Essay by Eric Worrall
Ahead of the meeting, the US government had threatened … targeting government officials who supported the NZF.
Oct 17, 2025
US-led alliance wins a year’s delay in adoption of green shipping deal
The IMO’s Net-Zero Framework will be up for approval again in October 2026, after the US and Saudi Arabia persuaded countries not to vote on it as planned
Joe Lo
News editor…
In April 2025, governments provisionally agreed the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) Net-Zero Framework (NZF), which would penalise high-emitting ships around the world and use the money to fund the transition to cleaner vessels and fuels.
…
The NZF was scheduled to set emissions reduction targets for ships starting in 2028. But this – and the rest of the framework’s timeline – have now been plunged into doubt. Although some technical work can continue, political progress will have to wait until October 2026 when delegates will next take up the issue of whether to adopt the NZF.
…
Trump’s threats
Ahead of the meeting, the US government had threatened a series of measures targeting government officials who supported the NZF and threatening to make it difficult and expensive for those countries’ ships to call at US ports.
A joint statement by the US transport and foreign ministers said: “We will fight hard to protect our economic interests by imposing costs on countries if they support the NZF. Our fellow IMO members should be on notice.”
And on Thursday, President Donald Trump tried to intervene directly in the IMO process, urging countries to vote against what he called “this Global Green New Scam Tax on Shipping” and “a Green New Scam Bureaucracy”. In a post on his Truth Social platform, he suggested that the NZF would lead to higher prices for American consumers, adding that the US “will not adhere to it in any way, shape, or form”.
…
Read more: https://www.climatechangenews.com/2025/10/17/us-led-alliance-delay-year-adoption-green-shipping-deal-nzf-imo-un/
The Trump administration released a statement ahead of the deferral vote;
Taking Action to Defend America from the UN’s First Global Carbon Tax – the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) “Net-Zero Framework” (NZF)
MEDIA NOTE
OCTOBER 10, 2025
Joint Statement by Secretary of State Rubio, Secretary of Energy Wright, and Secretary of Transportation Duffy
President Trump has made it clear that the United States will not accept any international environmental agreement that unduly or unfairly burdens the United States or harms the interests of the American people. Next week, members of the IMO will vote on the adoption of a so-called NZF aimed at reducing global carbon dioxide gas emissions from the international shipping sector. This will be the first time that a UN organization levies a global carbon tax on the world.
The Administration unequivocally rejects this proposal before the IMO and will not tolerate any action that increases costs for our citizens, energy providers, shipping companies and their customers, or tourists. The economic impacts from this measure could be disastrous, with some estimates forecasting global shipping costs increasing as much as 10% or more. We ask you to join us in rejecting adoption of the NZF at the October meeting and to work together on our collective economic and energy security.
The NZF proposal poses significant risks to the global economy and subjects not just Americans, but all IMO member states to an unsanctioned global tax regime that levies punitive and regressive financial penalties, which could be avoided. The United States is considering the following actions against nations that support this global carbon tax on American consumers:
- Pursuing investigations and considering potential regulations to combat anti-competitive practices from certain flagged countries and potential blocking vessels registered in those countries from U.S. ports;
- Imposing visa restrictions including an increase in fees and processing, mandatory re-interview requirements and/or revisions of quotas for C-1/D maritime crew member visas;
- Imposing commercial penalties stemming from U.S. government contracts including new commercial ships, liquified natural gas terminals and infrastructure, and/or other financial penalties on ships flagged under nations in favor of the NZF;
- Imposing additional port fees on ships owned, operated, or flagged by countries supporting the framework; and
- Evaluating sanctions on officials sponsoring activist-driven climate policies that would burden American consumers, among other measures under consideration.
The United States will be moving to levy these remedies against nations that sponsor this European-led neocolonial export of global climate regulations. We will fight hard to protect our economic interests by imposing costs on countries if they support the NZF. Our fellow IMO members should be on notice.
Source: https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2025/10/taking-action-to-defend-america-from-the-uns-first-global-carbon-tax-the-international-maritime-organizations-imo-net-zero-framework-nzf
The tax on global shipping would have been pumped into a net zero fund administered by the United Nations.
Why a deferral rather than a cancellation?
