"As an industry community, they should work with the IMO [International Maritime Organisation], they should work with organisations to lead the world in the right direction, and give support towards better environmental standards," said ASC chairman John Lu, also chairman of the Singapore National Shippers Council, a group representing shipping line customers.

Mr Lu was responding to statements Masamichi Morooka, chairman of the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS), an global association of shipowners, who said costs to shipping from environmental regulations were mounting dangerously.

"Unless this is understood, there is a danger of creating real barriers to investment in our industry as we hope to move closer to recovery," Mr Marooka, also CEO of NYK-Hinode Line Ltd, told a Nor-Shipping event in Oslo recently.

Mr Morooka echoed sentiments expressed in Paris by BIMCO's new president John Denhom, who told members that shipping had done its best to limit carbon emissions and so "there is nothing to be gained by imposing artificial mechanisms to achieve targets."

Mr Denhom, president of Baltic and International Maritime Council (BIMCO) and association of shipowners and shipmanagers, said the big problem today is regulatory burden, complicated by a "huge, politically inspired environmental agenda".

Not so, said Singapore's Mr Lu: "Without incentives, without regulations, without help from government, they will continue to hold on, and the situation will not be changed."

Asked if it were wrong for shipping companies to slow down environmental regulation, Mr Lu said: "For the industry to voice their difficulties, that is fine. But when these difficulties are going to affect global environmental regulation, then that is not good. We are all citizens of the earth. We should be concerned about that, not just concerned about our own industry." 

Regulations that get shipowners to adapt to new ballast water management, using lower-sulphur fuel and reducing greenhouse gas emissions would cost the industry an estimated half a trillion dollars from 2015-2025, noted Singapore Business Times.

Said Mr Lu: "Companies can make adjustments according to their own needs, and eventually provide an environment that invests in new ships while scrapping old ones to balance the overall overcapacity situation."