US Threatens IMO Members as Climate Rules Set for Adoption

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US Threatens IMO Members as Climate Rules Set for Adoption

The Trump administration warned Tuesday it would “retaliate” against fellow member states at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) if the IMO Net Zero Framework pushes through, saying the draft regulations would “unfairly” burden the United States. Last April the IMO’s Marine Environment Protection Committee approved what the IMO said was the first policy in the […]

Last April the IMO’s Marine Environment Protection Committee approved what the IMO said was the first policy in the world “to combine mandatory emissions limits and GHG pricing across an entire industry sector”.

The Net Zero Framework is set to be formally adopted October 2025 before entry into force 2027, according to the IMO.

“President Trump has made it clear that the United States will not accept any international environmental agreement that unduly or unfairly burdens the United States or harms the interests of the American people”, said a joint statement by the U.S. secretaries of state, commerce, energy and transport.

“Whatever its stated goals, the proposed framework is effectively a global carbon tax on Americans levied by an unaccountable UN organization”, the statement added.

“These fuel standards would conveniently benefit China by requiring the use of expensive fuels unavailable at global scale.

“These standards would also preclude the use of proven technologies that fuel global shipping fleets, including lower emissions options where U.S. industry leads such as liquified natural gas and biofuels.

“Under this framework, ships will have to pay fees for failing to meet unattainable fuel standards and emissions targets. These fees will drive up energy and transportation and leisure cruise costs. Even small vessels would incur millions of dollars in fees, directly driving up costs for American consumers”.

The statement warned, “Our fellow IMO members should be on notice that we will look for their support against this action and not hesitate to retaliate or explore remedies for our citizens should this endeavor fail”.

Rigzone asked the IMO and China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry for comment.

The Net Zero Framework would be mandatory for ships of over 5,000 gross tonnage, which “emit 85 percent of the total CO2 emissions from international shipping”, the IMO said in a statement April 11.

Under the draft regulations, “ships must reduce, over time, their annual greenhouse gas fuel intensity (GFI) – that is, how much GHG is emitted for each unit of energy used”, the IMO said. “This is calculated using a well-to-wake approach.

“Ships emitting above GFI thresholds will have to acquire remedial units to balance its [sic] deficit emissions, while those using zero or near-zero GHG technologies will be eligible for financial rewards.

“There will be two levels of compliance with GHG Fuel Intensity targets: a Base Target and a Direct Compliance Target at which ships would be eligible to earn ‘surplus units’. 

“Ships that emit above the set thresholds can balance their emissions deficit by: transferring surplus units from other ships; using surplus units they have already banked; using remedial units acquired through contributions to the IMO Net-Zero Fund”.

The fund will be established to collect pricing contributions from emissions, which would be used to “reward low-emission ships; support innovation, research, infrastructure and just transition initiatives in developing countries; fund training, technology transfer and capacity building to support the IMO GHG Strategy; and mitigate negative impacts on vulnerable states, such as Small Island Developing States and Least Developed Countries”.

In July 2023 the IMO committed to achieving net zero emissions in the shipping sector come 2050, agreeing to set a pricing mechanism for emissions and enforce a fuel standard.

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Cisco strengthens AI networking story

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ISO-NE should make its governance transparent, accessible and accountable

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New Compute Exchange service answers GPU pricing queries

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Data center sustainability efforts stall slightly in 2025

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Arista’s latest networking results: 4 critical takeaways

“We also think UALink is another spec that’s coming out, and that may run as an overlay on top of an Ethernet underlay. There needs to be some firm standards there because today, scale-up is frankly all proprietary NV Link. And we’re encouraged by—just like we worked hard to found the Ultra Ethernet Consortium as a member for some of the back-end Ethernet, and the migration from InfiniBand to Ethernet is literally happening in 3 to 5 years. We expect the same phenomenon on scale-up,” Ullal said. “The rise in Agentic AI ensures any-to-any conversations with bidirectional bandwidth utilization. Such AI agents are pushing the envelope of LAN and WAN traffic patterns in the enterprise,” Ullal said. Work to do on VeloCloud integration The recent acquisition of VeloCloud was also a hot topic of the second quarter results that included the introduction of former Cisco exec and industry veteran Todd Nightingale, as its newly appointed President & COO. “It’s only been a month, but I can’t tell you how impressed I am with the passion and focus of the team, the trust that Arista customers have in the technology and the enormous opportunity we have ahead of us in data center, AI, and in the campus,” Nightingale said. “VeloCloud’s secure AI optimized WAN portfolio offers seamless application-aware solutions to connect customer branch sites, complementing Arista’s leading spines in the data center and campus,” Ullal said. “In a classic leaf-spine atomic identifier, we are enabling multipathing, encryption, in-band network telemetry, segmentation, application identification, and traffic engineering across distributed enterprise sites. We are so excited to fill this missing void in our distributed enterprise puzzle to bring that holistic branch solution.” “We also intend to work closely with best-of-breed security partners to enable SASE overlays. Please do note that VeloCloud is not