Green obsessed member states and UN officials are likely still clinging to the hope they can shift the political landscape in favour of supporting this new tax on prosperity.
Have no doubt that interference will include covert foreign interference in US domestic politics.
But the coming year will likely see political shifts which will not favour expensive luxuries like carbon taxes.
With safe haven investments like gold spiking to an all time high, an Indian property and stock market bubble which is threatening to precipitate a Chinese style crisis, an economic crisis in France threatening to fracture the Euro zone, and China sitting on the mother of all banking crisis, and making all the wrong moves trying to fix the crisis, lets just say by this time next year I doubt a tax which would further damage the global economy will win widespread support.
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But there is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on our global climate sysem. There is plenty of scientific rational to support the conclusion that the climate sensivity of CO2 is zero. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere does not cause surface warming. In general the so called greenhouse gasses actually act as coolants in the Earth’s stmosphere. The AGW hypotheis has been faslifid by science.
Pasting this in every thread, with the same typos, is lame.
But the information that I provide is the truth and very relavant.
The AGW hypothesis has been disproved because its predictions have failed to occur.
Einstein said it only takes one failed prediction to disprove a theory. There have been dozens of failed predictions by the carbon dioxide worriers. Yet the wretched scare continues.
That is not what Einstein is reputed to have said, that “one failed prediction could disprove a theory.” He is reputed to have said that it only takes one person to prove him wrong, so one piling on him is unnecessary.
A minute of googling found no direct quotes, but much paraphrasing.
s/one piling on/one hundred piling on/
No, the AGW hypothesis has been disproved because of the science has involved. For example there is the idea that H2O provides a positive feedback enhancing CO2 based warming. but in reality, as evidenced by the fact that the wet lapse rate is significantly less than the dry lapse rate in the troposphere, H2O acts as a net coolant reducing any warming that CO2 might provide. This is just one falsifications of the AGW hypopthesis. For many more try reading “The Rational Climate e-Book” by Patrice Poyet which one can download for free from the internet.
When told about the book “One Hundred Authors Against Einstein,” Einstein famously replied, “Why one hundred? If I were wrong, one would have been enough”.
I think you go too far, Everything has an effect on our global climate system. Including CO2, cities, airports, aircraft, chopping down forests, vegan flatulence etc etc.
That was never the question.
The questions are:
And phrased like that the probable answers are not much, probably warming, probably irrelevant, and no, nothing can realistically be done to stop it.
The effects of most of what you are talking about is really trivial. The big issue in terms of the AGW hypothesis is the idea that adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes surface warming but that is contrary to atmospheric physics. If add CO2 to the atmosphere caused surface warming then adding CO2 to the atmosphere should cause an increase in the dry lapse rate in the troposphere. But in reality adding CO2 causes a slight decrease in the dry lapse rate which casses cooling of the surface. The greenhouse gases act as coolants and do not cause surface warming which falsifies the AGW hypothesis. For more falsifications of the AGW hyporhesis try reading “The Rational Climate e-Book” by Patrice Poyet which you can download for free from the Internet.
willhaas wrote, “here is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on our global climate sysem.”
In the first place, the fact that CO2 has a warming effect is well and truly proven. If you deny that, you’ve abandoned science altogether. CO2 is responsible for the big 15µm “notch” in Earth’s emission spectrum, which represents a large warming effect.
The graph is from van Wijingaarden and Happer, and it is derived from line-by-line spectral calculations. The black trace is the emission curve for CO2 = 400 ppmv. The red trace is for CO2 = 800 ppmv. (I added the flashing purple ovals.)
Here’s a similar graph, but from measurements, rather than calculations; the effect of CO2 is marked in green:
Additional CO2 does not deepen the notch in Earth’s emission spectrum, but it does broaden the notch slightly. The difference between the red and black traces in the first graph is the calculated effect at the mesopause (i.e., approx. TOA) of a doubling of CO2 concentration.
As you can see, the difference is about 277 – 274 = 3.0 W/m².
You can see from the graph and the table that CO2 is responsible for a large radiative forcing (warming effect), but additional CO2 causes only a small increase in that effect. The best evidence shows that the warming effect of human CO2 emissions is modest and benign, but it is not zero.
