Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change

The US Just Sank Shipping's Big Plan for Decarbonization, What Now? | Ep229: Tristan Smith

Episode Notes

Global shipping contributes about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to the total emissions of Japan or Germany. The sector, including its contribution to climate change, is governed by the International Maritime Organisation or the IMO, which is a UN agency based in London in the United Kingdom.

Last week, the International Maritime Organisation gathered to vote on a proposal to reduce emissions from ships that had been agreed to in principle earlier this year. And ahead of the gathering, most people intimately involved in the process thought the proposal would pass. But that wasn’t the case. The US stepped in at the last minute and pressured all those gathered to delay the vote on the proposal for another 12 months.

This week on Cleaning Up, host Bryony Worthington sits down with Professor Tristan Smith, a leading expert on shipping decarbonisation from UCL Energy Institute, to unpack the dramatic events at the latest International Maritime Organization meeting — where the United States’ last-minute intervention derailed a landmark vote on cutting emissions from ships.

Together, they explore:

How global shipping, responsible for around 3% of greenhouse gas emissions, became a critical test case for international climate policy
Why the IMO’s proposed carbon intensity regulation could have marked the beginning of the end for oil and LNG as marine fuels
The “Tariff diplomacy” and other threats that reshaped global negotiations
What this means for COP30 and other multilateral agreements.

Bryony and Tristan also dive deep into possible solutions: from e-fuels, ammonia, and battery electrification to nuclear propulsion — weighing what’s practical, what’s political, and what’s merely wishful thinking.

Leadership Circle:

Cleaning Up is supported by the Leadership Circle, and its founding members: Actis, Alcazar Energy, Davidson Kempner, EcoPragma Capital, EDP of Portugal, Eurelectric, the Gilardini Foundation, KKR, National Grid, Octopus Energy, Quadrature Climate Foundation, SDCL and Wärtsilä. For more information on the Leadership Circle, please visit https://www.cleaningup.live.

Links and more:

Is Shipping the Easiest "Hard-to-Abate" Sector? - Ep143: Johannah Christensen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umPAonV20cM
The IMO website: https://www.imo.org/
Michael’s Substack on the IMO decision: https://mliebreich.substack.com/p/imo-members-choose-between-the-us

Episode Transcription

I think it's interesting that even though the government had a shutdown, they prioritized what they did last week. They had already applied a lot of pressure, but they still sent a significant team to the meeting, and they continued to use their highest ranking individuals to go into capitals and pressure them during the period as well. So they clearly threw a lot of resources at this. Now, the reason why they did that could be because they're going to now do this generally, or it could be because they actually saw the IMO rules as genuinely material to their short term interests. The IMO rules, we think, will be the end of liquid natural gas as a marine fuel. We think it'll be significantly tailing off of oil as a marine fuel. And so it's possible that the reason why they were so active is because this is actually a regulatory body that when it passes something in MARPOL. Because actually you get very high compliance globally, it has a material effect on the global demand for oil and gas. And in an administration which has pinned its hopes on being able to export LNG and being able to still sell oil in a few years time, that's perhaps something that they decided deserved the extra attention they gave it.

Hello, I’m Bryony Worthington and this is Cleaning Up. Global shipping currently contributes about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to the total emissions of Japan. Global shipping, including its contribution to climate change, is governed by the International Maritime Organisation or the IMO, which is a UN agency based in London in the United Kingdom.

And last week, the International Maritime Organisation gathered to vote on a proposal to reduce emissions from ships, that had been agreed to in principle earlier this year. And ahead of the gathering, most people intimately involved in the process thought the proposal would pass. But that wasn’t the case. The US stepped in at the last minute and pressured all those gathered to delay the vote on the proposal for another 12 months.

One of the people at the negotiations was Tristan Smith, a Professor of Energy and Transport who leads UCL Energy Institute’s research group on the global shipping industry. He joins us to tell us what the proposal was trying to achieve, whether the delay means that the negotiations are now dead, and what the outcome says about the state of global negotiations ahead of COP30. Please welcome Tristan Smith to Cleaning Up.

Tristan, thank you so much for joining me here on Cleaning Up, especially as you're giving up time on a weekend. So appreciate that. Would you just kick us off by introducing yourself in your own words, please.

Sure, my name is Tristan Smith. I'm a professor at University College London. I lead a team that focuses on the decarbonisation of international shipping. We also occasionally think about domestic shipping, but we're pretty much focused on the big ships going across oceans. And I'm a naval architect and an engineer by background.

Obviously there was a point perhaps, when you went from just traditional naval architecture and engineering into caring about the climate. Could you tell us a little bit about what turned you on to the climate and when that happened?

Yeah, so this was around 2010 and I was just finishing my PhD and my first appointment as a research associate, and I was trying to figure out what to do next. I'd spent all of my career so far, at that point, in the defense industry, designing warships and nuclear submarines, which are fascinating engineering projects, but kind of that's what was in it for me. And I was starting to think a bit more expansively beyond that, and interested to get out of the defense industry. And then I was looking at these engineering solutions that you could have. And obviously I've seen what you can do with a nuclear reactor on a submarine. And so I considered all of those options, the broader perspective on solving the problem of propulsion for a very large mass through the ocean, but then I could very quickly see that this was not a simple engineering problem. It was very multifaceted, which immediately piqued my interest. And so I was interested from an engineering perspective, but not uniquely from an engineering perspective. And I was obviously rewarded for that as I learned more and saw how rich this was as a subject, and so many different things that need to be considered in the whole messy puzzle of the problem and its potential solutions.

And I think some of our audience will already know, but just give us a bit of a thumbnail about the shipping industry and how it contributes to climate change. How important is it? What's its contribution?

So currently, and reasonably statically over the last few years, it's emitted about a gigaton of CO2 equivalent, and that's on a well to weight basis. So if we include the CO2 equivalent emissions that occur upstream, as well as the emissions from the exhaust stacks of the ships, that's equivalent to a country the size of Japan or Germany. It's equivalent to around 2-3% of the total anthropogenic CO2 that we put into the atmosphere at this point in time. It's obviously also a sector which is critically important for world trade. By moving raw materials around, by moving energy commodities around, and by moving manufactured goods, it's what enables us to have the standards of living that we enjoy — as well as, obviously, the export-led economic development that many countries also enjoy. So it's a kind of key enabler of societies, and it's very much wedded to burning oil as an energy commodity in order to propel — and all the other functions that you need on board ships — but fundamentally, propulsion.

