 Greyhound bus drivers? 00:00:47.098 --> 00:00:48.977 It wouldn't happen. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:48.977 --> 00:00:51.755 So I started to get intrigued. 00:00:51.755 --> 00:00:54.269 And I discovered another fact, 00:00:54.269 --> 00:00:56.252 which to me was more astonishing 00:00:56.252 --> 00:00:59.337 almost for the fact that I hadn't known it before 00:00:59.337 --> 00:01:01.996 at the age of 42, 43. 00:01:01.996 --> 00:01:07.315 That is how fundamentally we still depend on shipping. 00:01:07.315 --> 00:01:09.660 Because perhaps the general public 00:01:09.660 --> 00:01:12.785 thinks of shipping as an old-fashioned industry, 00:01:12.785 --> 00:01:15.323 something brought by sailboat 00:01:15.323 --> 00:01:18.708 with Moby Dicks and Jack Sparrows. 00:01:18.708 --> 00:01:20.602 But shipping isn't that. 00:01:20.602 --> 00:01:25.479 Shipping is as crucial to us as it has ever been. 00:01:25.479 --> 00:01:30.082 Shipping brings us 90 percent of world trade. 00:01:30.082 --> 00:01:34.647 Shipping has quadrupled in size since 1970. 00:01:34.647 --> 00:01:37.639 We are more dependent on it now than ever. 00:01:37.639 --> 00:01:41.398 And yet, for such an enormous industry -- 00:01:41.398 --> 00:01:44.875 there are a 100,000 working vessels on the sea — 00:01:44.875 --> 00:01:48.268 it's become pretty much invisible. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:48.268 --> 00:01:52.557 Now that sounds absurd in Singapore to say that, 00:01:52.557 --> 00:01:54.903 because here shipping is so present 00:01:54.903 --> 00:01:58.285 that you stuck a ship on top of a hotel. 00:01:58.285 --> 00:01:59.965 (Laughter) 00:01:59.965 --> 00:02:01.981 But elsewhere in the world, 00:02:01.981 --> 00:02:04.227 if you ask the general public what they know 00:02:04.227 --> 00:02:07.063 about shipping and how much trade is carried by sea, 00:02:07.063 --> 00:02:11.680 you will get essentially a blank face. 00:02:11.680 --> 00:02:13.713 You will ask someone on the street 00:02:13.713 --> 00:02:15.436 if they've heard of Microsoft. 00:02:15.436 --> 00:02:17.273 I should think they'll say yes, 00:02:17.273 --> 00:02:19.468 because they'll know that they make software 00:02:19.468 --> 00:02:21.363 that goes on computers, 00:02:21.363 --> 00:02:24.508 and occasionally works. 00:02:24.508 --> 00:02:28.113 But if you ask them if they've heard of Maersk, 00:02:28.113 --> 00:02:30.814 I doubt you'd get the same response, 00:02:30.814 --> 00:02:32.261 even though Maersk, 00:02:32.261 --> 00:02:35.952 which is just one shipping company amongst many, 00:02:35.952 --> 00:02:38.934 has revenues pretty much on a par with Microsoft. 00:02:38.934 --> 00:02:40.415 [$60.2 billion] NOTE Paragraph 00:02:40.415 --> 00:02:42.338 Now why is this? 00:02:42.338 --> 00:02:44.251 A few years ago, 00:02:44.251 --> 00:02:47.523 the first sea lord of the British admiralty -- 00:02:47.523 --> 00:02:49.328 he is called the first sea lord, 00:02:49.328 --> 00:02:53.823 although the chief of the army is not called a land lord — 00:02:53.823 --> 00:02:56.266 he said that we, and he meant 00:02:56.266 --> 00:02:58.948 in the industrialized nations in the West, 00:02:58.948 --> 00:03:02.760 that we suffer from sea blindness. 00:03:02.760 --> 00:03:04.404 We are blind to the sea 00:03:04.404 --> 00:03:07.330 as a place of industry or of work. 00:03:07.330 --> 00:03:09.623 It's just something we fly over, 00:03:09.623 --> 00:03:12.628 a patch of blue on an airline map. 00:03:12.628 --> 00:03:15.953 Nothing to see, move along. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:15.953 --> 00:03:19.598 So I wanted to open my own eyes 00:03:19.598 --> 00:03:22.675 to my own sea blindness, 00:03:22.675 --> 00:03:26.045 so I ran away to sea. 00:03:26.045 --> 00:03:28.396 A couple of years ago, I took a passage 00:03:28.396 --> 00:03:30.770 on the Maersk Kendal, 00:03:30.770 --> 00:03:32.112 a mid-sized container ship 00:03:32.112 --> 00:03:35.340 carrying nearly 7,000 boxes, 00:03:35.340 --> 00:03:37.237 and I departed from Felixstowe, 00:03:37.237 --> 00:03:39.000 on the south coast of England, 00:03:39.000 --> 00:03:41.161 and I ended up right here in Singapore 00:03:41.161 --> 00:03:42.654 five weeks later, 00:03:42.654 --> 00:03:47.558 considerably less jet-lagged than I am right now. 00:03:47.558 --> 00:03:50.800 And it was a revelation. 