In the second place, climate is more than just temperature. A change in CO2 level IS a change in climate — and a very beneficial one, in fact. The 50% increase in atmospheric CO2 level over the last 250 years is one of the main reasons that catastrophic drought-triggered famines are fading from living memory, for the first time in human history.
https://sealevel.info/learnmore.html?0=madrasfamine
Where the alarmists go off the rails is with their unsupportable claim that more CO2 is harmful. The additional CO2 is directly very beneficial for both human agriculture and natural ecosystems, and even the modest effect on temperatures is generally beneficial. Scientists call the warmest periods in history “climate optimums,” because they’re objectively better than cold periods. That includes periods much warmer than now, like the peak of the Eemian interglacial.
There may be a small upper atmospheric warming effect but in the troposphere CO2 acts as a coolant effectively wiping out any upper atmospheric warming effect. In the troposphere a doubling of CO2 will slightly decrease the dry lapse rate and hence causes cooling of the Earth’s surface. Then there is the feedback effect of H2O which is negative. Because of the evaporative cooling effect of H2O, H2O operates to counter any warming that CO2 might porvide. Evidence of this is the fact that the wet lapse rate is significantly less than the dry lapse rate in the troposphere. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere does not increase the thermal insulating characteristics of the atmosphere. All of the climate simulations that assume a warming effect of adding CO2 to the atmosphere have all been wrong because that assuption is wrong. There is plenty of rational to conclude that the climate sensivity of CO2 is effdectively zero. There is no evidence in the paleoclimate record that higher CO2 levels cause surface warming.
Why not a hydrogen tax instead? The primary greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere is by far H2O and not CO2.
Don’t encourage them
Thank you and don’t stop monitoring and resisting the greatest con game in human history.
It’ll end only when the UN is shutdown. The UN is completely infested top to bottom with WEF cronies and CCP bought spies and moles. It is irredeemable. Only when the UN is shutdown and gone will the scam stop.
And next year Trump and the US economy will be in an even stronger position to stop the UN’s climate scam.
Especially after this coming COP30 fleece-the-West conference in Brazil (11-21 Nov) will be an utter failure in getting more money for the UN’s scam.
Got to shed a lot more bureaucrats and bring the federal deficit back into surplus, otherwise the USA risks being caught in the storm. Part of the reason gold is spiking is faith in the US dollar is under attack.
The UN have been searching for a way to extract money from the global economy for almost their entire existence. A transfer of wealth to unelected officials.
The UN is a corrupt organisation at the pointy end of the global charge. Clearly has no purpose other than enriching its administrators and no value to there global community.
Trump is a leader wielding greater authority then UN and commands greater respect than the entire UN.
Oh that’s not true, they have other purposes. Like funneling money to Hamas. It doesn’t ALL go into their own pockets.
Edit of text:
Change: “…then UN…” to “than the UN…”
I read with interest the lengthy essay on why China is making all the wrong moves on managing its financial crisis. He could just have said socialism is failing China just like socialism has failed every other country it had gotten its claws into.
There was a brief moment in history when China was going to go full on capitalist. But the powerful could feel the power slipping from their fingers. So they put their fingers into every aspect of the Chinese economy to retain their power, with predictable results. The writer could just have said history repeats itself.
Well said.
The key issue here is the precedent this tax would make. It would give the UN a funding source free f national assembly oversite and would be the beginning of UN independence and the beginning of one world government under a non elected body of bureaucrats.
We must block and stop this power grab by the UN and its agencies at all cost.
That’s the way Trump looks at it, too.
Got to love Trump!
After EPA Administer Lee Zeldin rescinds the 2009 CO2 Endangerment Finding, he will finally put an end to the greatest scientific fraud since the Piltdown Man. No one here or elsewhere will be talking about greenhouse gases, global warming and climate change. The companies will no longer have to worry about CO2 emissions from the use of fossil fuels and will abandon the net zero by 2050 pledge. Many radical environmental NGO’s will go bust.
This is good news, but a one year deferral is not enough. We need to drive a stake through the heart of this proposal.
The evidence is compelling that anthropogenic warming is modest and benign, and CO2 emissions are beneficial, rather than harmful.