And it's a sector that's not unique, because aviation, similarly, has this, but it's got its own international governance system. And that happens to be headquartered in the UK. The International Maritime Organization is down on Albert Embankment, which must have also been a factor in why you thought this is really an interesting topic. Because you can get access to that forum, can't you?

Absolutely. So actually, I don't know if I was like, ‘Oh, I'm in London, and the IMO is here, and it's the only UN agency that people trusted the UK to look after. So therefore, I'll wed myself to it.’ But it has been a fascinating place to be at, and I've been attending these are called marine environment protection committee meetings there for 15 years now. And I attended them originally, just to kind of get my head around, you know, I'm an engineer, so I understand that bit, but how on earth do you make the rules to see that process in action? And there was already, in 2010, an ongoing conversation about carbon pricing of shipping that was live at the IMO. It was only shortly after I joined that it — and this is coincidence — but it did die shortly after I joined. And then it kind of researched in the more recent years. But I've seen several evolutions of that, and it's been fascinating to have been able to be closely following and being part of the conversation that has been going on in that organization.

And it might be worth, again, just giving us a snapshot of the IMO, because it is a UN body, right? It's a very specific sectoral body. It's very old, and its primary goal is to set common rules to facilitate trade and international cooperation. But it's got some quite interesting characteristics, because shipping is quite an interesting sector. Do you want to give us a little bit of an outline of who are the big players in this forum? How does it work?

Yeah, so the origins go back to the Titanic, actually, and the safety issues. So there are a couple of major committees. One of them is the Maritime Safety Committee, and the other one is the Environmental Protection Committee. And the Environmental Protection Committee is relatively young compared to the safety issue, and obviously what we learned from the Titanic about the requirements for minimum standards of life saving equipment on board ships, so that we would be able to be confident that globally, when you got on a ship, you had a reasonable opportunity to survive when things went wrong. Those were the things that the organization spent a lot of time thinking about initially. Then it started thinking about environmental protection. There were lots of discharges from ships, oily discharges sometimes, that we needed to have a way of controlling, because vessels obviously operate in international waters. They also operate in national waters, and so they have a responsibility when they're in international waters that can be very significantly affecting of individual sovereign countries. And so they all started — as a group of, it's now 176 countries — to talk about solving a wide spread of environmental problems, which only laterally became inclusive of air quality. And then even later than that, became inclusive of greenhouse gas emissions. So the greenhouse gas regulatory topic, I can say only really starts in the early 2010s in actually adopting regulation. But the wider convention, and it's called MARPOL, the marine pollution convention, that marine pollution convention is older than that because of the wider spectrum of environmental impacts. But I think the thing that's really fascinating for me about this particular UN agency is the dynamic that exists. Because a lot of its rules can only enter into force when countries with the tonnage registered to their flag have agreed to something. And so some of the conventions have been slow to be adopted, because you need certain countries to agree to them and to ratify them before you actually get them adopted. And the tonnage is fascinatingly structured. So the three biggest flags are Panama, Marshall Islands and Liberia, and then the subsequent flags are inclusive of lots of other countries that you maybe didn't even know existed. And that's a function of the fact that people will register ships where it's beneficial for them from a tax perspective, they will register them in countries that might give them support from the United States Navy if they get into difficulties. And that's a feature of those three flags, for example. And then there are also issues to do with the fact that that flag country dictates the law on board the ship, so it hasn't picked the labour laws that you are obliged to apply. And unfortunately, that does give us the situation where countries that are more liberal, both on labour law and on tax, are often significant flags. But it also means that we have a very different dynamic to the one in many other UN agencies. The power is in every country's vote, but the flag registries have significant power as well.

So that's very different to say the UNFCCC, which is the climate talks, where it's based on a country's emissions or size. There's a kind of different dynamic at play, right? If you've got small island states or countries that are not used to having big diplomatic roles, they are setting the pace, or at least you have to convince them in order to move forward. Is that partly why you think it's been a relatively slow moving sector to take on environmental issues?

Partly why. Partly also because it’s got low political saliency outside of the shipping bubble. So it was very hard in the earlier years to go to governments and say, Look, you really need to put political capital into making progress at the IMO, because they were like, ‘well, how many of my electorate are going to not elect me because I haven't done something at the IMO.’ It's a difficult forum to get people to care about and so it's one that has not been facing the highest public scrutiny. In fact, in contrast to the sector like aviation, which in some ways gets more public scrutiny, but potentially doesn't have as potent or effective an organization for making rules. The MARPOL convention I just mentioned is actually quite a powerful convention for putting legal action in force, for forcing ship owners and operators to actually do something. And the organization — this is one of the other key issues, besides its power dynamics — can take decisions by majority if it needs to, as we have seen last week. But also previously, it isn't held up by a process which waits until you have unanimity before you move forwards. And so there's a contrast with the UNFCCC, for example, in that respect.

So let's fast forward to the day then. And we are recording this on Sunday, October the 19th, and you've just had quite a week of it really, where you had the MEPC meeting, the Environmental Protection Committee met in London. And it was an extraordinary meeting that was meant to finalize a policy that had been agreed in April. Do you just want to talk us through what was being discussed this week before we get to what the outcome was? What was on the table?

So the package of policy that was on the table consisted of a mandate for the greenhouse gas intensity of the energy used by ships to be progressively reduced over time, to a reduction of around 65% relative to the baseline oil derived fuels that we use today, and that is on a well-to-wake basis. So that includes the greenhouse gas intensity, or greenhouse emissions, and intensity of the fuels’ upstream production, as well as its operational emissions. This includes the methane that comes off a combustion of LNG as an example. And the penalty for non-compliance is to pay a fee. So you can choose to be in direct compliance, in which case you have no fees payable. You can choose to be a little bit above direct compliance, in which you pay $100 per ton on the excess. And then you can choose to be even more non-compliant. Or you continue to burn fossil fuel, in which case you pay $380 per ton carbon on the excess that you have up there. And those two penalty fees work a bit like an income tax. So they're kind of additive.You still have to pay them both, but you would pay them only on the margin that you're entering into that band on. And then the other key component to mention is that there was also built into this an incentivization for those who went for the long-run solutions, which the organization called zero, or near-zero, greenhouse gas emission fuel. So anyone who was using a fuel with a greenhouse gas intensity below 19 grams of CO2 equivalent per megajoule is eligible for a reward. And we never got to the point where we defined what that reward would be. But the concept is enshrined in that and that reward would be funded partly by those penalty fees, and then the other function of the penalty fees was to raise revenues that could be used to enable and support a just and equitable transition in low income countries. And in particular in small island developing states and least developed counties.

It's an intensity target, and it's based on the fuel burn. Does this mean other measures that you might take, like for example, increasing the efficiency of the vessel, or reducing the speed of the vessel, or even putting sails on the vessel. How would that interact with this?

