Full show notes and ad-free listening at wickedproblems.earth

Shipping is one of those things that’s just supposed to work. Post-Titanic, we created a set of rules that currently are looked after by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), which successfully removed much of the drama from shipping — so successful that Britain’s “Shipping Forecast” is now soothing ASMR for bedtime listening.

But last month at the IMO in London, what should have been a procedural meeting on decarbonising shipping turned into something far messier. According to a Financial Times investigation, U.S. officials didn’t just lobby against a global carbon levy on shipping — they allegedly threatened, intimidated and black-mailed delegates from smaller nations.

Developing-country delegates said they were warned their ships would face higher U.S. port fees, their officials denied visas, and their trade punished if they didn’t abandon support for the Net Zero Framework the IMO had endorsed only six months earlier. “It was like dealing with the Mob,” one diplomat told the FT.

In the end, it worked. The deal — the world’s first carbon-pricing mechanism for global shipping — was postponed for a year. The IMO, normally the most technocratic of international bodies, was left “in a state of complete shock.”

For the uninitiated this may sound arcane. But shipping matters. Roughly 90 % of global trade moves by sea; the sector accounts for about 3 % of global CO₂ emissions — more than Germany — and until now has been largely outside the reach of meaningful climate regulation.

The Net Zero Framework was meant to change that. It had already been provisionally agreed by a majority of countries in April. But by October, something changed. Countries like China, India, Panama, Liberia — and even Greece and Cyprus, who broke with the EU line — suddenly voted to adjourn. news.wickedproblems.uk

And the shift didn’t come from nowhere: it came from pressure. From a U.S. administration that now treats climate policy as an existential threat to American interests.

🎧 Who we spoke to

Carly Hicks (Chief Strategy & Impact Officer, Opportunity Green) explains how the IMO had once seemed one of the last genuinely global forums where climate ambition could meet technical reality — until the process was capsized by politics.
Ariane Morrissey (Senior Editor, Ship.Energy) was in the building as the talks imploded, describing a surreal scene where delegates who came to discuss fuel standards found themselves under threats of sanctions and visa bans.
Professor Tristan Smith (University College London) gave the longer-view: this is less a failure of climate tech than a warning shot about the fragility of multilateralism itself. He argues the US may have bought time — but may also have triggered the rise of regional regulation. The EU’s carbon-trading scheme now covers shipping; Singapore and Japan are exploring carbon levies. The patchwork world is arriving faster than the ships can adjust.

🎵 Outro music: “Sailing By” (1963) layered with a long-wave “Shipping Forecast” transmission — that calm voice reading “Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire…”

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