In September 2021 I boarded a train to Cambridge to join Carbon13’s second Climate Tech cohort. Carbon13 is a venture builder whose stated mission is to create high-growth startups that each have the potential of reducing carbon emissions by ten million tons annually.

I was excited. I was finally ‘officially’ turning my talents towards a meaningful task — fighting climate change.

What I mostly ended up doing was fighting with my co-founders.

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During the course of the three-month programme I teamed up with a naval architect and a robotics engineer to tackle the problem of maritime shipping. I knew next to nothing about that industry but the sheer scale of destruction that sector creates convinced me to focus on it. After all, if you’re going to tackle climate change through a startup, might as well attack the biggest problem around.

We co-founded a company called Aloft Shipping (now Aloft Systems) and I began to learn about shipping. I might be bad at Monopoly but I’m good at doing deep dives on complex topics and what I learnt was pretty horrific.

The shipping industry is roughly responsible for 9% of global CO2 emissions. This is very large.

That number is largely down to the burning of heavy fuel oils to power the ships. Shipping has an even larger footprint if we were to include, as we should, the infrastructures of ports (including the embodied carbon of the structures and the energy used to run them), the production and constant transportation of metal containers, and, of course, the shipbuilding industry itself.

But what is really causing the shipping industry’s emissions is none of that. The root cause is that a whopping 90% of the world’s goods are transported by boat at not one, but at several points in their life cycles.

Ores and raw materials are transported from where they’re mined to refineries and chemical plants. Chemicals are transported to factories that turn them into parts. Parts are transported to other factories to produce larger appliances. Oil and coal are transported to power those factories. Finished products are transported to final destinations. And when they break or are thrown away, the waste is transported (back to Global South nations) to be ‘recycled’.

Chemicals and fossil fuels are transported to produce ammonia. Ammonia is transported to farms along with machinery to apply it to fields. Other similarly transported machinery extracts what is grown and is then transported to factories. Food is packed into similarly shipped packaging containers and then the packaged goods are transported to fulfilment centres to be distributed to shopping malls. Glass, metal, plastic, and paper residues are transported (back to Global South nations) to be ‘recycled’.

Clothing, furniture, toys, appliances, building materials, electronics and a hundred other things follow similar paths.

And all of this is powered by the underpaid and under-rewarded labour of (mostly) Filipino sailors who live dangerous lives with precarious employment contracts.

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The way we had envisaged contributing to solving this problem was through wind. By harking back to the origins of sailing itself we were going to overthrow the polluting, incestuous, modern-day shipping industry and usher in an age of clean ocean transport. We were buoyed by the interest we saw in this way of powering vessels.

But fractures began to quickly emerge between my co-founders and myself.

Increasingly it became obvious to me that what most players in “ocean tech” wanted to do, including my co-founders, was replace the heavy fuel oil powered shipping industry with one just as extractive. Just with different people the helm.

The first red flag for me was that the biggest interest I saw in the concept of using wind power as a shipping technology was from BP, IKEA, and Rolls Royce, some of the worst actors in the climate catastrophe. Even worse was that startup founders and ‘impact investors’ were willing to play ball with them.

To my dismay the direction we were heading towards was one in which we would build rigid, steel, automated, and modular sails that could “improve” the efficiency of large tankers by, say, a factor of 10%. (Give or take; the exact numbers escape me but that’s the ballpark range). The cost of the risk of trying out new technology could be offset by a reduction in overheads in the form of smaller crews through robotised automation. Growth could be achieved by creating and owning a proprietary network of wind-based shipping nodes powered by centralised data collection through satellites and drones that would take advantage of the changing wind patterns to reliably ship more and more stuff just as we have been accustomed to doing.

I on the other hand wanted to open up those containers and work out just how much of that shit shouldn’t have even been produced in the first place and then create market or political incentives to stop making that crap. I wanted to open-source data on wind routes and incentivise slow shipping to halve that 90%. And halve it again, and again.

But at the time I did not have the language to explain my position clearly even to myself, let alone the team. Our relationship broke down. I became a drag.

So within just a few months, in January of 2022, to my co-founders’ relief, I left the team.

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For a long time after that I felt like a failure. My gut feelings however did not abate. And it turns out that they are right.

Because not only is the centralised and extractive model of climate capitalism questionable. It just doesn’t work even at the core task of reducing carbon emissions in the first place.

First comes the efficiency paradox. Sometimes called the rebound effect or the Jevons Paradox. Roughly this states that when you improve the efficiency of how a resource is consumed, you incentivise even more use of that self same resource. Often to a level even higher than it was before.

So it is with shipping. If you save an operator some money from fuel costs and help them gain some “green” credentials, the inevitable outcome is that they are more attractive to investors and will build more ships resulting in more actual emissions overall.

Secondly, the tech itself will most likely be used by those bad actors I mentioned at the beginning to further grow their exploitative operations. This was put very eloquently by The Register last October:

Airbus commissions three wind-powered ships to sail the Atlantic to move parts while making less CO₂, so it can build more planes that make plenty.

Source, October 2023

So the first customers of “clean” maritime wind power are aircraft manufacturers to create more planes. Next will be oil companies to ship more oil, coal miners to ship more coal, and large conglomerates to ship more low-quality furniture and consumer goods.

Not only are you therefore not “saving” the world and its oceans. You are most likely making it worse by creating the technology that enables the bad behaviours to flourish.

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The real answer lies in opening up those containers, looking at what shit is being transported, and working out ways of shipping less of it.

The answer has to lie in turning off the tap of constant production, consumption, waste generation, exploitation, and consumerism.

Degrowth and post-capitalism ideologies and policies are the best bet of achieving this. Shifting to a plurality of business models with open, shared, and fair knowledge. Decentralised ownership that prioritises human and ecological wellbeing over just shipping things a little bit more efficiently.

If this feels like a fairy tale, I would argue it is no more fanciful than startup founders dreaming of becoming “the Tesla of shipping” or the “Elon Musk of [insert industry here]”. Or terra-forming Mars. Surely our unbounded creativity can ideate better solutions than just changing the people in charge.

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Special thanks go to Erin Remblance, Ryan James, and Kasper Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjørkskov of (re)Biz who have helped shape my chaotic thoughts into clearer questions. Without the work you did with us over the past few months most of the above would have likely remained a mess of discomfort.

As always I recommend reading the work of Kate Raworth, Donnella Meadows, Robin Wall-Kimmerer, Jason Hickel, and Amitav Ghosh.

Photo by Venti Views on Unsplash