It is just a greenhouse gas intensity regulation. So you're right, it doesn't directly incentivize efficiency improvement. It's an indirect effect that incentivizes energy efficiency improvement. So in essence, the greenhouse gas intensity penalty increases the cost of energy, which in itself, could have an effect on efficiency, but in our research, we don't think it does. We think it's a very weak incentivizer of efficiency improvement. Wind is an interesting case, because direct electrification, use of wind, use of solar on board look like they are going to be classified as a fuel, essentially. And so we will need to treat them as a certain amount of energy which is used on board the ships, and therefore a lowering of the energy intensity, given they have no upstream CO2 emission, or operational CO2 emission. So those renewables that you use on board, I think will be incentivized. But if I change my engine to a more efficient engine, I would see no effect, except in changing the amount of energy I consume, and therefore the economics of the energy saving, but not from the regulation.

Okay, so there's a kind of formula that would determine the amount of energy that a sail is generating, for want of a better word, that would then influence how you report your intensity. But it doesn't apply to sort of slow steaming, or bubbles on the hull, or all these other measures which are technical measures. But aren't there other IMO regulations that cover efficiency?

Yeah, so there are a couple of other regulations. One of them requires you to build your ship to a minimum efficiency standard, and the other one actually monitors your operational carbon intensity. But instead of it being your emissions intensity, it's about the amount of CO2 you emit per unit of transport supply you do, so the amount of distance you travel and the cargo that you carry. And that's a really powerful metric as a kind of holistic incentivization of efficiency. However, unfortunately, it doesn't have a strong penalty for non-compliance. The consequence of failing to comply with the minimum requirements on that regulation are to write a report. And what we've experienced is that when you talk to the people who have to invest capital or change their operational behavior, they say, ‘Well, I'm not too threatened by the prospect of writing reports, I'm going to carry on doing what I do at the moment rather than take action.’ And so there's the makings of an excellent regulation which has not got an enforcement, unfortunately, with it that would change behavior. But these are the kinds of things we can work with, we can improve, and I hope we will improve.

So that’s what was on the table. But towards the end of last week, everything got put on pause, and it happened in a fairly dramatic fashion, didn't it?

So I feel naive and various other things. I went into the week thinking that the numbers were fairly secure for a process which is normally a rubber stamp. I mean, it's a standard procedure at the IMO, that you agree in principle at one meeting, and then a minimum of six months later, you go through a process of adopting, and then a 10-month period later you go through an acceptance and the adoption is normally taken by consensus. So you go back to the legal text that you agreed six months previously, you check it for grammar, you might change the odd comma, and then the chair says, ‘Great, let's put it through.’ Everyone says, ‘Yes, fine,’ because they all agreed to it in principle six months previously, so why would they object now? And then it's an automatic conveyor belt through to entry into force. That didn't happen, because there was a significant rebellion, for want of any better phrase, against what was agreed in principle. So countries that had previously expressed they thought it was a good policy, turned around and said, ‘Actually, we've changed our mind.’ And so they, they, they rejected it.

And you're being very even handed here, not naming any culprits. But I can. I'm in America, I'm probably risking something by saying this, but it was largely a shift in the US’ position that caused this. And the US adopted some pretty hardball tactics in order to get the blocking majority it needed to move away from the April agreement. So you were in the room. How did it feel? Did the US just show up on day one with a completely different position? Or had they already signaled in April, because it was the same administration, but perhaps back in April they weren't across it in the way that they are now? Maybe their ideological position has hardened. Talk to us a bit about what happened from your perspective.

Yeah, so maybe first I should clarify that what actually was agreed at the end of last week was not a rejection of the policy, but a deferral of the meeting. So we actually ended up on the basis of a Saudi call — so it was Saudi Arabia who put this proposal forward — they said, ‘We're not ready to make a decision on this at this meeting, we propose that we put this current meeting on hold for 12 months.’ And the majority of countries in the room supported that recommendation. So there was anticipated to be a vote on adoption, but we never got to that point, because before we could make the decision on what to do with that particular agenda item, do we adopt this or not? We had this interruption and a vote, and the vote once it had been passed, once it had been secured as a deferral, that was it. We couldn't do anything else. The fact that that was a plausible way forwards is significantly to do with the United States's position over this period. I think that's a fairly well documented and clearly evidenced state of affairs. So they didn't attend. They actually walked out of the April negotiations. They appeared, they left the room. They didn't take a position when we voted. There was public communication that they didn't like what they were seeing happening at IMO, but they also expressed, to my understanding, that they would create sanctions on countries that supported it. But they weren't actively telling people through the week that would be the case, at least in London. And so they didn't have an effect on very many countries. There are actually only six countries who are MAPOL annex signatories who joined the Saudi Arabian opposition when it came to acceptance back in April. The rest of the countries, 57 countries, 88% of those who have a vote in adoption said, ‘we want this to go forwards, we like this regulation.’ So actually, it was pressure that we saw very visibly in August, with various threats communicated in the media and various other channels and Truth Social expressing sanctions and dire economic consequences for countries who took a supportive position. And unsurprisingly, there are many countries that cannot afford to take that risk, who then changed their position in the meeting. The narrative might be different. You know, there are lots of different justifications given, but the fundamental thing that changed between April and September was not that there was any new evidence. There was no clarification that this was a different deal that we hadn't understood properly in April. This was just a very powerful exercise in threats and tariff diplomacy.

And it's worth pausing on this, because this was, asI've read about it, quite a forceful and unprecedented use of unconventional diplomatic means, right? There was even singling out of individuals, there were threats of visa revocations, and as you say, tariffs being imposed on countries that supported the policy. There was an attack on the UN Secretariat accusing them of bias. I mean, it sounded pretty ugly. Were you there? Did you witness this? Or was this all in the back rooms on the telephones?

I was there and I witnessed it.

Pretty sad, right?

It felt apocalyptic. You know, this is not about zombies or meteors. This is just about an appalling deployment of pressure. I mean, pressure is the word that is regularly used to describe interactions between diplomats. You know, ‘we have a relationship with you. You're another country. And you know, we were going to invest in your country and do this nice thing, but now we're thinking about not doing it, because…’ We know that wasn't how it worked. It was not positive. It was very negative. And if that's the way that a multilateral process is operated, then it's not surprising that you get these results. The consequence is, therefore, that these multilateral processes then become dictated by the one who has the levers. And obviously that happens a bit already. I'm not naive to the fact that countries don't use power in these negotiations, but I've not ever seen the IMO operate in that way previously, in a way where the consequences of taking a particular position are so fundamentally dire that countries that have their survival at stake choose a different position. And I think there are many countries that took a principled position for the last 10 years who then changed a position in a meeting. And I don't know the full details of what they were given as the threats, but they took their principled position on the dangers of climate change — because they are existentially threatened by climate change — and they moved their position. And that's extraordinary.

