Two years after the EU became the first bloc to bring shipping into a carbon market, and with the phase-in about to be charged in full, Brussels is going to find out whether the scheme it built can survive its own first revision. The Commission is due to publish its draft overhaul on 15 July. Shipowners, ports, terminal operators and unions have all filed competing demands, with the liner industry going furthest; the World Shipping Council has drafted the actual legislative text it wants adopted, including a reserve of 100 million allowances over ten years to narrow the price gap between fossil and green fuels. The disputes the scheme has carried since launch — whether it leaks business to rivals, whether it pre-empts a global deal, whether it charges twice for the same tonne of emissions — are not settled. They are the revision.
The bigger picture. The Commission has treated cargo diversion as a risk to design against, pointing out that coastal states all approved the law and that Red Sea re-routing moved far more boxes than any carbon charge; carriers themselves call some route changes "rational behaviour" that leaves trade flows intact. This month the port terminal operators stopped hedging — "carbon leakage is not a mirage," FEPORT said, the lost revenue "proving to be real" — and the ports authorities say transhipment is already draining to non-EU hubs, with the Mediterranean hit first. The design flaw they point to is real enough: a vessel pays the full charge between two EU ports but only half on a leg to or from a port outside the bloc, which is precisely the incentive to call somewhere just over the border. Sitting underneath all of it is the original geopolitics of the scheme: that the EU could price carbon alone until the IMO caught up. The IMO has not caught up. Formal adoption of the Net-Zero Framework's implementing rules is postponed, and the EU has spent the spring softening its own negotiating line to keep southern flag states on board. The industry's ask has become: "widen the trigger that forces Brussels to back off if a global agreement ever arrives, so that no one pays both Brussels and London". None of this is happening in a vacuum: EU leaders asked the Commission in March to blunt the effect of the bloc's carbon price on "diversion of activities," and the whole Green Deal is being reread through the lens of competitiveness.
The divergence. Strip away the shared language about a global deal and the industry's positions pull in opposite directions. Liner shipping wants a reserve of 100 million allowances, while the shipowners' body ECSA wants the same gap closed the other way, by recycling the roughly €9 billion a year shipping pays into the scheme into European fuel production it casts as an energy-security asset. For ports, money should go to the quayside, and their real alarm is not the fuel gap but the cargo gap they say is already draining across the border. On the early evidence the lines are setting the terms: the mechanism the Commission is hinting at looks set to recycle support into fuels and cleaner propulsion, modelled on aviation.
A second front. Away from the carbon file, European owners are still hiring Russian masters and officers more than four years into the war, InterManager's Kuba Szymanski confirmed to the Maritime Watch. The move away has been marginal, largely due to cost and availability. The dependency is sharpest on the Dutch flag, where a government-commissioned study found Russians make up 53% of non-EEA masters; The Hague is now weighing powers to bar individual Russian masters on security grounds rather than a blanket ban that owners warn would idle ships and drive reflagging.
The full reporting is at maritimewatch.eu, where this week's coverage also takes in a Parliament-commissioned study urging the EU to regulate how ports charge vessels for shore power, and Greek Socialist pressure on the Commission over Turkish maritime incursions.
All this alongside a searchable archive reaching back across more than five thousand articles. Free trials are available on request: email editor@maritimewatch.eu.