00:03:50.800 --> 00:03:52.995 We traveled through five seas, 00:03:52.995 --> 00:03:55.542 two oceans, nine ports, 00:03:55.542 --> 00:03:58.289 and I learned a lot about shipping. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:58.289 --> 00:04:00.007 And one of the first things that surprised me 00:04:00.007 --> 00:04:02.394 when I got on board Kendal 00:04:02.394 --> 00:04:05.139 was, where are all the people? 00:04:05.139 --> 00:04:06.759 I have friends in the Navy who tell me 00:04:06.759 --> 00:04:09.898 they sail with 1,000 sailors at a time, 00:04:09.898 --> 00:04:13.237 but on Kendal there were only 21 crew. 00:04:13.237 --> 00:04:16.114 Now that's because shipping is very efficient. 00:04:16.114 --> 00:04:19.178 Containerization has made it very efficient. 00:04:19.178 --> 00:04:21.272 Ships have automation now. 00:04:21.272 --> 00:04:24.001 They can operate with small crews. 00:04:24.001 --> 00:04:25.790 But it also means that, in the words 00:04:25.790 --> 00:04:28.250 of a port chaplain I once met, 00:04:28.250 --> 00:04:30.295 the average seafarer you're going to find 00:04:30.295 --> 00:04:34.434 on a container ship is either tired or exhausted, 00:04:34.434 --> 00:04:37.213 because the pace of modern shipping 00:04:37.213 --> 00:04:39.534 is quite punishing for what the shipping calls 00:04:39.534 --> 00:04:41.965 its human element, 00:04:41.965 --> 00:04:44.417 a strange phrase which they don't seem to realize 00:04:44.417 --> 00:04:46.821 sounds a little bit inhuman. 00:04:46.821 --> 00:04:49.496 So most seafarers now working on container ships 00:04:49.496 --> 00:04:53.573 often have less than two hours in port at a time. 00:04:53.573 --> 00:04:55.211 They don't have time to relax. 00:04:55.211 --> 00:04:57.455 They're at sea for months at a time, 00:04:57.455 --> 00:04:58.770 and even when they're on board, 00:04:58.770 --> 00:05:00.072 they don't have access to what 00:05:00.072 --> 00:05:04.506 a five-year-old would take for granted, the Internet. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:04.506 --> 00:05:07.332 And another thing that surprised me when I got on board Kendal 00:05:07.335 --> 00:05:10.317 was who I was sitting next to -- 00:05:10.327 --> 00:05:15.576 Not the queen; I can't imagine why they put me underneath her portrait -- 00:05:15.576 --> 00:05:18.345 But around that dining table in the officer's saloon, 00:05:18.345 --> 00:05:20.173 I was sitting next to a Burmese guy, 00:05:20.173 --> 00:05:23.438 I was opposite a Romanian, a Moldavian, an Indian. 00:05:23.438 --> 00:05:25.675 On the next table was a Chinese guy, 00:05:25.675 --> 00:05:28.717 and in the crew room, it was entirely Filipinos. 00:05:28.717 --> 00:05:31.677 So that was a normal working ship. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:31.677 --> 00:05:33.700 Now how is that possible? 00:05:33.700 --> 00:05:35.592 Because the biggest dramatic change 00:05:35.592 --> 00:05:37.436 in shipping over the last 60 years, 00:05:37.436 --> 00:05:39.948 when most of the general public stopped noticing it, 00:05:39.948 --> 00:05:42.567 was something called an open registry, 00:05:42.567 --> 00:05:45.372 or a flag of convenience. 00:05:45.372 --> 00:05:47.959 Ships can now fly the flag of any nation 00:05:47.959 --> 00:05:50.911 that provides a flag registry. 00:05:50.911 --> 00:05:53.186 You can get a flag from the landlocked nation 00:05:53.186 --> 00:05:55.310 of Bolivia, or Mongolia, 00:05:55.310 --> 00:05:58.285 or North Korea, though that's not very popular. 00:05:58.285 --> 00:05:59.708 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:05:59.708 --> 00:06:01.819 So we have these very multinational, 00:06:01.819 --> 00:06:06.600 global, mobile crews on ships. 