Those who are watching other UN fora, I mean, this is a different US, right? A different US is showing up here. We're going into Brazil, where the US is still party to Paris. They may have withdrawn, but that they're still in for another year. It does seem that this was an ideological opposition to both UN processes telling the US what to do, and climate change, right? Is this something that we're going to see replicated in other fora? You can see, potentially, ICAO falling apart. Belem, Brazil, very difficult to see how they're not going to try to disrupt that? Or are they only interested in the ones that actually have an effect, like, I suppose, IMO, and ICAO have actual rules. UNFCCC is largely voluntary in its current manifestation.

But even without the naivety, it would have been hard to stop it. So don't feel responsible. But just just focusing on the US, because it has been discussed that the US is betting heavily on LNG right now. They're building new export terminals, there's a boom in investment in that export capacity. But at the same time, demand for gas is potentially waning or at least plateauing, not least because China's not adopting it in the way that they thought they would. And you've now got deals with pipeline gas from Russia to China, which obviously is cheaper and actually more efficient than taking LNG halfway around the planet. So I'd heard that shipping was being touted as a growth market for LNG, and that would be driven by these regulations. Because LNG is not cheap compared to even the low-sulfur oil that they are burning now. So in the short term, they're kind of acting against their own self interest. This carbon intensity measure would have put a benefit on the lower carbon intensity of LNG. But I guess then there's the wrinkle of, but that does require you to produce clean LNG, and if it's well to wake, as you said, which is the shipping equivalent of well to wheel, it's got to take into account any methane slip in the process. And I don't believe the US’s methane slip is under control, right? It's pretty bad compared to other countries.

Yeah, so Permian gas is not going to help them be competitive against oil. I mean, there's an ongoing and unresolved question at the IMO about how we will quantify the life cycle emissions associated with other fuels, including LNG, and what we'll use for the upstream emissions. So it's possible that there will be a loophole there that gets Permian gas out into the maritime market with an advantage. And when we model those assumptions, we can see a demand for LNG in shipping until about 2031-32, and then it becomes very heavily penalized. And so what the US export of LNG as a commodity to the maritime industry relies on, is ship owners building a lot of LNG dual fuel vessels so that they can run them on those fuels. And if you build a regulation that says: actually, that fleet will only be commercially usable and competitive for the next four or five years, and by the way, if you try and get a slot to build a new ship at the moment, you've got a couple of years to wait. So it's probably only going to get any commercial advantage for three or four years of its 30 year life. Hopefully, the rational response that we would expect ship owners at that point to do is stop ordering LNG dual fuel vessels because who wants to sit with a $100 million asset that suddenly gets a haircut five years into its life. And so a lot of our research has concentrated on that question: What happens to an asset which is commercially attractive for the first three or four years but then becomes unattractive, and we don't think there's very much appetite or logic once you have clarity in the regulation. But this is — 2025 — this point in history is a moment when there is a strong incentive in the near term because of the way the EU designed their regulation on maritime emissions. You can actually use LNG, bank the benefits, store them up as credits, give yourself optionality for compliance over the future years. It is a compelling business case under EU regulation well into the 2030s. So unfortunately, the EU designed a regulation that made it attractive, exactly as you're describing. The IMO was about to plug that gap, and it's now been paused. So we don't know what happens yet, and it's quite possible that this was because they saw this as a threat to their market.

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So something you said there is very interesting, because obviously the IMO is a global regulation, but part of why the IMO was incentivized to move was because there was this patchwork erupting of more regional interventions on shipping, including the EU. And so that's likely to continue then. Are we going to see more of that then? What will Asia do? Because, if Europe's already regulated, China was supportive of this measure, and that must be because it was playing into its own self interests. So will we see other other regions decide to regulate independently of the IMO?

It’s entirely possible, but let's just pause for a second, because the IMO is not dead. It still exists, and the net-zero framework still exists. So it's still been agreed, and one of the things that the deferral gives us is a chance to rescue it in a way that if there'd been a vote on adoption and it had been rejected, or it had been accepted in a certain way that was procedurally very difficult, we would be in a different situation. So I see a couple of different scenarios in 12 months time. One is that we reopen and very significantly weaken the IMO regulation. And another is that we adopt something very similar to what we were about to adopt, but we just do it 12 months later in a different dynamic. Now, geopolitically, we have to see a different world to the one we're in this week. But I don't know what 2026 looks like, and so I'm hoping that we can consider that as a scenario, and see what happens. So, obviously 12 months is not a huge amount of time for other regions to then tool up their regional policy. It's a massive undertaking to put in place some sort of accountancy regime, monitoring, reporting, verification system, and then to integrate that into a regional jurisdictional process. And the EU is an expert at doing it for lots of sectors. They've done it before. It's relatively simple for them to just put shipping on top of what they'd already done, and that's how they did it. But doing that in a different region, like Africa or Latin America or even Asia, is not simple. I can imagine scenarios where China, which already has various regulations in place for how it interacts with international shipping, including things like how they regulate the energy that you use when you're in a port, and the plugging into shore power and things like that. I can imagine how they would have the power. The power in terms of shipping. Shipping isn't going to stop coming to China if they apply some sort of regional policy or local policy. I can imagine how China has that as an option. I don't know how many other countries really do. And so there is discussion. There is a nascent carbon pricing in Africa, activity going on, from maritime emissions. And there is obviously this formation of discussion around COP30 about countries and their heavy industry being part of a club of actors who adopt some sort of carbon pricing regime. So I think all of those will now get a lot more attention, but I think we'll very quickly realize that for a sector like shipping, there is absolutely nothing better than this organization, the International Maritime Organization, for having a cost effective, equitable and environmentally effective regulation. One of the things that you get when you start to regulate regionally is the incentivization of carbon leakage. The vessels that might go into Europe will perhaps start calling in Turkey or in North Africa, and then they will modify, as a result of that, the supply chains or their compliance. So there are lots of reasons why, for something like a freight movement, it's a really difficult thing to to do in a regional structure, before we get onto the administrative burden that is associated with that

