A big, contentious brouhaha erupted between the Trump administration and a globalist initiative by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) aiming to impose a tax on the world’s shipping industry. Amid growing skepticism about the scientific legitimacy of alarmist claims regarding human-caused climate change, the same international bodies that have long targeted carbon dioxide are now pushing a complex new scheme designed to impose huge costs on maritime shipping.
Within these machinations lie the usual seeds of inflation, control, and a vision of one-world domination by wealthy elites determined to “rescue humanity from itself.”
### Taxing Cargo Ships for Carbon
On Friday, the IMO voted to postpone its proposed “Net-Zero Framework” (NZF), which would require all oceangoing ships exceeding 5,000 gross tonnage to track and trace their emissions using a Greenhouse Gas Fuel Intensity (GFI) metric. However, postponing it for a year isn’t the same as sinking it.
As with most bureaucratic takeovers, smaller vessels (over 400 GT) would be included later. Oversight would be monitored by the Sustainable Fuel Certification Scheme administered by the IMO’s chief environmental body, the Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC). Additionally, “a new digital IMO GFI Registry will be established to track each ship’s compliance status.”
Many more Orwellian acronyms abound, as the self-styled “scheme” would charge operators who exceed established limits through a two-tiered structure. The limits will tighten as 2030 approaches (the date Greta Thunberg ominously predicts as the world’s end—but no matter).
### The Trump Administration’s Stance
The Trump administration has forcefully and formally objected to the NZF. A Joint Statement by Secretary of State Rubio, Secretary of Energy Wright, and Secretary of Transportation Duffy, issued on October 10, declares:
> “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 emissions from the international shipping sector. This will be the first time that a UN organization levies a global carbon tax on the world.”
### Greenhouse Gaslighting
The statement calls the effort “an unsanctioned global tax regime that levies punitive and regressive financial penalties,” and threatens a list of retaliatory measures against nations voting in favor of the NZF:
> “The United States will be moving to levy these remedies against nations that sponsor this European-led neocolonial export of global climate regulations…. Our fellow IMO members should be on notice.”
In response, the IMO protests on its website, insisting this is not a global carbon tax but a carbon trading system:
> “Rather than imposing a single, fixed tax rate on emissions that feeds into consolidated revenue used for other purposes, the IMO system sets performance-based GHG-intensity targets for ships. In other words, the IMO Net Zero Framework is a market-based system built around performance targets and tiered compliance fees. It thus functions as a global incentive and funding framework for shipping decarbonization, not as a uniform global carbon tax.”
But this is just the tip of the maritime organization’s gargantuan undersea regulatory iceberg.
### The Titanic Chances of Success
Like all climate change alarmism, this entire venture outstrips reality with its sheer arrogance. The Titanic had better chances of success than this globalist boondoggle disguised as salvation.
The technology does not exist to meet the demands of this plan, so the revenue collected (that is not a tax) will accumulate rapidly in the IMO Net-Zero Fund to “be used for other purposes.” Theoretically, funds will be paid out to “reward low-emission ships,” but as discussed below, there is not enough “low-emission” fuel available to fill their tanks.
Other purposes of the Fund include supporting innovation, research, infrastructure, and “just transition” initiatives in developing countries; funding training, technology transfer, and capacity building to support the IMO GHG Strategy; and mitigating negative impacts on vulnerable states, such as Small Island Developing States and Least Developed Countries.
### Another Globalist Grab
Here lies the big rub: the Marxist globalist reallocation of wealth to poor countries and rich venture capitalists in a “just transition.” Like all renewable energy schemes, the free market cannot serve this plan because:
1. No one wants it,
2. It is not profitable, and
3. The technology does not exist.
It turns out solar panels do not run on the sun—they run on subsidies, as do EV cars, wind turbines, biofuel plants, and ethanol facilities. As with all these schemes, the non-GHG ecotoxins released in the construction and operation of these industries are simply ignored.
Forever chemicals will be eternally spewed in the lucrative climate change industry. What’s a little cancer and infertility so long as the planet doesn’t burn up in carbon-fueled flames, right?
### The Fuel Reality Check
The IMO’s NZF proposal depends on shifting cargo ships to “‘zero or near-zero’ emission fuels, technologies or energy sources” (ZNZs). The International Energy Agency admits there are not enough ZNZs to go around:
> “Low-emissions fuels covered only around 1% of global final energy consumption in 2022, largely from liquid biofuels, compared with almost 5% by 2030 in the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 (NZE) Scenario.”
The solution is “more rapid roll-out of low-emissions fuel production and distribution… to get on track with the Net Zero Scenario.” But this is where the NZE skips the environmental facts on the tracks: there are insufficient natural resources to support the industrial frenzy for fee-funded rollouts, and the environmental costs, measured in toxic pollution, likely exceed the threat of relatively innocuous greenhouse gases.
### Technological Realities Masked
The IMO boasts that its monitoring metric will track the GHG footprint of fuels used by ships, covering emissions from the entire fuel lifecycle—from extraction and production to use on board the ship—known as the “well-to-wake” approach.
The International Energy Agency stresses:
> “The development of standards and certification schemes ensuring a sustainable supply chain will be critical for scaling up the production of both biofuels and hydrogen, while avoiding potentially harmful environmental, economic and social impacts. The development of international markets and trade in these fuels will also depend on internationally agreed methods and certification processes to guarantee the sustainability of traded fuels.”
Translation: it is critical that these fuels—which don’t yet exist at scale—be produced “sustainably,” but we lack the technology, resources, or “well-to-wake approaches” needed to even begin guaranteeing this.
Yet, as with solar panels, wind turbines, EVs, and heat pumps, traditional energy production will be crushed in the interim to combat the supposed threat of global warming. And, oh yeah, maritime industries stand to make boatloads of money in the process.
Boondoggle 101.
### The End Game: Control and Profit
The end game is control and profit, framed as a global societal rescue.
A 2024 analysis by accounting giant Deloitte Global—a World Economic Forum partner—explained the plan clearly:
> “Reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 requires a fundamental transformation of society, from its current fossil fuel-centric model to an efficient, highly renewable and electrified energy system.”
Again with the random utopian dates (Stalin and Mao loved five-year plans, too).
Deloitte Global found that this shift can only be achieved with massive public funding and international regulatory compulsion. While the aviation industry could fly on these fuels, maritime shipping requires a massive transformation of ship engines:
> “…the decarbonization of maritime shipping follows a multi-fuel future composed of methanol and ammonia. This requires both the use of existing infrastructure during the transition and the development of new bunkering and engine technologies and refueling infrastructure. The technological challenges associated with decarbonization therefore go beyond only fuel supply.”
But, the study reveals, the fuels aren’t ready either:
> “Synthetic fuels, which are almost absent from the current fuel mix, would have only a marginal role in 2030…. This represents a major industrial and technical challenge, as the low-carbon hydrogen sector is still in its infancy and CO2 capture technologies have not yet been developed on a large scale. Although synthetic fuels hold the key to decarbonizing aviation and shipping, they are still at an early stage of deployment with almost non-existent regulatory frameworks and significantly higher costs than fossil fuels.”
### Conclusion
President Trump is right to take a stand against this nonexistent technological solution to maritime shipping that likely inflicts far more environmental harm than the problem it claims to solve.
The economic burdens, inflation, and globalist control also threaten national and individual sovereignty.
The IMO’s global carbon tax is dead in the water.
https://www.libertynation.com/trump-administration-stood-against-global-carbon-tax-scheme/
