From Tilak’s Substack
Tilak Doshi
As the world’s climate delegations gather in Belém for COP30 (November 10th-21st), they do so under a very different geopolitical sky. The United States has withdrawn from the UN’s climate process altogether, and its diplomats have just led a successful rebellion at the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) to block a global carbon tax on shipping. The episode marks not only a turning point for global climate policy but a moment of historical resonance. Europe’s effort to impose its moral and regulatory hegemony on the world has been checked by the US. As in 1956, when President Eisenhower forced his European allies to abort their attempt to take over the Suez Canal, Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” approach to energy policy in 2025 has re-asserted the primacy of national interest over imperial pretension.
The IMO Revolt
In April 2025, the IMO unveiled what Carbon Brief – a European climate policy advocacy website – described as “the first in the world to combine mandatory emissions limits and greenhouse-gas pricing across an entire industry sector”. The “Net-Zero Framework” would have imposed an effective global levy on ships not meeting emissions-intensity targets and funnelled revenues into an UN-run global decarbonisation fund.
By October, that project lay in tatters. As Climate Home News – a UK-based green advocacy media outlet – reported: “The IMO’s Net-Zero Framework will be up for approval again in October 2026, after the US and Saudi Arabia persuaded countries not to vote on it as planned.” The US position is explicit. A State Department press release titled ‘Taking Action to Defend America from the UN’s First Global Carbon Tax’ stated: “The Administration unequivocally rejects any and all efforts to impose economic measures against US ships based on GHG emissions or fuel choice.”
The State Department confronted IMO-led efforts bluntly, declaring that: “The United States will be moving to levy remedies against nations that sponsor this European-led neocolonial export of global climate regulations.” US negotiators warned of “reciprocal measures to offset any fees charged to US ships”. In the words of one industry source quoted by E&E News: “The Trump team went all out to kill the carbon tax, rallying allies from Asia to Africa.” The result: Europe’s most ambitious multilateral climate initiative since Paris 2015 has been deferred for at least a year under US pressure. The IMO affair shows that Washington no longer merely abstains from globalist schemes — it now blocks them when the US national interest is at stake.
COP30 and Europe’s Waning Leverage
The European Parliament’s briefing admits that “global greenhouse-gas emissions are still increasing, while fast and deep emission reductions are needed to keep the goals of the Paris Agreement within reach”. In diplomatic terms, that is an admission of failure.
The EU’s internal politics compound the problem. Politico notes that “Hungary, Poland and Slovakia balked at stricter 2035 targets, warning of damage to their industries”. The EU faces dismal economic prospects. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has warned that the welfare state is “no longer sustainable” while France and the UK teeter on the brink of financial insolvency. The EU’s Green Deal, once hailed as “Europe’s man on the moon moment”, has become a fiscal and political quagmire.
COP30 arrives, therefore, at a moment when Europe’s self-proclaimed “climate leadership” is largely rhetorical. Its moral capital cannot pay its energy bills. Along with Europe, the UK – fond of proclaiming ‘climate leadership‘ – is being hoist by its own petard with Energy Secretary ‘Mad Ed’ Miliband leading the charge. Europe’s climate order was built on two illusions: that the world would follow its moral leadership, and that its own citizens would bear the costs indefinitely. Both have collapsed.
Even an icon of the climate establishment like Bill Gates senses the shift. He recently published a note on his website which stunningly admitted:
Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.
When even the billionaire technocrat who bankrolled climate alarmism for over a decade calls for realism, the intellectual tide is turning.
America’s Return to Energy Realism
From his first week in office in the second term, President Trump moved to dismantle the global climate bureaucracy. He withdrew from the Paris Agreement and halted payments to the Green Climate Fund. His administration supported legislative moves in Texas to eliminate ESG considerations from investment and procurement decisions by state pension funds. The Trump administration is actively challenging the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), characterising it as an “unfair trade practice” and a “Global Green New Scam Tax”. The blocking of the IMO tax is only the latest in US moves against the EU-led globalist climate agenda.
