Take a seat, Nostradamus: I’ve got some news. To quote the rock band REM, it’s the end of the world as we know it.

Like the recent gatherings preceding it, speaker after speaker at the Platts 5th Annual Mediterranean Bunker Fuel Conference in Athens last week discussed the ifs, whats and hows of the impending little shipping apocalypse.

Ned Molloy, managing editor, fuel oil, discussed bunker prices while Alex Younevitch, managing editor, freight markets, delivered a rather droll presentation on the state of affairs in the bulk market.

Sameer Mohindru, senior editor, Asia shipping markets, wasn’t there, but the sonorous words in his recent Platts video kept ringing in my ears: “2020 will change the course of maritime history.” So too the venerable oracle of the bunker business, Adrian Tolson, who recently declared 2020 to be “the biggest thing to hit our industry since we switched from coal to fuel.”

And they’re right: shift will happen in 2020.

And just as in previously-predicted apocalypses, armies of enterprising consultants bearing appropriately-furrowed brows are capitalizing on the rising tide of anxiety, divining many predictions from their briny crystal balls. Those old enough might recall all the professional prognosticators who made big bucks preparing us for another apocalypse: Y2K.

For the young ’uns among us, Y2K (meaning ‘Year 2000’) was the expectation that all computers worldwide would become confused and malfunction once their internal clocks ticked one second beyond 23:59:59 on Dec. 31, 1999.

A mass freak-out ensued among the world’s governments and many corporations, who proceeded to ply around half a trillion US dollars fixing their IT systems. An array of survivalists, millennialists and messianists eagerly awaited Armageddon with breathless anticipation.

But when the Year 2000 was one second old, computers kept on ticking.

Yet instead of mass relief, a substantial number of observers strangely concluded that the absence of a cataclysmic crash must have meant that Y2K was a gigantic hype or hoax and that the investment to prevent the supposed catastrophe was an utter waste of money. In retrospect the outrage over the waste seems more like sour grapes — disappointment that the world didn’t actually come to a crashing end.

Was the Y2K fear and investment justi...