“Hot Topics in Shipping” was the title of Professor Ira Breskin’s lecture, “but shipping’s actually been hot for many years,” he said playfully as he introduced himself to the crowd at the National Lighthouse Museum a few weeks ago.

Having recently published The Business of Shipping (ninth edition), Professor Breskin is taking his academic work on the road and speaking to sold-out audiences around the region about domestic and international shipping. It’s a fascinating, fact-packed hour. Catch Prof. Breskin next at the National Maritime Historical Society in Montrose, New York on March 23.

What tops the hot topics list? Too much capacity and its corollary, too little demand. There aren’t enough containers to fill all the new ultra-large vessels. “So, carriers get together to pool capacity, to reduce capacity,” said Prof. Breskin. “There are three alliances—2M, Ocean, and the THE (Transport High Efficiency) Alliance—which carry about 90 percent of international traffic. But alliances are not the same as mergers. And there have been a lot of mergers. What sparked all this activity was the Hanjin bankruptcy in Sept. 2016.” The bankruptcy of this South Korean shipping company, the seventh largest in the world at the time, sent shock waves through the industry.

A close second in the hot topics list: maritime security. Prof. Breskin, who has had a long career as a journalist covering international trade and transportation for The Journal of Commerce, among other publications, reported that the cost of security in the shipping business has grown from practically nothing a few years ago to five per cent of operating expenses. The reason? Cyber security. For many, the wake-up call was a cyber attack that crippled Maersk and other global companies in June 2017. Its computer systems infected with malicious software, Maersk quickly had to grapple with that fact that tens of millions of tons of cargo had stalled mid-delivery. Ships, trucks, cranes, and gates were paralyzed. The shipping giant lost hundreds of millions of dollars, and was forced to rebuild its global computer network.

The question of cargo vulnerability came up. Prof. Breskin shrugged. “It’s a numbers game,” he said. “We’re moving millions of containers a year. Only about 10 percent of contents are inspected.”

On a positive note in maritime security, Prof. Breskin said, piracy in the open seas has abated.

Another hot topic: the greening of the shipping industry. Effective January 1, 2020, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) has mandated that all ships around the world must use low-sulfur fuels. Fuel costs will go up by 40 percent, Prof. Breskin said, and many ships will need to be retrofitted; some scrapped outright. A side note: in the metropolitan region, The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey is working to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 35 percent by 2025, and reduce all emissions related to the agency’s facilities by 80 percent by 2050. The Port Authority was the first U.S. public transportation agency to embrace the Paris Climate Agreement.

The Business of Shipping is available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Schiffer Publishing.

Photograph courtesy of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.