IMO’s Net Zero Framework for Shipping is completely unscientific. It’s based on what the industry calls TCRE and RCB, which are really just homeopathic climatology.
Homeopathic medicine is based on “water memory,” the claim that even after a medicine is diluted so much that not a single molecule of the original therapeutic agent remains, its medicinal effect is undiminished, or even increased.
Similarly, homeopathic climatology is based on “CO2 memory,” the assumption that CO2 has just as much warming effect after it is removed from the air as it had when it was emitted.
Mankind is currently adding about 5 ppmv of CO2 to the atmosphere, every year (90% of it from fossil fuels). But, thanks to huge negative (stabilizing) carbon feedbacks, the CO2 growth rate in the atmosphere is only about 2½ ppmv/year.
If you’re interested in the impact of carbon emissions, you obviously should not ignore that! But they do.
In fact, AR6 explicitly posits that the removal of CO2 from the air by natural processes does not matter, and that the effect of “carbon emissions” on temperature is determined by total emissions to date (“cumulative emissions”) and unaffected by natural removals of CO2 from the air (e.g., by trees).
Do you think I’m kidding? I’m not.
They call it “transient climate response to cumulative CO2 emissions” (TCRE) and “remaining carbon budget” (RCB), and it is the justification for the Net Zero campaign.
“The transient climate response to cumulative CO2 emissions (TCRE) is a metric of climate change that directly relates the primary cause of climate change (cumulative CO2 emissions) to global mean temperature change.” – MacDougall (2016) https://doi.org/10.1007/s40641-015-0030-6
Here’s the AR6 version:
“Cumulative CO2 emissions” is NOT the amount of CO2 remaining in the atmosphere. It is defined to be the mathematical summation of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions to date.
But here’s the rub: the higher the CO2 level in the atmosphere goes, the faster nature removes CO2 from the atmosphere (mostly into the oceans, and into the terrestrial biosphere and soil enrichment). Quantitatively, for each 50 ppmv rise in the CO2 concentration, the rate of natural CO2 removals accelerates by about 1 ppmv/year. That makes the effective lifetime of CO2 added to the air (the “adjustment time”) about 50 years, and the half-life of added CO2 50×ln(2) ≌ 35 years.
(That inconvenient fact was mentioned in the IPCC 1995 Second Assessment Report, but has been omitted from subsequent IPCC Reports. The SAR [WGI TS, B.1, p.16] said: “Within 30 years about 40-60% of the CO2 currently released to the atmosphere is removed.” That implies an adjustment time of 33-59 years, and a half-life of 23-41 years.)
In the real world, CO2 removed from the atmosphere no longer has a warming effect. But TCRE ignores the removal of CO2, and considers ONLY additions of CO2 to the air. In other words, it is predicated on the assumption that the mere MEMORY of CO2 once in the atmosphere has just as much warming effect as the CO2 which remains.
That’s not an inconsequential error. It is an essential assumption needed to justify the Net Zero campaign—and it’s nonsensical as orgone energy and quantum healing crystals. It is basically homeopathic climatology.
How can anyone take seriously institutions which promotes such crackpot nonsense?
From post:”…evidence is compelling that anthropogenic warming…”.
It is hard to drive a stake through anything when you agree with the basic premise. There is no warming caused by CO2.
The fact that CO2 has a warming effect is well and truly proven. If you deny that, you’ve abandoned science altogether.
But size matters. The evidence is compelling that the warming effect from additional CO2 is modest and benign.
That’s not because CO2 has a small warming effect, but because there’s already so much CO2 in the air that additional CO2 adds only slightly to that warming effect.
GHGs are colorants, which tint the air in the LW IR (rather than visible) part of the spectrum. The warming effect of CO2 is due to the fact that it absorbs LW IR wavelengths in a part of the spectrum where the Earth is a strong emitter. Radiation which escapes from the Earth cools the Earth, and the greater the amount of radiation which escapes to space, the greater the cooling effect. So anything (like CO2) which reduces the amount of radiation that escapes to space has a warming effect.
At some wavelengths, CO2 is transparent, so the amount of CO2 in the air has no effect on those wavelengths. In fact, at some wavelengths none of the GHGs in the air absorb appreciably, so most radiation passes right through. The “atmospheric window” around about 10 µm is the most important range of such wavelengths.
