Trump vs. Global CO2 Tax: Shock-and-Awe Victory

“It was like a bunch of gangsters coming into the neighborhood and smashing windows and threatening shop owners … a shock-and-awe thuggery approach.” – Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D, Rhode Island)

The recent New York Times article, “Trump Officials Accused of Bullying Tactics to Kill a Climate Measure” (Lisa Friedman et al.: November 6, 2025) somehow forgets that politics is messy and confrontational. It did not start with Trump, and climate politics has long been a contact sport for the Progressive Left.

“Nations were poised to approve the first fee on pollution from ships. That’s when the Trump administration began the threats,” the article begins. Trump’s intervention was “extraordinary, even by the standards of the Trump administration’s combativeness, according to nine diplomats on its receiving end.”

The global climate taxers were nonplussed. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse complained about the administration’s “shock-and-awe thuggery approach.” Another complained about “the disproportionate use of force…. a cruise missile … to redress a traffic violation.” Hyperbole and naivete run rampant….

A Major Victory, in Fact

Yes, Trump used the powers of government–including non-market intervention–to block what the Times called a “fee.” The world’s first carbon dioxide (CO2) tax was an all-pain-no-gain on consumers, as well as a burden on shipping. And for what, temperature-wise and sea-level-wise? Lisa Friedman et al. can only report that proponents said that shipping’s three percent of global CO2 emissions (akin to aviation) was “expected to grow” and could “increase drastically by 2050.” Perhaps the United Nations’s global government can work to stop international shipments of industrial wind turbines and electric vehicles instead.

Why Tax?

With biased articles like this, it is best to read from the bottom up, so to speak. The rationale for Trump’s decisive action was stated deep into the article:

“President Trump was clear, the United States will not adhere to any bogus international climate agreement that is not in the best interest of the American people,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. She said it was the I.M.O., not the Trump administration, that pressured nations to accept a bad policy. Mr. Trump “will not allow the I.M.O. to bully our country into propping up their Green Energy Scam,” she said.

The Climate Industrial Complex’s global whining aside, the essence of Trump’s victory for consumers and shipping can be appreciated from the following Press Release from the U.S. Department of State, “Taking Action to Defend America from the UN’s First Global Carbon Tax – the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) “Net-Zero Framework” (NZF)”. As jointly stated by Secretary of State Rubio, Secretary of Energy Wright, and Secretary of Transportation Duffy:

The United States will be moving to levy these remedies against nations that sponsor this European-led neocolonial export of global climate regulations.  We will fight hard to protect our economic interests by imposing costs on countries if they support the NZF.  Our fellow IMO members should be on notice.

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