Enterprise tips for cloud success

The remaining tips were cited by roughly two-thirds of the enterprises. Tip number three is to look especially at applications whose users are widely dispersed. And by “widely” here, they mean on different continents, not just different neighborhoods. The reason is that quality of experience and even availability can be compromised when work has to transit a lot of networks just to get to where it’s processed. This can lead to user dissatisfaction, and dispersing resources closer to the users may be the only solution. If an enterprise doesn’t already have their own data center located close to each user concentration, chances are that putting a new hosting point in themselves couldn’t achieve reasonable economy of scale in capex, power and cooling, and operations costs. The cloud would be cheaper. A qualifying comment here is to take great care in evaluating the real impact of dispersion of application users. In some cases, there may not be enough of a difference in QoE or availability to require dispersing hosting points, and in fact it may be that where the application is hosted isn’t even the problem. “The cloud may look like the easy way out,” one enterprise said, “but it may not be the economical way.” See where your QoE issues really lie before you go to the cloud’s distributed hosting to fix them. Tip four is to examine the user-to-application interaction model carefully, to see if there’s a large non-transactional component. Mission-critical business systems, and business core databases, are almost always in the data center. The stuff that changes them are the transactions that add, update, and delete records. If an application’s user interaction is tightly coupled to the creation of transactions, then its processing is tied to those data center resources. That makes it harder to move the user-interface

Stargate’s slow start reveals the real bottlenecks in scaling AI infrastructure

The CFO emphasized that SoftBank remains committed to its original target of $346 billion (JPY 500 billion) over 4 years for the Stargate project, noting that major sites have been selected in the US and preparations are taking place simultaneously across multiple fronts. Requests for comment to Stargate partners Nvidia, OpenAI, and Oracle remain unanswered. Infrastructure reality check for CIOs These challenges offer important lessons for enterprise IT leaders facing similar AI infrastructure decisions. Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst and CEO at Greyhound Research, said that Goto’s confirmation of delays “reflects a challenge CIOs see repeatedly” in partner onboarding delays, service activation slips, and revised delivery commitments from cloud and datacenter providers. Oishi Mazumder, senior analyst at Everest Group, noted that “SoftBank’s Stargate delays show that AI infrastructure is not constrained by compute or capital, but by land, energy, and stakeholder alignment.” The analyst emphasized that CIOs must treat AI infrastructure “as a cross-functional transformation, not an IT upgrade, demanding long-term, ecosystem-wide planning.” “Scaling AI infrastructure depends less on the technical readiness of servers or GPUs and more on the orchestration of distributed stakeholders — utilities, regulators, construction partners, hardware suppliers, and service providers — each with their own cadence and constraints,” Gogia said.

Incentivizing the Digital Future: Inside America’s Race to Attract Data Centers

Across the United States, states are rolling out a wave of new tax incentives aimed squarely at attracting data centers, one of the country’s fastest-growing industries. Once clustered in only a handful of industry-friendly regions, today’s data-center boom is rapidly spreading, pushed along by profound shifts in federal policy, surging demand for artificial intelligence, and the drive toward digital transformation across every sector of the economy. Nowhere is this transformation more visible than in the intensifying state-by-state competition to land massive infrastructure investments, advanced technology jobs, and the alluring prospect of long-term economic growth. The past year alone has seen a record number of states introducing or expanding incentives for data centers, from tax credits to expedited permitting, reflecting a new era of proactive, tech-focused economic development policy. Behind these moves, federal initiatives and funding packages underscore the essential role of digital infrastructure as a national priority, encouraging states to lower barriers for data center construction and operation. As states watch their neighbors reap direct investment and job creation benefits, a real “domino effect” emerges: one state’s success becomes another’s blueprint, heightening the pressure and urgency to compete. Yet, this wave of incentives also exposes deeper questions about the local impact, community costs, and the evolving relationship between public policy and the tech industry. From federal levels to town halls, there are notable shifts in both opportunities and challenges shaping the landscape of digital infrastructure advancement. Industry Drivers: the Federal Push and Growth of AI The past year has witnessed a profound federal policy shift aimed squarely at accelerating U.S. digital infrastructure, especially for data centers in direct response both to the explosive growth of artificial intelligence and to intensifying international competition. In July 2025, the administration unveiled “America’s AI Action Plan,” accompanied by multiple executive orders that collectively redefined

Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

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John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

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OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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