LONDON — In a clubby mid-rise on the River Thames, its lobby filled with models of container ships and oil tankers, a rather obscure United Nations group is gathering this week to make a momentous decision that will influence whether the world can meet its promise to limit perilous global warming.The meeting of the International Maritime Organization , the U.N.
About 90 percent of the world’s trade travels by ship — a ceaseless movement of 60,000 vessels plying their routes, moving 11 billion tons of goods each year.Essentially, almost every import in a modern American home and garage arrives by boat — cars, appliances, furniture, clothes — and increasingly a lot of the food in the kitchen, too, like frozen burgers from Argentina or green bananas from Colombia.
At the IMO meeting, the United States is leading the charge by “high ambition” countries to hold future warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — to stave off dramatic sea-level rise and other perils. The Biden administration is pressing the shipping sector to go green.