The Daily View: The MEPC is getting nasty

THE GLOVES are off at the IMO. The US and Saudi Arabia have dominated talks at the MEPC so far, as they try to quash by any means possible the majority in favour of the global Net-Zero Framework.

Whether they succeed in killing the two-tier carbon tax will not be clear until Friday, when the adoption will probably boil down to a tense roll-call vote.

The MEPC voted 63-16 in April to approve the NZF (some states weren’t eligible to vote, and others abstained or didn’t turn up).

Will we see a repeat? It’s hard to say. The anti-NZF camp (which includes Middle Eastern oil exporters, Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria and others) have used nearly every agenda item to repeat their arguments against it, slowing the meeting and turning minor points on dead-duck suggestions into protracted debates, to the obvious frustration of many.

The fact that the US spent the day pursuing a procedural attack angle (objecting to the IMO’s long-standing ‘tacit acceptance’ rules for amending Marpol) rather than the adoption itself, could suggest it doesn’t have the numbers to win that adoption vote and is hedging its bets.

But it could lead to two potential votes able to kill the framework on Friday, up from one. That’s a serious threat to this and any future IMO efforts to fight climate change.

Rumours of US pressure on, and less-than-eager comments by, the Marshall Islands, Liberia, the Bahamas and other major flag registries has visibly dented optimism in the ‘Yes’ camp. To a (mostly) uninformed observer, this looks up in the air.

The US and Saudi Arabia’s sharp-elbowed new delegates have accused the other side of “tactical mis-reading” of conventions, and indirectly suggested the IMO Secretariat is biased against them.

This prompted a stern intervention by secretary-general Arsenio Dominguez, urging states work together to find common ground.

“This is not the typical spirit in which we work at IMO,” he warned, adding: “I stand by my staff.”

The IMO usually takes great care to maintain a chummy atmosphere during negotiations, at least public ones. The pollution of that atmosphere (pun intended) has made old hands uneasy.

“I’m worried about this,” Dominica’s representative said late on Wednesday. “I see a room divided for sure, and I see some things that I hadn’t seen at IMO (before).”

Dominica’s delegate said he had attended IMO meetings since 1996, first for the US then Dominica.

“This is a different vibe in this room, and it does not feel like the IMO that I’ve attended to since I was a young man,” he said.

“I beg of everybody to really think this through in a way that is constructive for all states.”

Consensus on issues this thorny is hard enough to find. Delegates should take care not to throw old-fashioned diplomacy out the window to get what they want.

Declan Bush
Senior reporter, Lloyd’s List

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