Shipping entered the EU emissions trading scheme two years ago and has paid the full carbon rate since January. The European Commission is already rewriting it. The first revised draft is due on 15 July, and it arrives with a thick complaint file: cargo slipping to ports outside the bloc to dodge the charge, island ferry routes pleading for relief, and shipowners opening a joint front with the airlines to press for their carbon payments to be recycled into cleaner fuels.
The bigger picture
Every one of these fights traces to design decisions. The scheme prices carbon inside a region, but the ships it prices move freely in and out of it. A refrigerated box heading from South America to the Gulf can be transhipped at Algeciras, where the charge applies, or at Tangier Med a short hop across the strait, where it does not. Carriers deny diverting Europe-bound cargo and concede that transhipment traffic is exposed; no amount of drafting is expected to close that gap.
The island complaints run on the same logic. Because only islands with fewer than 200,000 residents can be exempted, Sardinia and Sicily pay the full freight surcharge while their own satellite islets go free. Italian and Greek members of the European Parliament are pressing for the exemption to be widened, or for a dedicated fund to hold down the cost of island living.
The money is the third front. Owners pay around €9 billion a year into the scheme, while the cleaner fuels they are being steered towards cost roughly four times as much as conventional marine fuel. Last month European Shipowners brought Airlines for Europe alongside them to demand that governments be forced to recycle their carbon income into closing that gap, turning a shipping grievance into a two-sector lobbying front.
Around the edges sit the older grievances: half of every voyage in and out of the bloc is charged, which trading partners read as a reach into their sovereignty; the green lobby wants the net pulled tighter around ships sitting just under the 5,000-GT line; offshore operators want it loosened. The clean fix — a single global scheme at IMO that Brussels could credit against its own charge, is the one thing the Commission cannot deliver on 15 July. It is stuck in London and Washington, where the US has told the IMO it will accept no levy, tax or fund by any name.
Money, money, money
By European Shipowners' own analysis estimates, the roughly €7.7 billion shipping pays into national coffers each year is carved up among governments by a formula fixed to their past industrial emissions — not their fleets, their ports or the owners they administer. Landlocked Czechia stands to collect more than the Netherlands or Belgium; Greece, home to Europe's largest fleet, ranks only sixth. The body wants Member States legally required to earmark part of the take for cleaner fuels, noting that so far only France and Estonia have set aside anything for shipping at all.
A carbon market built to price what cannot move was always going to struggle with an industry that does nothing else. This revision is unlikely be the last.
The gap in the net
Away from the carbon file, the Commission spent the week explaining what its Russia sanctions do not yet cover. Pressed over an ice-class gas carrier being overhauled at a Danish yard, the executive said it can move only against ships that are formally listed, and the ban on servicing the tankers that carry Russia's Arctic LNG, adopted in April, does not reach vessels that merely work for the project until 2027. The ship at Odense flies the Bahamas flag, left the Russian register in 2022 and is managed outside Russia, so it slips through all three tests that would have caught it now, leaving the summer maintenance season open. It is the same two-speed drafting visible across the bloc's maritime-services bans, where the harder measures are written in but left dormant, their activation parked pending G7 coordination and the appetite of Member States that have resisted escalation.
A quieter Greek case rounds out the week. A member of the European Parliament has asked the Commission whether Greece's unusually narrow tax break for ship suppliers, granted only where goods are billed directly to the owner or operator, and denied to caterers, concessionaires and international ferries, is compatible with EU law, arguing it drives the chandlery trade out of Greek ports to suppliers elsewhere in the bloc.
Maritime Watch has reported the politics behind these files since 2010, and has an archive of more than five thousand articles. The revenue split, the lobbying over the 15 July revision and the enforcement gaps in the Russia sanctions are all covered in full at maritimewatch.eu.
Free trials on request — reply to this email or write to editor@maritimewatch.eu.