But at some wavelengths, centered on about 15 µm, CO2 absorbs and emits so strongly that ALL of the radiation at those wavelengths which escapes to space originates within the atmosphere. If you “look down” from space at the Earth with a spectrophotometer, the radiation you “see” at any given wavelength will be from some average altitude, called the “emission height.”
The intensity of that radiation depends on the air temperature where it is emitted.
Adding more CO2 to the atmosphere increases the emission heights for the affected wavelengths. The question you should be wondering is how that affects the air temperature at the emission height.
At some of those wavelengths, CO2 is such a strong absorber and emitter that the emission height is so high that it’s approximately at the tropopause. At the tropopause, changes in altitude have little or no effect on air temperature. So for those wavelengths, additional CO2 has no warming effect.
But at fringe wavelengths, where CO2 absorbs and emits only weakly, the emission height is lower, i.e., down in the troposphere. Within the troposphere, increasing altitude decreases air temperature. So raising the emission height lowers the temperature at the emission height, which reduces the intensity of the emissions which escape to space. That reduces energy lost to space, so it has a warming effect.
The effect is small, but not zero. The most comprehensive analyses are by van Wijingaarden & Happer. This is one of their papers:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.16465
This is their figure, except that I added the blinking purple ovals:
The blinking ovals highlight the small effect (only about 3 W/m²) on radiative emissions to space from doubling the CO2 level. (The IPCC claims 3.7 ±0.4 W/m², but that is almost certainly too high.)
From the post:”The intensity of that radiation depends on the air temperature where it is emitted.”
CO2 does not emit radiation based on its temperature. Its emissivity is near zero at atmospheric temperature a pressure.
mkelly wrote, “CO2 does not emit radiation based on its temperature. Its emissivity is near zero…“
That’s incorrect. Emissivity (ε) refers to the amount of radiation emitted relative to a blackbody. The reason it is low for radiatively active gases is that they emit over only a narrow slice of the blackbody emission spectrum: the same wavelengths that they are capable of absorbing. The intensity of the radiation that they emit still increases with temperature.
The reason emissivity rises with pressure, as shown in your plot, is “pressure broadening.” That makes the “narrow slice” of spectrum where the CO2 absorbs and emits less narrow.
At the tropopause, a CO2 molecules which is vibrationally excited with 83 meV of energy (equivalent to one 15 µm photon) is on the order of 100 million times (give or take an order of magnitude) more likely to lose that energy via collisional transfer to another air molecule than by radiative emission of a LW IR photon, but that doesn’t mean those emissions are negligible. It just means the CO2 molecules stay at almost exactly the same temperature as the surrounding air molecules, regardless of how much radiation they absorb or emit.
Here are some resources where you can learn about it:
https://sealevel.info/learnmore.html?0=pressurebroadening#brief
Black body does not apply to gasses.
Call one CO2 tax that lowered CO2 emission? Or just find one tax that solved anything?
Actually, this is bad news. Just postpone until there is US president who’s not on the ball.
All the more important to have Congress declare that no UN escapade will ever be recognised by the US. Prevent any future government from joining or abiding by such tort treaties.
Ed, these were my general thoughts that first popped up as well when I read this submission. The commies are in it for the long game, and will merely hide under a rock until the current pesky US President with his non-conforming attitude is swept aside in a future election cycle. The UN is the font of the incessant flow of black water juice into a productive, republic oriented capitalistic society. Poisoning the well of productivity and advancement. The UN will require removal as an influential institution from the world stage before this all ends, to the benefit of all!
Regards,
MCR
Please help me understand how an arbitrary UN committee gets the authority to tax private entities? I cannot see a major Chinese shipping company coughing up millions when these clowns come knocking
It is not actually a tax, just an emission reduction scheme where ships buy expensive allowances if they exceed ever tightening emission caps. It is under an international treaty and 2/3 of the voting countries have to approve it. Enforcement is by countries not the UN.
This scheme is popular with the countries because the greater the failure of net zero the more money they get. The money goes to the IPO and is supposed to be spent on the transition.
