Trump has blown up crucial decarbonization talks at the International Maritime Organization (IMO), threatening reciprocal measures if fees are imposed on US vessels based on their Green House Gases (GHG) emissions or fuel use. Not many ships fly the US flag, so this is clearly an effort to derail the Marine Environment Protection Committee’s (MEPC) working group that’s meeting this week in London and putting together ‘mid-term measures’ to its GHG reduction policy and finalizing the draft amendments to MARPOL Annex VI on an “IMO net-zero framework”.
The US delegation reportedly didn’t turn up for the MEPC meeting, which is one of the busiest on record. And last month, when the IMO’s Legal Committee met, the US delegation that did attend was quite muted. They made this short statement (below) which should have given everybody a ‘heads up’ about what was coming at this week’s meeting and then made a few interventions about the ‘dark fleet’ and Iran.
Sadly, their US IMO representative of many years, Jeffrey Lanz, has retired and there were new faces at the Legal Committee that many didn’t recognize. Lanz was a safe and well-known pair of hands who managed to steer the US through the IMO during the first Trump term without crashing. US statement to IMO Legal Committee: “US is under new administration and reviewing our policies to ensure that they are not unduly or unfairly disadvantaging the US as part of broader policy review. This means that we are reserving our position on some matters at this meeting. Our silence does not necessarily invoke our passive agreement.”
These talks are extensive, detailed and meant to be finalized for approval in October. Consensus has been near-impossible to reach so the IMO has kicked the can down the road for years on this, amid signals that forcing a vote on such an issue is likely to further lead to regional regulatory initiatives and/or withdrawal from shipping conventions.
This last-minute plot twist will give many of the blocs of countries that are frustrating progress an opportunity to walk away or further delay crossing ‘t’s and dotting ‘i’s. Trump’s America-first, insular approach to global trade and policymaking alongside climate change-unfriendly legal reversals directly contradicts the premise of the IMO: to provide global regulation of the shipping industry. So, this may be the start of something much wider in the short to medium term. Mid-terms are 18 months away.