The New Map: Energy, Climate and the Clash of Nations | Daniel Yergin
Shipping, particularly container shipping, figures prominently in The New Map: Energy, Climate and the Clash of Nations, the latest book by Pulitzer Prize winning author, energy expert, Daniel Yergin.
The advent of the “Container” is hailed as one of the great Innovations of the 20th century. It originally came from the US and heralded a new age of Globalisation. However, today that symbol of Globalisation has come to represent something different and disturbing: a breakdown in the geopolitical consensus around globalisation caused by protectionism. As Yergin wrote, containerised shipping has enabled mainland China’s meteoric rise amongst other factors.
However, with great power and geopolitical tensions flaring over issues such as in Taiwan and Ukraine, the industry will be confronting a future that is less hospitable to global trade and far flung supply chains. Widespread acknowledgement of the growing vulnerabilities of supply chains was made clear in the six day Suez canal blockage by the 20,000 TEU container ship Ever Given in late March .It is also evident in the massive shift in consumer spending in developed nations-from travel to home improvement goods, and from brick and mortar retail to ecommerce, triggering a surge in the shipping of containerised goods and widespread shortages of capacity across the supply chain from vessel space to containers, to trucks and warehouse. “Momentum towards a more collaborative world order that rested on an increasingly connected global economy is now going reverse.” Yergin wrote “The world has become more fractured, with a resurgence of nationalism and populism and distrust, great power competition, and with a rising politics of suspicion and resentment”.
PLD highly recommends the reading of – THE NEW MAP so as to better understand the rampant forces working against the landscape of globalisation in which container shipping will thrive nevertheless.
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