From Steward to Saboteur: America’s Role in the Failure to Govern the Maritime Commons

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The International Maritime Organization’s recent failure to adopt a global carbon-pricing mechanism for shipping is more than another bureaucratic delay. It is a demonstration of Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” in real time, replayed on the high seas. The ocean is the world’s pasture and the atmosphere is the waste pit for its exhaust. Each nation benefits from cheap trade and fossil fuels, while the long-term costs are spread thin across the entire planet. What should have been a landmark step toward collective stewardship turned into another lesson in how ideology shapes, and often defeats, cooperation.

Last week’s meeting of the International Maritime Organization ended without agreement on a proposed global carbon-pricing mechanism for the shipping industry. The plan, part of the organization’s Net-Zero Framework, aimed to put a price on emissions and use the revenue to support cleaner fuels and infrastructure. The proposal collapsed after heavy lobbying by the United States, which reportedly warned smaller member states of trade and diplomatic consequences if they supported the measure. Saudi Arabia and a handful of allies backed the U.S. position, framing the levy as a threat to competitiveness. The outcome was a one-year postponement and another missed opportunity to align the maritime sector with global climate goals.

Hardin’s 1968 parable was simple. A group of herders share a pasture. Each gains individually by adding more animals, even though overgrazing will destroy the grass. Since the cost of overuse is shared, the incentive to restrain is weak. The result is collapse of the common resource. The essay was a warning about incentives, not morality, yet over time it has become a mirror. Every ideology that reads it sees a different villain and a different cure.

Classical economists treat the tragedy as a pricing failure. If the pasture is free, it will be overused. Their solution is to internalize the externality through taxes, permits, or private ownership. In their view, the IMO’s proposed carbon levy was a clean correction: make each ton of carbon emitted by a ship carry a cost, and the industry will innovate toward efficiency. The European Union and Japan largely followed this logic, supporting a price on emissions as the most rational way to align markets with climate stability.

Neoliberal thinkers take a similar but narrower view. They agree that markets should solve the problem, but distrust regulation to do it. Their instinct is to commodify the commons rather than govern it. At the IMO, this view was embodied by the United States, which opposed the carbon-pricing framework on the grounds that it was a “global tax on trade.” American negotiators and allied industry groups insisted that innovation would clean up shipping without what they called coercive rules. In practice, that argument protects incumbents. When the world’s largest economy rejects a collective price on emissions, the invisible hand becomes a barrier to cooperation.

Liberals and social democrats interpret the commons as a shared trust that must be managed through transparent rules and mutual obligation. For them, the proposed levy was not an economic scheme but an act of stewardship. The idea was to recycle the revenue into clean fuel infrastructure in developing nations and into adaptation funding for small island states that are already facing the physical consequences of climate change. To these delegations, mainly from Europe and the Pacific, the United States’ behavior was not a philosophical disagreement but a direct betrayal of multilateralism. Reports surfaced that senior American politicians lobbied IMO member states to block the measure even while Congress was shut down. The pattern was unmistakable.

Libertarians saw something different in the same pasture. To them, the tragedy of the commons is not a call for cooperation but proof that ownership is the only safeguard. Each actor should be free to decide how to manage its own resources. The IMO proposal, from this perspective, was an assault on sovereignty. The American fossil fuel lobby and many right-wing commentators framed it as a form of global governance, a loss of freedom disguised as environmental policy. The rhetoric of individual liberty served as cover for collective neglect.

Socialists reversed the libertarian logic. They saw the IMO stalemate as another example of capitalist capture of a shared resource. The atmosphere and oceans are global goods, but the profits from their exploitation flow to a small number of corporations and petro-states. For many in the Global South, the carbon levy was less about pricing efficiency than fairness. Those who had benefited most from burning fossil fuels should shoulder more of the cost of cleaning up. From this view, the United States and Saudi Arabia were defending entrenched interests while vulnerable nations were left to absorb the damage.

Environmentalists read Hardin as a moral text. They see the pasture as the planet itself, not a metaphor. To them, every year of delay at the IMO is measurable harm: more CO2, more ocean acidification, more rising water. Shipping accounts for roughly 3% of global greenhouse emissions, a share comparable to major industrial nations. The science is not in dispute. The failure to act is a political choice that sacrifices the long term for the short term. Environmental advocates saw the U.S. position as deliberate obstruction, not strategic caution.

