PRAGMATISM seems to be the new buzzword sweeping through the shipping executive lexicon.

What that means, though, requires a bit of decoding.

Those of you who have been schlepping round the conference circuit at Posidonia in Athens this week will have no doubt noticed that it comes up quite a lot when talking about decisions that have not been made.

A lot has happened in the past few years. We need to factor in energy security as well as energy transition. The technology is there, the regulation is coming, but, realistically, the fuel supply is not. We need to focus on efficiency this decade, and, by the way, 2050 net zero now seems pretty unlikely now. We need to be pragmatic.

Is this outbreak of pragmatism a genuine shift towards a more realistic conversation? Is it a resetting after the greenwashed ambitions that never really had any substance? Or are we starting to feel the environmental, social, and governance backlash playing out and pulling back on the difficult substance of what lies ahead in terms of the energy transition?

There has certainly been a shift.

Given that this push for pragmatism is coming, not from the environmental laggards, but from many of the most progressive voices who previously argued with conviction for ambition when it came to shipping’s energy transition and all that entails, the podcast this week reports from Posidonia.

Joining Lloyd’s List editor-in-chief Richard Meade around Athens this week to discuss what this all means are:

• Jan Dieleman, president of Cargill Ocean Transportation

• Knut Ørbeck-Nilssen, chief executive of DNV – Maritime 

• Matthieu de Tugny, president, Marine & Offshore, Bureau Veritas

• Bud Darr, executive vice-president, Maritime Policy and Government Affairs, MSC Group

• Christopher Wiernicki, chief executive of ABS