💥 Shipping decides on world’s first global carbon tax 💥

🚢 There is your good news to start the week! After ten (!) years of negotiations, the International Maritime Organisation decided to operationalise a global carbon tax to help achieve its net-zero by 2050 target.

🌎 This is nothing short of incredible as it is testament that climate multilateralism is still possible. While the U.S. left the negotiations and threatened counter-measures, the motion got adopted anyway, and is now binding to all IMO 175 member countries.

The details:

🎯 It introduces two tier emission reduction targets (with a 2008 baseline): Tier 2 (base) -8% by 2030 and -30% by 2035. And Tier 1 (stricter) -21% by 2030 and -43% by 2035.

🔴 Penalties apply to CO2 equivalent and amount to $100/t (Tier 1) and $380/t (Tier 2). The use of traditional shipping fuel would lead to a penalty of around $480/t.

💵 Revenue from the system are expected to amount to $10 billion/year by 2035 which will be reinvested into a Net-Zero fund to support green fuel deployment and developing countries.

🔦 The carbon tax applies to all vessels globally above 5,000t, which covers 85% of all shipping emissions.

🤔 The role of CDR (and other credits) is still to be discussed. For now, the system foresees the use of corrective units (CUs) for underperformance and surplus units (SUs) for overperformance.

Next steps

📅 October 2025 (MEPC/ES.2): Final adoption of MARPOL Annex VI amendments

📅 Spring 2026 (MEPC 84): Approval of detailed implementation guidelines

📅 2027: Entry into force, 16 months after adoption, as per MARPOL

📅 2028 - first carbon taxes due

🤩 This really made my day. It shows that the world can rally behind global, sectoral carbon taxes. And compliance is - in my opinion - the only way to really get to net-zero. I was also so impressed to see countries like China and Brazil in favour, testament that it is not just the EU pushing for this.

🗣️ What's your take? Do you share my enthusiasm here? And, if you work in shipping, how do you see the implementation of this?

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