These steps are not merely populist gestures. They amount to a coherent energy-dominance doctrine: a reassertion that economic competitiveness and energy security are the foundation of national power. White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told the Guardian: “President Trump will not jeopardise our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries.”
Eisenhower’s Lesson
The analogy with the Suez crisis of 1956 is not contrived. Then, Britain and France, clinging to illusions of empire, tried to retake the canal with Israel’s help from Nasser’s Egypt. The Eisenhower administration, fearing a global backlash from perceptions of European colonialism and a Soviet response, used economic pressure — including threats to sell US holdings of sterling — to force its allies to withdraw. The Economist later called it “the moment when Britain learned it was no longer a great power.”
As in 1956, when the Suez crisis exposed the gap between imperial ambition and economic means, the IMO defeat has revealed the EU’s strategic senescence. Its leaders can no longer compel compliance through soft power. Even EU members now resist its edicts. In 1956, the US intervened to halt an imperial venture that threatened world stability. In 2025, it intervenes to halt a climate venture that threatens world prosperity. Then, the attempted takeover of the Suez Canal; now, the IMO carbon tax gambit on global shipping. Then, Europe’s imperial gunboats; now, EU’s climate bureaucrats.
Having outsourced its defence to NATO that steadily crept eastwards to the Russian border under US tutelage in the 1990s, the EU tried to build its moral stature through multiculturalism, mass immigration and the Net Zero crusade. In the salons of Brussels and European capital cities, the Paris Agreement was adopted as the European flagship enterprise – an enterprise which President Obama enthusiastically adopted without Senate approval, which he knew would not have been forthcoming.
The IMO global carbon-tax plan was to be the UN’s latest gambit in ‘saving the planet’. Trump, like Eisenhower, has torpedoed it — through diplomatic and financial leverage. Once again, Washington has reminded Europe that moral posturing without material power is mere vanity. If in a former age, the US stood against European resource colonialism, now it stands against Europe’s carbon colonialism, as so eloquently put by the US Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
The Western globalist climate project was less about science than salvation. In post-Christian Europe, carbon emissions replaced sin; ‘Net Zero’ became moral redemption through self-denial. The empirical reality remains: hydrocarbons supply over 80% of global energy despite massive subsidies for renewable energy. The world’s poorest billions aspire to the material comforts fossil energy makes possible. To deny them that path, in the name of climate virtue, is a new colonialism in all but name.
The Eisenhower-Trump parallel is more than rhetorical flourish. Both men confronted allies whose imperial vanity endangered the balance of power. Eisenhower saved the liberal post-war order from colonial overreach; Trump may be saving global prosperity from ideological overreach. In each case, America’s realism imposed limits that Western Europe refused to acknowledge.
The Global South Aligns with Reality
Developing nations have watched this evolution with a mixture of relief and calculation. For decades, UN ‘climate finance’ was the rent-seeker’s game: pledge allegiance to the climate cause in order to receive grants. On the one hand, we have environmental NGOs such as the WWF and Greenpeace and their subsidiaries and political supporters in developing countries convinced that the ‘climate crisis’ requires a radical curtailment of oil and gas development. On the other are businesses in the renewable energy sector and their political sponsors that benefit from subsidies and regulatory mandates provided by Western governments, the UN and affiliated organisations in the climate-industrial complex.
Developing countries are waking up to the ‘climate finance’ spigot being turned off. The previous UN climate summit in Baku was dubbed the “climate finance COP” for its central goal: to agree on how much money should go each year to help developing countries cope with “climate-related costs”. But with US funds drying up, the incentives are shifting. The UN Green Climate Fund faces a funding shortfall. The US officially rescinded $4 billion of its outstanding $6 billion pledge to the GCF in early 2025 but there is little expectation of any US funding of the globalist UN climate agenda henceforth.
The COP30 process will proceed, but its authority is broken. The IMO will reconvene, but without US money or muscle, its “Net Zero framework” will remain aspirational. Europe will continue to sermonise, but the world is tuning out. Eisenhower’s intervention ended Europe’s pretensions to empire. Trump’s energy realism may end Brussels’s claims to climate leadership. The world will not be poorer for it.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
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