PORTRAYING yourself as complex, misrepresented and misunderstood are the actions of a petulant teenager, not a globalised, multi-billion dollar driver of world trade.
When it comes to questions of public perception, it is time the shipping industry realised that it needs to grow up.
Accusations from British MPs this week that the industry has contributed little in the battle to reduce emissions appeared to illicit genuine surprise and distress from some quarters.
The Environmental Audit Committee claims that prevarication had prevented any global agreement were inevitably followed by a very public discussion of the reports’ findings courtesy of the BBC.
The debate of course was one sided and ill-informed about many of the positive steps forward that both industry and government have taken, but in the absence of any authoritative shipping voice to counter the report’s wilder claims, shipping was yet again portrayed as the environmental bogeyman.
And the story will not stop there. Come December, the considered thought of UK MPs will be long forgotten and the industry will be waiting to hear what the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change conference thinks of their efforts to control emissions.
Will this grand, post-Kyoto project look objectively at the continuing debate over market based instruments, carbon levies and trading schemes that are yet to reach a sound conclusion and agree that shipping should be considered a special case and left out of the framework?
Or will it see the same decade of inaction that the UK MPs reported and insist that the industry is dragged kicking and screaming into the new climate change deal?
Like it or not, the answer to that is as much a question of perception as it is objective, rational debate.
