'Disgraceful': U.S. Lobbying Blocks Global Fee on Shipping Emissions

'Disgraceful': U.S. Lobbying Blocks Global Fee on Shipping Emissions

‘Disgraceful’: U.S. Lobbying Blocks Global Fee on Shipping Emissions
October 20, 2025
Reading time: 5 minutes

Full Story: The Associated Press
Author: Sibi Arasu, Jennifer Mcdermott, with files from The Energy Mix









Beat Strasser/Wikimedia Commons



The Trump administration has succeeded in blocking a global fee on shipping emissions as an international maritime meeting adjourned Friday without adopting regulations.

The world’s largest maritime nations had been deliberating on adopting regulations to move the shipping industry away from fossil fuels to slash emissions. But Donald Trump, Saudi Arabia and other countries vowed to fight any global tax on shipping emissions.

“It used to be easy to write off President Donald Trump as a go-it-alone pariah on the international climate stage,” writes Politico Power Switch, in a post that also cites Russia, China, Cyprus, and Greece as countries that helped Trump scuttle the deal. In the end, “the Trump administration pulled off a previously unimaginable feat today by using threats and economic power to thwart a global tax on climate pollution from shipping.”

“The issue is that Donald Trump doesn’t want what he has dubbed “this Global Green New Scam Tax on Shipping”—and the U.S. is doing everything it can to throw the process off track,” Climate Home News’ Joe Lo reported from the International Maritime Organization (IMO) headquarters in London. The IMO is the United Nations agency that regulates international shipping.

“What is happening wouldn’t shock climate COP veterans but is unusual for the normally staid IMO—with its low profile and scheduled lunch and tea breaks,” Lo added.

According to Lo, Brazil had called for a vote on the new regulatory framework, suggesting that despite U.S. threats, those in favour still have a two-thirds majority needed to win the vote—as they did in April. But Singapore, then Saudi Arabia called for a vote to adjourn the meeting for a year. More than half of the countries agreed. Brazil’s negotiator warned that delaying adoption of the rules—which many had thought would be a formality this week—is “not a neutral stance”, as shipowners are waiting for certainty before they decide to invest in green technologies.

“The delay leaves the shipping sector drifting in uncertainty,” Dr. Alison Shaw, IMO Manager at Transport & Environment, a Brussels-based environmental organization, said in a media release. “But this week has also shown that there is a clear desire to clean up the shipping industry, even in the face of U.S. bullying.”

“The world cannot let intimidation and vested interests dictate the pace of climate action.”

John Maggs, the Clean Shipping Coalition’s representative at the IMO, said in a release that kicking the decision down the road to the next session in October 2026 “is simply evading reality.” Governments serious about climate action must rally to convince nations on the fence or opposed that adopting the green shipping regulations is “the only sane way forward.”

“Now you have one year, you will continue to work on several aspects of these amendments,” IMO secretary general Arsenio Dominguez said in his closing remarks. “You have one year to negotiate and talk and come to consensus.”

“The failure of IMO member states to clinch this agreement is a major setback for people and the planet,” Delaine McCullough, shipping program director at Ocean Conservancy, said in a release. “It’s disgraceful that climate action has been delayed when we see the devastating impacts every day, and when shipping fuels have been tied [pdf] to 250,000 premature deaths and six million cases of childhood asthma every year.”

Ralph Regenvanu, minister for climate change for the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu, said the delay was unacceptable, “given the urgency we face in light of accelerating climate change.”

If the green shipping regulations had been adopted, it would have been the first time a global fee was imposed on planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. Most ships today run on heavy fuel oil that releases carbon dioxide and other pollutants as it’s burned.

Shipping emissions have grown over the past decade to about 3% of the global total as trade has grown and vessels use immense amounts of fossil fuels to transport cargo—much of it consisting of fossil fuels—over long distances. In April, IMO member states agreed on the contents of the regulatory framework, with the aim of adopting the “Net-Zero Framework” at this London meeting.

Adopting the regulations was meant to demonstrate how effective multilateral cooperation can deliver real progress on global climate goals, said Emma Fenton, senior director for climate diplomacy at a U.K.-based climate change nonprofit, Opportunity Green. Delaying the process risks undermining the framework’s ambitions, they added.

The regulations would set a marine fuel standard that decreases, over time, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions allowed from using shipping fuels. The regulations also would establish a pricing system that would impose fees for every tonne of greenhouse gases emitted by ships above allowable limits, in what is effectively the first global tax on greenhouse gas emissions.

The IMO, which regulates international shipping, set a target for the sector to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by about 2050, and has committed to ensuring that fuels with zero or near-zero emissions are used more widely.

“What matters now is that countries rise up and come back to the IMO with a louder and more confident yes vote that cannot be silenced,” said Anaïs Rios, shipping policy officer for Seas At Risk. “The planet and the future of shipping does not have time to waste.”

This Associated Press story was published Oct. 17, 2025, by The Canadian Press.