Pirates of the Climate COP

"Even the Batman is no match for Donald Trump"

If you run the numbers on energy expended to move weight or volume over distance, it becomes immediately obvious why, as soon as Europeans started building cities in North America, they began connecting lakes and rivers by canals. Hauling things over water is less energy-intensive, whether by mule-drawn barges or ginormous container ships. After boats, the next most efficient is rail, then truck, then horses, oxen, and humans on cargo bikes.

Jevons Paradox has favored marine transport over alternatives to the point where it can even be competitive for Jeff Bezos to deliver your steaks from Argentina than for you to drive to the Farmer’s Market for something raised by a neighbor. Sadly, at that scale, you get “neglected externalities.”

Global shipping accounts for 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and that is projected to rise to 10% over the next 25 years unless something changes (and many things might). Here at Global Village Institute, we have long supported the Sail Transport Network, and particularly its pilot program, Sail Aegean, to re-establish the ancient coastal trade routes using sail power. We have to admit, though, while inspirational, it was still pretty boutique. 

In April, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) adopted a framework intended to get the shipping industry to Net Zero by 2050. It created some clever financial incentives to encourage clean fuels and transform infrastructure, such as ports that load and unload the cargo and the ships themselves. The sale of emissions reduction credit incentives could enable the industry to accelerate decarbonization and reach that Net Zero target sooner.

The greenhouse gas (GHG) initiative is important to distinguish from the sulfur regulations adopted by the IMO, which have had catastrophic consequences by accelerating near-term ocean heating. In 2020, an IMO rule began reducing the sulfur content of shipping fuels to curb pollution but this had an unintended consequence. Sulfur emissions, climate scientists well knew, make bright clouds that reflect sunlight without retaining infrared heat, meaning they have been cooling the planet by as much as half a degree Celsius or more. While undesirable from a health standpoint, ship pollution was masking global warming, and as shipping expanded, so did that cooling effect. When sulfur began to be phased out, we could see the fine print of the McPherson Paradox, which James Hansen termed “our Faustian bargain.” Concealed by cooling sulfur aerosols, ocean heat soared and continues to build. It is no small wonder that Melissa, warmed by the heat below the Tropic of Cancer, is the third Cat 5 hurricane of 2025. Because the ocean and atmosphere are a coupled system, the removal of sulfur from maritime fuels has raised global temperature, broken the polar vortex, and now threatens to slow the Atlantic circulation that warms Canada and Europe and brings timely monsoon rains to Asia.

Removing CO2 and methane from shipping emissions is a different story. That would reverse the negative effect of removing the sulfur. The party-states negotiating this agreement for the past 20 years, over opposition from oil producers like Saudi Arabia, returned to London last Friday to ratify the IMO-adopted change and code it into international law.

Instead, they had a visit from the Penguin. 

As long-time followers of this blog will know, we began an A.I.-generated comic book series here last winter depicting the current President of the United States as a Batman supervillain, Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot, a.k.a. The Penguin. We couldn’t resist the similarity of the Gotham villain to the current occupant of the White House. In the original version created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger for Detective Comics #58 (December 1941), Cobblepot, in top hat and tails, is the number one “Gentleman of Crime” in Gotham City. He runs a nightclub called the Iceberg Lounge as a cover for his crime syndicate, sort of like the strip club Bada Bing in The Sopranos, the Miss Universe pageant, or the contemporary global money-laundering scheme masquerading as a New York real estate company (NASDAQ: DJT) now planning to transform Gaza into a Palestinian Riviera, sans Palestinians.

 

Past D.C. graphic novels, and the Gotham TV series on Fox (2014-19), told the story of Penguin being arrested by Batman but always eluding justice, such as by threatening a judge’s family or bribing officials. In season 2 of the TV series, Cobblepot becomes the Mayor of Gotham and announces that no one can commit crimes in Gotham without a “license” from him. He imprisons police and prosecutors and divides the city among his cronies. Gotham becomes his piggy bank.
 