00:06:06.600 --> 00:06:09.312 And that was a surprise to me. 00:06:09.312 --> 00:06:12.429 And when we got to pirate waters, 00:06:12.429 --> 00:06:15.555 down the Bab-el-Mandeb strait and into the Indian Ocean, 00:06:15.555 --> 00:06:17.307 the ship changed. 00:06:17.307 --> 00:06:20.450 And that was also shocking, because suddenly, 00:06:20.450 --> 00:06:22.664 I realized, as the captain said to me, 00:06:22.664 --> 00:06:24.666 that I had been crazy to choose to go 00:06:24.666 --> 00:06:27.718 through pirate waters on a container ship. 00:06:27.718 --> 00:06:29.709 We were no longer allowed on deck. 00:06:29.709 --> 00:06:32.305 There were double pirate watches. 00:06:32.305 --> 00:06:36.582 And at that time, there were those 544 seafarers being held hostage, 00:06:36.582 --> 00:06:38.550 and some of them were held hostage for years 00:06:38.550 --> 00:06:41.321 because of the nature of shipping and the flag of convenience. 00:06:41.321 --> 00:06:43.403 Not all of them, but some of them were, 00:06:43.403 --> 00:06:48.117 because for the minority of unscrupulous ship owners, 00:06:48.117 --> 00:06:50.662 it can be easy to hide behind 00:06:50.662 --> 00:06:55.661 the anonymity offered by some flags of convenience. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:55.661 --> 00:06:59.600 What else does our sea blindness mask? 00:06:59.600 --> 00:07:01.919 Well, if you go out to sea on a ship 00:07:01.919 --> 00:07:03.914 or on a cruise ship, and look up to the funnel, 00:07:03.914 --> 00:07:06.783 you'll see very black smoke. 00:07:06.783 --> 00:07:09.318 And that's because shipping 00:07:09.318 --> 00:07:11.905 has very tight margins, and they want cheap fuel, 00:07:11.905 --> 00:07:14.076 so they use something called bunker fuel, 00:07:14.076 --> 00:07:16.592 which was described to me by someone in the tanker industry 00:07:16.592 --> 00:07:18.758 as the dregs of the refinery, 00:07:18.758 --> 00:07:22.015 or just one step up from asphalt. 00:07:22.015 --> 00:07:25.412 And shipping is the greenest method of transport. 00:07:25.412 --> 00:07:27.755 In terms of carbon emissions per ton per mile, 00:07:27.755 --> 00:07:30.726 it emits about a thousandth of aviation 00:07:30.726 --> 00:07:32.841 and about a tenth of trucking. 00:07:32.841 --> 00:07:36.077 But it's not benign, because there's so much of it. 00:07:36.077 --> 00:07:38.607 So shipping emissions are about three to four percent, 00:07:38.607 --> 00:07:40.782 almost the same as aviation's. 00:07:40.782 --> 00:07:42.171 And if you put shipping emissions 00:07:42.171 --> 00:07:45.551 on a list of the countries' carbon emissions, 00:07:45.551 --> 00:07:47.164 it would come in about sixth, 00:07:47.164 --> 00:07:49.278 somewhere near Germany. 00:07:49.278 --> 00:07:53.296 It was calculated in 2009 that the 15 largest ships 00:07:53.296 --> 00:07:55.891 pollute in terms of particles and soot 00:07:55.891 --> 00:07:57.291 and noxious gases 00:07:57.291 --> 00:07:59.869 as much as all the cars in the world. 00:07:59.869 --> 00:08:01.269 And the good news is that 00:08:01.269 --> 00:08:03.464 people are now talking about sustainable shipping. 00:08:03.464 --> 00:08:05.951 There are interesting initiatives going on. 00:08:05.951 --> 00:08:08.206 But why has it taken so long? 00:08:08.206 --> 00:08:10.553 When are we going to start talking and thinking 00:08:10.553 --> 00:08:14.589 about shipping miles as well as air miles? NOTE Paragraph 00:08:14.589 --> 00:08:17.394 I also traveled to Cape Cod to look 00:08:17.394 --> 00:08:21.321 at the plight of the North Atlantic right whale, 00:08:21.321 --> 00:08:23.477 because this to me was one of the most surprising things 00:08:23.477 --> 00:08:25.433 about my time at sea, 00:08:25.433 --> 00:08:27.230 and what it made me think about. 00:08:27.230 --> 00:08:30.383 We know about man's impact on the ocean 00:08:30.383 --> 00:08:32.815 in terms of fishing and overfishing, 00:08:32.815 --> 00:08:34.623 but we don't really know much about 00:08:34.623 --> 00:08:36.806 what's happening underneath the water. 