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Idle Ships, Cleaner Skies
How Trump Became Maritime Shipping’s Unintended Climate Ally
Trump’s aggressive economic policies in Q1 2025 have triggered immediate ripples throughout global maritime logistics, reshaping shipping routes, port activity, fuel consumption, and emissions trajectories. I’ve been seeing statistics on container volumes and hearing from industry insiders that they are bracing for empty US ports in coming weeks. It’s time for another article on the theme of Trump: Inadvertent Climate Hero.
Three years ago, I published the first version of my maritime shipping decarbonization projection through 2100. It forecast a return to almost 2019 levels by 2025, then a gradual decline. A great deal of that was due to the slow reduction of bulk fossil fuel shipping, which accounts for 40% of all maritime tonnage. With peak oil, gas, and coal and the subsequent decline, along with alternative power of maritime shipping, including electrification of inland and nearshore shipping, along with increased efficiency measures, I projected a significant decline in total shipping tonnages. As a note, while the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) modeling scenarios do include the impacts…
