Under immense pressure from the US, countries at a meeting of the International Maritime Organization in London on Friday agreed to postpone a vote that would have made the shipping industry pay for planet-warming pollution.
The carbon pricing regulations were first agreed on by the vast majority of countries at a meeting in April, but President Donald Trump’s administration pushed hard to get countries to vote against the measure going into effect at the October meeting. That included threats to levy tariffs and to delay visas for maritime crew.
Discussions on the issue went as high as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, said a person familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to discuss private details. The night before the vote, Trump wrote on his social-media platform Truth Social that the US will not “stand for this Global Green New Scam Tax on Shipping” and urged countries to “vote NO in London tomorrow.”
“We’re not having climate negotiations here, we’re having geopolitical negotiations,” Faig Abbasov, director of shipping at think tank Transport & Environment, said on the sidelines of the talks. “The United States is waging war against multilateralism, UN diplomacy and climate diplomacy, at this meeting now, inside the building and outside the building.”
Countries at the IMO failing to adopt the carbon charge will further sour the moods of negotiators heading into the UN climate summit COP30, happening in Brazil in November. All countries are expected to submit new climate plans going out to 2035, but so far those plans have mostly disappointed.
COP30 is aimed at delivering on the goals of the Paris Agreement to keep global temperatures from rising beyond 2C compared to preindustrial levels. While the agreement accounts for the vast majority of global greenhouse-gas emissions, it leaves out those coming from shipping and aviation beyond territorial boundaries. That means, without the support of IMO, the world will fail to halt global temperature rise.