You first fire all the lawyers. So get rid of 5,000 people in the Department of Justice. Don’t replace them. Get rid of all of the guardrails within the Department of Justice, like the investigations of corruption, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the ethicists, and the Civil Rights Division. Get rid of all of that. Then get rid of all the lawyers, systematically, who are inside of each of the cabinet-level departments and agencies. Get rid of them. So they are fired and not replaced. Get rid of the ethicists. They’re all fired and not replaced. Get rid of the Inspectors General. Get rid of them. Now turn to the military. Put an idiot meat puppet in charge of the Department of Defense in Pete Hegseth. Then get rid of all of the generals and admirals and others with legacy knowledge and apolitical contributions to our national defense. Get rid of them. Then you militarize the National Guard and get it under your command. See where this is going now? And get rid of Congress completely by bringing in your own funding. And what are we going to do about it now that we’ve identified it?

—Michael Popof, Legal AF, October 25, 2025.

Bone Saw the IMO

It should come as no surprise that when Mohammed Bin Salman came crying to Jared Kushner, saying the International Maritime Organization was about to punish the fossil industry with tough CO2 regulations, the White House interceded to postpone the adoption of the IMO plan for another year and to reopen the text for Saudi-crafted changes.

Cobblepot threatened that any country that voted to adopt the Net Zero plan would face tariffs, trade sanctions, and port sanctions. Ships from that country would not be allowed into US ports. Visas for individual negotiators, and potentially those for entire UN diplomatic missions from some countries, could be revoked. Good luck getting back to your apartments in New York from the IMO meeting in London.

As a result, the diplomats pulled back, and the Net Zero shipping plan was not adopted. The Penguin won. And he didn’t even take credit.

What will this mean for the UN climate summit in Belém? After all, the United States is no longer a party to the Paris Agreement. Why are they even there? Paris Agreement principal midwife Christiana Figueres has some thoughts on that:

We have to continually remind everyone that you do not go to Belém asking, what is the big agreement that is coming out of Belém? There is no big agreement, okay? There is no big agreement. Deliberately, on the part of the Brazilian presidency, it is a shift from the international negotiations, which happen among governments in the Blue Zone, to attention on the Green Zone, which is where the action is already happening. So the United States will throw some toys out of the pram, but A, number one, there is no international agreement that they can actually point their guns at.

And secondly, let’s remember that the US is not a part of the Paris Agreement. So in the Blue Zone, when the conversation starts on anything, they will have to wait politely, patiently (maybe not politely), for all parties to speak before they can speak as an observer to the Paris Agreement. That kind of puts them in their place.

 

When she speaks of the Green Zone, she refers to the part of the COP where civil society gathers to share progress notes. Ideas flow from solution leaders such as the Global Ecovillage Network, the Coral Reef Alliance, and the International Biochar Initiative. The Blue Zone is where nations agree to rules for sustainable rubber harvests. The Green Zone is where the rubber meets the road. Figueres continues:

My observation would be political dysfunction in the USA cannot mean political dysfunction in the world, and we need to unravel our over-dependence on US-brokered systems, because clearly we’ve got a kind of mad person in that particular office, and it’s an issue of global safety and security that we find ways around that… it’s a warning to us all to try and insulate ourselves from the US malfunction.

***

I think you’re right to bring the seriousness to this because it’s going to cost lives, right? But there were seven million people on the streets in the USA on Saturday saying that they want no kings, and they want no more of this madness.

 

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References

Cheng, Lijing, et al. “Ocean heat content in 2023.” Nature Reviews Earth & Environment 5.4 (2024): 232-234.

Hansen, James E., et al. “Global warming in the pipeline.” Oxford Open Climate Change 3.1 (2023): kgad008.

Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to cease the war in Ukraine immediately. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years. It will continue to do so with your assistance. We aid Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road and work to heal collective trauma everywhere through the Pocket Project. You can read about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVIx.org). I appreciate your support.

And speaking of resettling refugees, did you know? A study by Poland’s National Development Bank found that the influx of Ukrainians added between 0.5% and 2.5% to GDP growth and paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.

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#RestorationGeneration.

When humans are locked in a cage, the Earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.

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