How Trump vetoed the world's plan to reduce shipping emissions

With relatively little fanfare, the first-ever global carbon tax was poised to be formally adopted as an international agreement this year.

The International Maritime Organization, or IMO, the United Nations agency overseeing global shipping, had drafted a net-zero framework to move the sector toward cleaner fuels — a crucial step in the energy transition, since the industry that handles around 90 percent of global trade also accounts for 3 percent of the world’s emissions.

The framework would require shippers to pay a fee per ton of greenhouse gas emissions if their emissions rose above a certain threshold. The fees would then be pooled into a fund and distributed to support the development and uptake of alternative fuels and decarbonization in developing countries. The shipping ind