Breaking: US Strong-Arms Europe Into Shipping Emissions Delay – CleanTechnica

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Earlier today, CleanTechnica published a report by Transport & Environment that said the US, UAE, Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries were pressuring the EU to abandon its green shipping measures and to accept a much weaker global deal. “Caving into US demands would reverse years of progress and hand control of Europe’s decarbonization and energy transition to foreign oil interests,” T&E said.

Bloomberg Green is now reporting that “climate diplomacy ran into a Trump-sized iceberg. Nations were set to decide on landmark regulations to make vessels start paying for their greenhouse gas emissions. On Friday, the International Maritime Organization voted to postpone the decision for a year.”

Bloomberg reporter Akshat Rathi said the US brought enormous pressure on the countries present at the meeting of the International Maritime Organization in London on Friday, causing the IMO to postpone a vote that would have made the shipping industry pay a small fee for the climate heating emissions from ocean-going cargo vessels.

Shipping Framework Years In The Making

The IMO plan has been in the making for several years and its adoption would be a win for multilateral climate regulations in advance of the COP 30 climate summit in Brazil later this year. It would pave the way for the end of the shipping industry using oil as the dominant fuel for powering cargo vessels instead of cleaner options with lower emissions like ammonia.

The projected cost of the fee was around $10 billion a year — a pittance in comparison to the billions of tons of cargo that are carried by cargo ships every year and the one billion tons of carbon emissions attributable to ocean freight operations every year. The proposed Net-Zero Framework would require cargo ships weighing 5,000 tons or more to pay a fee if their carbon dioxide emissions exceed a threshold level, which in effect would reward ships that use cleaner fuels.

Until early today, the new fee on ship emissions was expected to be approved. A representative from the International Chamber of Shipping — which represents more than 80% of the world’s merchant fleet — told Bloomberg yesterday it expected the measure to pass. So did Edmund Hughes, a former IMO official who was involved in environmental regulation. Boston Consulting Group also expected the new regulation to be adopted.

“This is a defining moment for the industry and a pivotal step forward in global decarbonization efforts,” BCG partner Peter Jameson told Bloomberg yesterday. “While some parties may seek to slow or complicate the process through political pressure, that will not be enough to change the outcome.”

Danger: Climate Thugs At Work

So what changed? Like Al Capone or John Gotti threatening an honest citizen in a shakedown, the US administration brought up the heavy artillery to defeat the proposal. US Secretary of State “Little Marco” Rubio became personally involved in strong-arming the participants at the IMO meeting in London, according to an anonymous source.

The night before the vote, the so-called president of the United States took to his personal antisocial media channel to say the US will not “stand for this Global Green New Scam Tax on Shipping” and urged countries to “vote NO in London tomorrow.” He did everything short of planting the severed head of a race horse at the foot of the bed of each delegate.

“We’re not having climate negotiations here, we’re having geopolitical negotiations,” Faig Abbasov, director of shipping at Transport & Environment, said on the sidelines of the talks. “The United States is waging war against multi-lateralism, UN diplomacy and climate diplomacy, at this meeting now, inside the building and outside the building.”

Last Friday, the State Department said it was exploring options including tariffs to pressure they members of the IMO. The same day, it issued a separate statement saying that visa restrictions, sanctions on officials, and commercial penalties were among the responses being considering against nations that support the rules.

The Administration Is Unhinged

The New York Times reports that Little Marco, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy issued a joint statement last week, in which they said the United States was considering antitrust investigations into countries that support the measure and “blocking vessels registered in those countries from US ports.”

The statement referred to the proposed fee as a “European led neo-colonial export of global climate regulations” and said that it would raise shipping costs. The European Union responded with a terse two sentence statement supporting the tax proposal, saying it would “ensure a global level playing field.”

“The arguments against the framework are weak. Even if shipping costs were to rise by up to 10 percent, this would barely affect consumer prices, as shipping typically represents only a small fraction of total product costs,” Rico Luman, a senior economist for transport at the Dutch bank ING told Bloomberg. “In contrast, the various direct import tariffs that we’re currently seeing are far more damaging economically.”

Translation — the administration’s complaints are just another pack of lies as it continues to repay the enormous campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry many times over.

Ugliness On The World Stage

The delay means “that innovation will struggle to scale, inequities will deepen, and the transition to clean shipping will become harder and more costly,” said Natacha Stamatiou, global shipping manager at the Environmental Defense Fund. The European Union was trying its best to ensure that the carbon levy gets adopted. But the postponement for one year shows “European leadership in international climate talks is not enough,” said Krzysztof Bolesta, Poland’s deputy climate minister.

Many people attending the IMO conference in London expressed dismay at the hardball approach taken by the US to apply pressure on countries. Norway’s climate minister Andreas Bjelland Eriksen, told the Norwegian news site DN that he was “worried” to see the new US attitude toward global climate diplomacy. He worries that it might be a sign of things to come at the COP 30 summit meeting next month in Rio.

Ralph Regenvanu, the climate minister of Vanuatu, a small Pacific island nation that is among the world’s most vulnerable to sea level rise, called the delay “unacceptable given the urgency we face in light of accelerating climate change.”

There is no disguising it any more. The pudgy potentate and his coterie of presidential jock sniffers are determined to beat any opponent into submission. This is not governing; it is racketeering. As the US alienates its most important allies, it will wake one day to find it has no friends left in the world. That hardly seems to be recipe for greatness.