THE Lloyd’s List team at Nor-Shipping have been getting a bit of heat this week for calling out the gap between the industry’s front-runners, who are pushing a progressive agenda, their followers, and then the laggards.

The good, the bad and the ugly if you will.

But as we touched on in yesterday’s edition of this daily podcast live from Nor-Shipping, that’s quite a reductive view of what is realistically not a linear shift across a single industry, but a messy and difficult series of transitions across a supply chain that is still very fragmented.

So, in search of a more balanced view from the frontrunners Lloyd’s List editor Richard Meade hopped on an e-scooter to visit podcast regular Jan Dieleman.

Most listeners will know Jan from previous editions, but for those who are not familiar he is the head of the shipping division at commodities giant Cargill. He is also the chairman of the Global Maritime Forum — the non-profit aimed at bringing voices from across the industry to chart a sustainable future. He is therefore well versed in both what the best of the industry are not just capable of and all too familiar with the gaps between the rhetoric on show and the reality of chartering decisions in an industry that needs to closely monitor the bottom line.

Jan talks about why the industry can’t move in unison and why we do need regulation to close the gap between the front runner and the laggards. He also discusses collaboration and the need for a more holistic conversation across sectors and government. And we even talked a little about carbon capture.

But the conversation starts by tackling what Jan sees as the elephant in the room — the fact that shipping may not be able to get what it wants when it come to a sustainable future of fuels, because shipping may not be the most important industry out there.