Okay, so I hear you that it's not dead. It could be voted on again in a year, but I can't imagine that the year won't just involve the US hardening its position, buying off more countries, threatening more countries. So if it comes to a vote in a year's time, I don't think we are going to see, necessarily, a different outcome on the same policy. And part of me wonders, is it not just perhaps an opportunity to take a big step back and think holistically: what's going on here? Are we just incentivizing a shift to LNG, which is not great in the short term, plus some very expensive e-fuels blended at very low levels? The number of fuels that you can actually buy today that would actually reduce your carbon intensity are not a huge number, and they're very expensive. I mean, we'll talk about e-methanol and ammonia. You'd need massive subsidies for that to be the mainstream replacement fuel. So is it perhaps just a time to step back and say, ‘You know what? This is just too expensive today.’ It’s very unclear where the technology is going to come from and wait a bit, just see if there are emerging trends out of other sectors that are easier to decarbonize. Like I'm thinking, for example, if we get a new form of nuclear propulsion that's going to be coming down in cost in the next decade. Solid state batteries, that might mean you could electrify ships more effectively for longer. There's a potential cascade out of land transport decarbonisation, where you have a lot of freed up bioethanol, because it's no longer being burnt by Brazil and blended in the US markets. Those things could play out over a decade, and mean that when we come to this problem again, we might have a different solution set on our hands. Is that something that people are thinking about?

We have thought about it. We absolutely have thought about it, as have many other organizations for a decade and tested it. We first reached the hypothesis that e-fuels and ammonia were the least cost pathway to decarbonize shipping eight years ago, and we've tested that hypothesis on an annual basis ever since, because it's not a hypothesis you take lightly. Its implications are for a much higher cost of fuel. And so let's work through some of those alternatives that you just raised because I don't want to be closed to innovation, but in any transition, you have to, at some point, form a position on what you're incentivizing, otherwise you won't get anything. So that's why we've done our work, and that's why we've shared it, and I think we have found very similar results to many other organizations. Let's start with batteries. So we absolutely should electrify and use batteries wherever it's possible. And there are good examples of ships being built today running on batteries, and I fully expect more vessels to do so as the technology becomes cheaper and more energy dense, or the other parameters. And we have run all of our calculations with heroic assumptions about how much cheaper that technology will become. We do not, with heroic assumptions, get ocean going shipping using batteries. You would need the capital cost of a kilowatt hour to come down far more than even the most optimistic projections would be before you can start going beyond a 24 hour voyage. And most vessels that cross an ocean in an energy efficient way will take a couple of weeks, three weeks, four weeks. So you would be talking about a very, very high charging frequency.

How much of shipping is made up of those very long distance journeys relative to the shorter ones?

So I don't have a precise value off the top of my head. When we try and do battery electrification scenarios, we can get single digit percentage points reduced by battery electrification. Now I don't know, if you then really push the battery technology, whether you'd start to get beyond 10% of the energy usage being able to be substituted, but when we're talking about international shipping… as opposed to domestic shipping, which I think is much more viable for battery electrification, because the voyages are often less than 24 hours, obviously — domestic shipping and sort of near coastal shipping, international shipping around the Baltic, for example, absolutely electrified. But the Baltic activity in shipping does not drive international shipping emissions. It's intercontinental trade of 15,000 TEU (Twenty-Foot Equivalent Unit) container vessels, and 400,000 ton bulk carriers and 200,000 ton oil carriers. This is what our energy demand comes from at the moment, and I think will continue to be dominated by. So the high 80s is going to need a liquid fuel of some sort. So battery electrification, definitely, but it doesn't solve the problem. Nuclear reactors, let's let's look at them. Let's do some analysis of their techno economics, which we have done in the past. And obviously, we know a lot about what a pressurized water reactor might take as a technology implementation. We know that a small modular reactor that maybe has a different engineering component looks like. But the one of the headaches that you still have with a nuclear reactor is the liability and how you handle the liability risk. So if I built a nuclear powered ship to sail from the UK to the US, and I did a bilateral treaty between those two countries, then maybe within that bilateral treaty, I could take some risk on the consequences of a disaster, such that the operation of that vessel would be feasible. But what if that ship then crashes into Ireland, a country which would be outside of a bilateral treaty between the UK and the US? What if it got stranded on the coast of France? What if it hit Bermuda. You know, these are all scenarios which we have the IMO for to manage some of the consequences and to have safety on international shipping. So I don't see how even a small group of countries can get together and start to operate nuclear powered ships as an international trade. You need a multilateral framework. That multilateral framework probably needs action from both the IMO and the International Atomic Energy Agency. So by all means, let's look at the technology. We're not convinced, when we look at the techno economics, that it's genuinely more affordable. We'll see more evidence of that as the capital in the SMR space has some effect. But don't underestimate the complexity of actually getting a legal framework where you would ever get insurance, because the insurance then becomes the problem. If no one will insure because there's no liability control, you wouldn't be able to operate.

Yeah, but that's a different question to the economics of the pure propulsion, right? And arguably perceptions of the risks of nuclear are not really in keeping with the actual risks. You know, there's a perception of it being a far bigger problem than, say, for example, a ship running on ammonia, which has its own challenges in terms of safety and regulatory changes that are going to be needed. This is a fairly toxic substance that's harmful to humans, etc. And you know, the examples you gave, we should remind ourselves, we do have a lot of nuclear power ships running around the world at the moment. They’ve found a degree of safety that means that they are able to ply the oceans and as yet no one has run into Bermuda and caused an incident. These are military vessels, of course, but anyway, let's not make this a conversation about nuclear. But I suppose my point was, in 10 years time, when this sector is a bigger proportion of global emissions, because right now it's 2% and there's a lot of work that needs to be done to decarbonize the other 90% of more accessible reductions, right? Which is through land-based transport, the power sector. We know what we're doing there, and we can electrify an awful lot of that. In 10 years time, shipping will then be a bigger proportion, we also might have found a lot of technologies have come to market that have made the calculus that you've done now somewhat different, because it's very hard to project forward at the moment.

I don't agree. I don't think it's that hard to project forwards. I think there are good fundamentals in the laws of physics that tell us how much energy you need to do various different things, and tell us how much costs are associated with these different things. So the cost on nuclear, for example, is not just driven by the engineering construction, it's also driven by the crewing. It's also driven by the insurance. And so I'm taking my analysis from what we've done to assess the insurability and the premium associated with insurance of operating nuclear, from the size of the crew that you would need to operate nuclear. Because it's not the 15 people that you have on a commercial ship, it's not the unmanned machinery space that we've done lots of work, not our group, we've done lots of work, collectively as a sector, on how you would operate in ammonia machinery space, by taking out people in order to solve the safety problem. So you have actually a large amount of information at this point in time. Yes, we will run our analysis every year and update assumptions. But I think there's a misplaced hope that some of these fundamentals will change in that period of time, which is very convenient as a procrastination justification for a sector which has assets which have 20, 30, 40 year lives. And so if we express that, and then use that to be seduced into a pause for a decade, we are going to lock in technologies like LNG, and we are going to postpone any energy transition which the sector genuinely needs. And in our analysis, there isn't a scientific justification to do that.