It’s a ransom.
I don’t know how such regulations are enforced, but I do know that they are. When the IMO 2020 international shipping regulations went into effect it drastically curtailed sulfate aerosol emissions from ships. Those regulations resulted in “an estimated 46% decrease in ship-emitted aerosols,” and (because ships are a major contributor), a 10% decrease in total global sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions.
Reference:
Yuan, T. et al. (2024) “Abrupt reduction in shipping emission as an inadvertent geoengineering termination shock produces substantial radiative warming.” Commun Earth Environ 5, 281. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01442-3
(See also this earlier paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abn7988)
So IMO regulations on ships are somehow enforced, and the shippers are complying with those regulations.
A tax by any other name is still a tax.
That’s one question I had: Who is going to do the collecting?
The Chinese promoted the idea. Under the rules their fleet which is relatively young would benefit while older fleets from elsewhere would pay. Plus there would be a huge bonus for Chinese shipyards producing compliant vessels.
The sadder fact is that it is all simply irrelevant. Bunker fuel price rises have made nuclear powered ships not only viable, but highly competitive.
Ship owners are thrashing out the details with insurance companies and port authorities even now…
Maybe someday, if the SMR folks succeed. But, for now, nuclear powered vessels are extremely expensive, and only owned by nation states. There are no privately owned nuclear powered vessels in existence or under construction. There never have been.
Most nuclear powered vessels are military. They are very costly compared to conventionally powered ships, but the fact that they can go for many years without refueling is a military advantage worth paying for.
Additionally, Russia has eight state-owned nuclear-powered icebreakers. The logistical challenges of refueling in the Arctic apparently created the incentive for building those very expensive ships.
65 years ago the USA was simultaneously building two very similar submarine types, one nuclear, and one conventional. According to Gemini, “The Skipjack-class nuclear submarine cost around $40 million per hull, while the conventional Barbel-class submarine had a significantly lower cost of approximately $450,000 per hull.“
Commercial cargo vessels don’t need to go years without refueling. Transit times are measured in weeks, and in most cases the vessels can simply refuel at the destination. So I don’t see nuclear powered cargo vessels catching on soon.
From the article: “The United States will be moving to levy these remedies against nations that sponsor this European-led neocolonial export of global climate regulations.”
Yes, I think the Europeans and Australian and New Zealand politicians are the main impetus behind this UN tax scam.
They still believe the Earth is in danger from CO2 and are trying to find a way to force their views on the rest of us, and vindicate their own insane, ruinously expensive, and largely ineffective efforts to reduce CO2 production.
The Europeans have a mini-UN with their European Union, so they are ok with the idea that the UN can take money from other people and overrule their desires. They do that in Europe, too.
Trump put a stop to this nonsense. He’ll do the same next year.
Wait what. New Zealand? I’d love to know what evidence you have that the right of centre government in NZ is part of a UN tax scam Tom.
Did the “right of center” New Zealand government repeal their Net Zero law?
Does your current government support Net Zero? i think they do. Do they encourage others to support Net Zero? I think they do.
New Zealand politicians are just as much in the business of promoting Net Zero as any of the other European nations or Australia. It’s a “mutual admiration society”, and they want other nations to admire and adopt their Net Zero position, too.
Is any of that false?
So your logic is because they didn’t do something that makes them as guilty as the crowd that did do it? Interesting. I will remind you the Trump government should be on that list as well, because they too have a net zero target of 2050. But he is not alone. 145 other countries are aiming for net zero so why pick on poor little NZ?
And….I think you will find the current government in NZ is slowly eating away the things the left of centre put in place around climate change. Support for renewables and EV’s. Methane tax on farmers.
We want our jester puppet back as we don’t like what orange man is doing with all that power we had-
Huge crowds gather in cities across United States for ‘No Kings’ protests against Trump
Jordan Peterson shrinks the left’s fearsome Nazi-
Donald Trump Is Not Acting Recklessly
He’s just leader of the counter-revolution of the 85% against the 15% that aren’t going to give up power easily and ruin their revolution-
Bill O’Reilly Visibly Shocks Dave Rubin w/ His Dark Prediction for What Happens Next | Bill O’Reilly
We live in interesting times.