Technocrats focus on systems management rather than ideology. They believe better monitoring, reporting, and optimization can prevent collapse. Inside the IMO, this tendency shows up in endless debates about metrics, efficiency standards, and pilot programs. Japan and South Korea lean heavily on this approach, preferring incremental improvements over broad policy commitments. The U.S. government often supports this middle ground because it sounds reasonable and buys time. The result is motion without direction.

Nationalists draw the boundaries of the commons around their own borders. The U.S. and Saudi Arabia both invoked national interest to justify resistance. Saudi officials feared that a carbon price would undercut oil revenues, while American leaders claimed it would raise shipping costs for U.S. exports. In both cases, sovereignty was the language of self-interest. Protecting the homeland became synonymous with preserving fossil competitiveness.

Corporate strategists, meanwhile, read Hardin as a business opportunity. For some firms, regulation is an advantage. Maersk and a few other global carriers had already invested in green methanol ships and supported the carbon levy because it would level the field. For others, especially fuel suppliers and smaller operators, delay was profitable. Every year without a carbon price keeps older fleets viable and fossil fuels cheap. The commons becomes a market to game rather than a system to preserve.

Communitarian and Indigenous perspectives reject the framing of the commons as property at all. For small island nations such as Tuvalu and Vanuatu, the ocean is home, not a pasture. Their push for a carbon levy was grounded in reciprocity: those who profit from maritime trade should help protect the seas that make it possible. Watching the most powerful country on earth block even modest reform was a reminder of how fragile moral appeals become in the face of power.

Sociopath’s are not ignorant herders in the commons, but understand the consequences and choose to graze two sheep anyway. They know the pasture will fail but calculate that they will profit before it does. This mindset is difficult to distinguish from the libertarian argument for absolute freedom, which elevates individual choice above collective restraint. Both claim that responsibility is personal and that limits are a kind of tyranny. The difference is intent: the sociopath acts with awareness and indifference, while at least some libertarians rationalize that the damage will somehow be self-correcting. In the current U.S. position at the IMO, the two have merged. The refusal to price carbon is presented as defense of liberty and competitiveness, but it functions as deliberate overgrazing of the planet’s shared field, a knowing decision to take short-term advantage while others bear the cost of decline.

The American position at the IMO cannot be separated from the Trump-era narrative that climate change is a “green scam.” That phrase, repeated by senior figures and amplified through media networks, has moved from the fringes into policy. It casts every environmental measure as a conspiracy to tax the public and weaken the nation. The claim is politically effective because it transforms collective restraint into betrayal. In that framework, science becomes suspect, and cooperation becomes surrender. The same framing shaped the lobbying campaign that derailed the IMO’s carbon-pricing plan.

This episode reveals more than policy disagreement. It shows how ideology determines action when a commons is under strain. The EU approached the problem as a market correction. The Pacific nations treated it as survival. Saudi Arabia saw a threat to its oil rents. The U.S. viewed it through a lens of nationalism and fossil patronage. Every actor was rational within its own worldview, and that is the heart of Hardin’s insight. The tragedy of the commons is not only that people pursue self-interest, but that they define self-interest differently and cannot agree on the rules.

The cost of delay is concrete. Ships have lifespans of 20 to 30 years. Every new vessel built without zero-carbon capability will still be burning fossil fuels in the 2050s. Carbon pricing would have accelerated investment in cleaner fuels and propulsion. Its absence locks in emissions and puts greater pressure on land-based sectors to make up the gap. The longer the IMO remains divided, the more likely regional systems such as the EU Emissions Trading Scheme will dominate. Fragmented regulation raises costs and weakens global coordination.

The lesson is not that global governance is impossible, but that it cannot succeed without shared definition of fairness. The tragedy of the maritime commons is preventable, but only if the largest players treat stewardship as a duty rather than a concession. Markets can manage scarcity, but they cannot manage morality. The United States once led the creation of institutions designed to prevent exactly this kind of collective failure. Its choice to obstruct rather than lead shows how far it has drifted from that role.

The oceans remain open, the ships continue to sail, and the carbon continues to rise. Hardin’s pasture is the planet. Whether it endures will depend not on our technology, but on our willingness to see the commons not as a burden to avoid, but as the foundation of shared prosperity.