You're saying that the costs of these e-fuels or ammonia substitutions, though we know they're very expensive, are two to three times or even higher than the existing fuel costs that a ship owner is expected to pay. You have confidence that those prices are going to come down, or are you just saying we're going to have more expensive shipping?

I’m saying we can have more expensive shipping. And one of the areas that we work in is to look at the effect of a more expensive source of energy to move goods around the world, and it really doesn't have a strong effect in most instances. Shipping is relatively price inelastic in a lot of cases when it comes to demand. So when you calculate, what does this do to global GDP, even, what does this do to the GDP of a low income country, we're talking about less than 1%. Now that's a small additional cost. It's not an insignificant additional cost. I don't trivialize what the effect might be on low-income countries in the slightest. But as an additional cost to a global trade system, that isn't very large. When you look at what we currently ship because energy is so cheap, then there's a huge way in which we can reduce those GDP effects by being more rational about what we move. There's a great anecdote that we catch shellfish in the North Atlantic, we put them on a ship, we take them to the Far East, where they're shelled because there's cheaper labour in the Far East, and then we take them back into the European market to sell. So some of these things, which we do at the moment, are enabled by very low cost energy.

Yeah, we also do that with aviation, even more shockingly.

There's a global trade consequence of this, which, when we're also putting a value on what we need to ship around the world, I think is not able to take into account these energy costs. Nor do we find that the argument is that a nuclear reactor would be cheaper, even with projection.

But I guess what we're looking at there, though, is a very, very energy dense solution, which would unlock a different mode of shipping. You would not be worried about the speed with which you move your vessel, because the capital cost is so high, the running costs are almost trivial, and so you'll just get faster ships, basically. And that's likely to have an economic benefit for those people who develop those vessels. So I don't think it's straightforward. And because it's manufactured, really, the fuel costs as a relation to the reactor costs are so low that if you do get to a point where you're producing SMRs and the price per unit is coming down. I mean, this is all very hypothetical, but it's at least got a cost curve that's more likely to yield a reduction with distribution. The more you build, the cheaper it gets compared to a fuel production process, which is inherently going to be expensive. You know, all the fuel routes that are substituting for oil are just going to be expensive, right?

So they're lower cost, potentially, than the biofuels that we're currently using. So if I take the numbers that we have at the moment, you can get green ammonia prices on Platts, which are in the order of $2,000 a ton, that's in fuel oil equivalent price. You can also get the figures for biomethanol. You can get them for used cooking oil. Those are the current green ammonia prices. We are aware of projects that are lower than that.

But there’s no demand at the moment, right?

So this is a nascent technology… No demand for the ammonia or no demand for the biofuel?

There's just very little demand for anything, right? Because fossil is providing the majority, and it's cheap.

So there's, there's quite strong demand in the sustainable aviation fuel to my understanding, on things like used cooking oil. So I think the prices that you're seeing there are not representative of a very small demand. They're representative of what's already happening in a market and I don't think those prices are actually that different. So if we're saying that we shouldn't have any e-fuel use in shipping, why is it appropriate to have an equivalent energy cost for the use of those types of liquid fuels which have been manufactured in a different way already? I don't understand.

I suppose what it comes down to is how should you use your spare electrons? If you have spare electrons, if you can generate more electrons, you're going to get between two to nine times more carbon saving if you use them to displace fossil directly, right? So if you use them as electrons going into a battery perhaps in your marine time sector, but just for local ships, for ferries. Or you put it into road transport, which a vast majority of oil demand is still from road based transport. Why would you dilute that effect by up to nine times?

Okay so your argument is now about scalability?

No, it's just about the urgency of climate, really. This is why I'm saying perhaps shipping and aviation, we should just pause, because until we've done the bulk of the cheap stuff, where all your electrons should be focused, because you get so much more bang for your buck for those electrons being used directly. And it could be in hybrid ships, it could be battery vessels for short distance, and it could be even in hybrid airplanes, where you're using your electrons much more efficiently. And let's just pause on the fuel route, because it's expensive to do it with e-fuels.

I think you're conflating two different arguments, so let me see if I can break them down. So there's a lot of narrative, which is, we've got a grid, it's not decarbonised. We need to bring some renewables onto that grid in lots of different parts of the world. Most of the e-fuel production projects that I'm aware of are islanded production. So if we take the projects in inner Mongolia that are producing, to our knowledge, some of the lowest cost green ammonia. They are not connected to the grid, so they aren't doing anything except using the supply chain of the components and capital in terms of competing with the electrification in other countries. There is no logic that I can see for countries like the UK or Europe to be producing e-fuels. And so a lot of the rhetoric that you've described has come from countries with grids that are struggling to decarbonize, and they're saying, why put extra demand on that grid for the production of e-fuels? I completely agree that doesn't make any sense, but I don't agree that there is a finite supply of renewable electricity components. I don't agree that there's a finite amount of capital. Look at what's happening with AI. How has so much capital and so much hardware suddenly become viable? Why could we not do that for a renewable energy projection, which has to do with supply of fuels and shipping? And then let's go back to think about sigmoid curves, or S-curves and energy transition. So what we're doing is called technology lock in. At the moment, we have 60% of the order book as LNG dual fuel, and that's because we have an attitude, which is, that's what we need for this next 10 year period. We will get that continued, if not increased, for the next five or 10 years, whilst you say, oh, let's just decarbonize Europe and the UK. And you won't progress anything further forwards in the fleet, such that you then make it even harder, because suddenly when you do turn to the shipping sector and say, well, actually, now let's do some e-fuel work in the shipping sector, because actually that nuclear miracle hasn't come to pass that we said would would happen, then you have this incredibly hard and much less tractable problem, which then pushes you well into the 2050, 60s and 70s. Ships are not designed to be disposed of like a car after five or 10 or 15 years. These are assets that are designed to live for 30 years. The retrofit costs are massive. If you try to do surgery in the middle of a ship's life to put something like an ammonia tank and fuel distribution system on board, it adds a huge amount of cost. Whereas if you design it in, and there are lots of vessels being launched today which are ammonia ready, because someone's factored in the cost of that retrofit, and try to put in, in some cases, piping or site of the tank, then we can manage the transition quite effectively. But it means you are actually acknowledging that pathway and legitimizing it, rather than arguing that it's maybe not the right pathway.