00:08:36.806 --> 00:08:39.411 And in fact, shipping has a role to play here, 00:08:39.411 --> 00:08:43.057 because shipping noise has contributed 00:08:43.057 --> 00:08:46.250 to damaging the acoustic habitats of ocean creatures. 00:08:46.250 --> 00:08:49.242 Light doesn't penetrate beneath the surface of the water, 00:08:49.242 --> 00:08:51.869 so ocean creatures like whales and dolphins 00:08:51.869 --> 00:08:54.173 and even 800 species of fish 00:08:54.173 --> 00:08:57.064 communicate by sound. 00:08:57.064 --> 00:08:58.777 And a North Atlantic right whale 00:08:58.777 --> 00:09:01.984 can transmit across hundreds of miles. 00:09:01.984 --> 00:09:03.947 A humpback can transmit a sound 00:09:03.947 --> 00:09:05.885 across a whole ocean. 00:09:05.885 --> 00:09:07.840 But a supertanker can also be heard 00:09:07.840 --> 00:09:09.911 coming across a whole ocean, 00:09:09.911 --> 00:09:12.475 and because the noise that propellers make underwater 00:09:12.475 --> 00:09:15.812 is sometimes at the same frequency that whales use, 00:09:15.812 --> 00:09:18.846 then it can damage their acoustic habitat, 00:09:18.846 --> 00:09:20.536 and they need this for breeding, 00:09:20.536 --> 00:09:22.187 for finding feeding grounds, 00:09:22.187 --> 00:09:24.710 for finding mates. 00:09:24.710 --> 00:09:27.551 And the acoustic habitat of the North Atlantic right whale 00:09:27.551 --> 00:09:30.901 has been reduced by up to 90 percent. 00:09:30.901 --> 00:09:35.513 But there are no laws governing acoustic pollution yet. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:35.513 --> 00:09:38.769 And when I arrived in Singapore, 00:09:38.769 --> 00:09:43.673 and I apologize for this, but I didn't want to get off my ship. 00:09:43.676 --> 00:09:46.635 I'd really loved being on board Kendal. 00:09:46.635 --> 00:09:48.530 I'd been well treated by the crew, 00:09:48.530 --> 00:09:52.071 I'd had a garrulous and entertaining captain, 00:09:52.071 --> 00:09:56.143 and I would happily have signed up for another five weeks, 00:09:56.143 --> 00:09:57.974 something that the captain also said 00:09:57.974 --> 00:10:00.247 I was crazy to think about. 00:10:00.247 --> 00:10:02.491 But I wasn't there for nine months at a time 00:10:02.491 --> 00:10:04.446 like the Filipino seafarers, 00:10:04.446 --> 00:10:06.685 who, when I asked them to describe their job to me, 00:10:06.685 --> 00:10:09.007 called it "dollar for homesickness." 00:10:09.007 --> 00:10:10.485 They had good salaries, 00:10:10.485 --> 00:10:13.516 but theirs is still an isolating and difficult life 00:10:13.516 --> 00:10:17.205 in a dangerous and often difficult element. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:17.205 --> 00:10:19.291 But when I get to this part, I'm in two minds, 00:10:19.291 --> 00:10:22.216 because I want to salute those seafarers 00:10:22.216 --> 00:10:24.403 who bring us 90 percent of everything 00:10:24.403 --> 00:10:28.069 and get very little thanks or recognition for it. 00:10:28.069 --> 00:10:30.790 I want to salute the 100,000 ships 00:10:30.790 --> 00:10:32.113 that are at sea 00:10:32.113 --> 00:10:34.646 that are doing that work, coming in and out 00:10:34.646 --> 00:10:37.875 every day, bringing us what we need. 00:10:37.875 --> 00:10:40.895 But I also want to see shipping, 00:10:40.895 --> 00:10:44.374 and us, the general public, who know so little about it, 00:10:44.374 --> 00:10:46.414 to have a bit more scrutiny, 00:10:46.414 --> 00:10:48.518 to be a bit more transparent, 00:10:48.518 --> 00:10:51.790 to have 90 percent transparency. 00:10:51.790 --> 00:10:54.691 Because I think we could all benefit 00:10:54.691 --> 00:10:56.796 from doing something very simple, 00:10:56.796 --> 00:10:59.878 which is learning to see the sea. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:59.878 --> 00:11:02.036 Thank you. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:02.036 --> 00:11:06.344 (Applause)