I’m sympathetic to this argument, that we should start thinking about things and giving market based incentives that are technology neutral to help us do cost discovery in the early stages, just to open up diversity into the market. But what I'm questioning is this belief that as curves work for everything, and then this idea that we've got vast amounts of untapped renewables that necessarily can't be brought into the market for the cheaper uses of that electricity, which would be less inflationary. Because you're getting more carbon for your electron, right, if you put capital into green electron production. You mentioned Inner Mongolia, China's got HVDC cabling that can run thousands of kilometers. Transmission between continents is now possible. And that electrification process is now the least cost way of getting carbon out the atmosphere. So I suppose what I'm saying is, let's not lock ourselves into some pathway now where we have to do everything all at once, because politically, what we're going to get is backlash over narratives around green zealots pushing up prices. This is not defending the US position, but this sense that we're trying to do too much all at once, and the technology is not yet there, the price curves are not yet clear, that they'll come down. And we've got, in front of us, some really good wins. We've got the decarbonisation of transport nailed now, because we've got really good EVs on every every class of vehicle, whether it's two wheelers, up to HGVs. We know we can do that with electrons directly, and you will get two to nine times more benefit doing that than converting to a fuel. So that's all I'm putting out.

I think you're mischaracterizing what the IMO regulation is designed for. It's not trying to force the global fleet onto ammonia in the next 5, 10, or even 15 years. It's cleverly conceived. And this comes back to the revised strategy around the concept that there will be a portion of continuation of the use of fossil fuels. There will be a portion of the fleet which is able to take action in a more incremental way, in a less disruptive way, drop in fuel, stimulating the Bioenergy market where it's appropriate, assuming that we design good safeguards around sustainability. But within this, we need a process that explores some e-fuels, and the target on that is a 5% energy substitution. It's not a major shift away from that to enable some early adoption. And if that early adoption produces results which say this is not right, if there is a new technology that appears that that we aren't incentivizing adequately in the way the policy is designed, the IMO has a five year review of that regulatory framework. So it's a relatively near term, low-risk experiment, and the cost of distributing a small percentage of the fuel being substituted for a long run solution in order to de-risk, this is distributed around a global fleet at a relatively low cost. In our calculations, a 5 billion to 10 billion per annum pot of money gets us to quite a large percentage share of a substitution with an e-fuel.

What percentage do you think that 10 million a year could get you to, 5%?

10 billion, billion. So the consequence of the carbon price that you have. So essentially what we end up with, the regulation, as it was agreed in April, is a carbon price of around $10-12. And that does a very large amount of early adoption stimulation in a global fleet. It closes a cost gap, depending on how you design it and what other ways in which you add incentive into this. It doesn't take a large amount of that money to get you quite a long way. I think it would be a pity for there to be an outcome at the IMO that is so fearful of the cost increase the trade, the green zealot argument that you made, that is so fearful of that of a $10 carbon price, essentially a $10 carbon price, that it avoids this sector being a potential enabler of energy transition. And I think what's interesting is that there are lots of countries that do not have gas grids, that do not have electricity grids, that do not have material renewables investment at this point in time. And many of those countries saw opportunity in what they were being asked to consider in April. In our experience, we worked a lot, if not primarily with low income countries, and they actually saw an energy transition opportunity from an international shipping regulation that came from something that climate finance, that UNFCCC, that many other processes weren't offering them. So not only would a step away from shipping be a good sector to be decarbonizing from a let's just get our other ducks in a row first argument. You would actually have an equitable transition issue as well that needs to be thought through, and that was significantly enabled by the design of that regulation, by the fact it had a commitment to revenue distribution for a broad range of purposes, besides fuel subsidy, alongside the fuel subsidy. So I think there are multiple good reasons that most member states, 88%, saw a reason to agree in principle to the regulation, but were unfortunately pressured into rejecting it for different reasons.

My sense is that this was seen as a least-worst outcome by many countries, because the other alternative was just to pay some tax on your fuel, right? Currently, the whole maritime sector, like the aviation sector, pays no fuel tax at all. And there's always been talk of just adding a levy to the fuel sales, doing something similar, bringing it back in. But this market-based mechanism with all these quite complex thresholds does produce a very low incentive. And because it's intensity targets, there are other ways around it, etc. So I suspect, on balance, they all said, ‘if we're going to have to do something, let's do this, because it's market based, and we'll keep the revenues in the sector.’ But then the US comes along, changes the tune of the whole dance completely into, ‘you don't need to do anything, because climate change isn't real.’ And then suddenly that consensus around this policy, which was a compromise for some, just falls apart until the US changes back to a ‘climate change is real’ position. I think we're in for a bit of a long hiatus, aren't we?

Or unless they lose their power.

How are they going to lose their power when they're happy using bully boy tactics that no one's ever seen deployed?

I'd better stay in my lane, which is in shipping decarbonization, but I think there is an effect of those threats, which diminishes over time. There are countries that we work with who held a strong position because they said they already have had US visas refused. They've already tariffed us. What more can they do now? There are other countries for whom the tactic was effective. But I think in terms of scenarios and there are scenarios I can see where in 2026 there is the potential to have another shot at this. There are also scenarios where we can't, where this has to wait longer. And so I entertain both of those. But I think it's dangerous to assume that there isn't a scenario where we come back, because if we do have that option, and we're not ready for it, we will fail. And so there's a bit of a we now need to twin track this. And so next week, I'm expecting to go into a meeting at Intersessional Working Group on greenhouse gas emissions, where I'm going to keep working on the development of guidelines, because actually, those guidelines will give us the substance that maybe will help countries derisk, and see things that they they weren't sufficiently persuaded by to push back against the United States. And I'm ever optimistic that something could change, and I want to be ready for the moment when it does change.

And does that mean, then, you could foresee a scenario where a different policy is worked on in the intervening 12 months. Or is it just binary? We get this policy more defined? Or because you might, you know you talk about the European regulations being weak and therefore supporting LNG. Almost certainly, that's the only way you diffuse the US’s opposition, is by saying, you guys want to sell LNG, you need this policy, and we will alter the world away. Think about regulations which haven't even been fixed yet, we'll think about the way in which gas counts for longer. We'll accept it longer in the mix. Is there a period where you have to compromise on the policy? Or is it binary still for you?

I don't know. So unfortunately, because the meeting is now in deferral, we can't conceive of any other alternatives to the NZF, the net zero framework. We will only know that in 12 months time. So in 12 months time, we have a decision point which says, reopen major surgery, or adopt as is but we just change the date. Or we're back to square one, there's no net zero framework. And so I'm preparing for all three of those, and I include within that the development of guidelines which we would need in either of those two first scenarios. So if you imagine that we need to figure out how a fund would work, whether that fund has the amount of money that we currently estimate it will have, or whether it'll slightly modify, I don't know, but we can still do some work on structurally, what's the board of countries that sits on deciding what's used, what the money is used for? Structurally, what is the legal framework? I mean, these are the major works that need to get done. And actually, there were lots of low-income countries that said, ‘you know, we don't want to adopt something until we know what might happen with that revenue.’ And we don't trust that it'll all get sorted out. Okay, so there's a potential that this is what I meant by there's work we can do now that might provide clarity that then improves the assessments that people are able to make when they go into the adoption decision. And that's before we get on to all the other kinds of technical details. There are 14 different guidelines that are needing to get detailed, and I don't see why we can't make progress on those. Obviously, politically, there might not be the will to do it, but I don't get that message at the moment.

You've been so generous with your time on a Sunday. So thank you, Tristan. I have one last question, which might be a little bit of a change of subjects. So I just wanted to touch on something you mentioned earlier, which was that the IMO has got a history of actually passing regulations that are very well enforced. The double hull tankers was an example where oil spills were vastly reduced because they were adopted universally that all hulls needed to be doubled. Then the other one was the removal of sulfur from the heavy fuel oil. I mean, ships were burning the bottom of the barrel, very polluting. And there was this regulation that came in recently to move away from the sulfur, take the sulfur out of that burn. Now it seems as if the scale at which the sulfur was being emitted was acting as a brake on global warming, because essentially, it was putting aerosols into the atmosphere which were reflective. Sunlight was being scattered back, and we've removed that quite suddenly and created a sense of a termination shock. And now we're exposed to more warming because we're reflecting less sunlight and greenhouse gasses are still rising. Has this been discussed in IMO or in MARPOL or in MEPC meetings at all? And should it be? Because it does seem like quite an important thing that we've just done a weird reverse geo-engineering experiment without really realizing it.

No, there was definitely discussion at the time. So this was late 2010s when we were finalizing exactly how the sulfur regulation would come in, and asking these questions. And there was scientific evidence at that point describing exactly what you're saying. And there were discussions around that the IMOs remit was to control sulfur, not to fix climate. And the maturity of the climate debate was quite low at that point. It wasn't until 2018 that we adopted the initial greenhouse gas reduction strategy. And so structurally, as an organization, IMO has always had this as a siloed debate. The air pollution with SOx, NOX, PM is over here on one agenda item, and the GHG admissions issue is over there. And so, so I think your first question was, ‘Is it being discussed?’ And the answer is yeah, it was briefly. Under the climate discussion, it isn't discussed, people don't go, ‘oh, actually the short term measure that we should be doing is reversing the sulfur regulation,’ at least when the ships are offshore. Because obviously, one of the main drivers of air pollution regulation is impacts on human health. But ships are spending a lot of time in the middle of an ocean where they're nowhere close to centers of population. And so you could argue that there’s a way to modify the regulation to allow ships to continue to burn high sulfur fuel out at sea. There would be other consequences of that, including acidification. And so I think you would have to have a very nuanced and sophisticated multi-environmental parameter debate, where you went through and said, ‘well, actually, I'm happy to sacrifice a bit of acidification for a bit of short term climate.’ And that's a very difficult responsibility to give an organization which is primarily one that regulates ships, to stop doing things rather than take a nuanced judgment as to which of the evils needs to be controlled first, and in what way? Because it's so complicated how these things will interact in practice.

I think what will end up happening is we'll be having more conversations about climate risks exacerbating, and as safety and maritime safety has always been the first priority of shipping, a rapidly heating up world with lots more energetic storms and all of the impacts that's going to generate, I feel as if we're all going to have to have a much more sober conversation about risks. And that more holistic conversation about, as you said, which harms are we prioritizing? Is it runaway climate change? Because we've just exposed ourselves to a much more rapidly heating planet? Is that something that we care more about than we currently do? And I feel like we're just at the beginning of that conversation now, where risk assessments have to be undertaken.

But is that a responsibility for the IMO, or is that a responsibility for a wider United Nations process that is able to look? Because it's very hard to take that as one sector. What one sector does could then start to compete with what another sector does in that space

And it's early days, right, as to how any kind of governance would work. But at least surfacing the fact that we have accidentally geo engineered our planet very effectively in all manner of ways, recklessly, as it turns out. And we probably need to have a much more mature conversation about how we engineer our way into a safer period, right? We need to buy ourselves some time. None of this is happening fast, even if your policy goes through next year, we're talking decades before shipping finally gets to a carbon neutral position. We may not have decades if the current rate of warming is sustained, that's that's the risk.

No, I completely understand that. And yeah, not saying that the conversation couldn't be had. I think you would have to look very hard at the IMOs mandate if the IMO was to be the place where you made those decisions. And I think you would have to work very much in an inter-agency structure in order to think through. Because one sector can't be given the responsibility of managing the geo engineering back of something. I think you would need a lot broader consultation than the one organization could take.

This could be a new area for you, with your architecture and your engineering capabilities.

There is a field of maritime carbon dioxide removal, which is covered within the IMO under the London convention and London protocol. So the IMO itself that I focus on is the Marine Environment Protection Committee. But it also looks after other places where we will have to think through CDR — carbon dioxide removal — in the maritime context. And so, yeah, there's absolutely a potential for there to be more work done on that. And it requires a similar skill set of looking at a scientific evidence base and understanding the politics around how that scientific evidence base might turn into policy and practice.

And it's not just scientific, is it scientific and engineering? That's why it's fascinating. It's engineering that got us into this. Is engineering going to get us out of it? Not sure. It's been a delight to talk to you, Tristan, thank you so much for tolerating all my questions on this Sunday evening. And this is going to be a topic I'm sure we’ll return to while we work out where the landscape is currently when it comes to any kind of climate action. Thank you for doing what you're doing, and thanks for joining us.

Not at all. Thank you so much.

So that was Tristan Smith, professor of energy and transport at the UCL Energy Institute. As always, we'll put links to further information in the show notes, including my conversation with Johannah Christensen, the CEO of the Global Maritime Forum. That’s episode 143. My thanks to Oscar Boyd, our producer, Jamie Oliver, our video editor, and to the rest of the Cleaning Up team and wonderful leadership circle members who make the Cleaning Up podcast possible. And thanks to you for listening. We hope you enjoyed the conversation, and please join us at the same time next week for another episode of Cleaning Up.