The International Maritime Organization (IMO), routinely lays down rules that regulate international shipping which carries almost all of the world’s trade. These rules are a result of consensus arrived at carefully, with much expert input, through meetings that are not dramatic. But in October, when the IMO that has 176 member-nations met to vote on decarbonising global shipping as a response to climate change, the U.S. actively disrupted the meeting. Chaos ruled. Threats were made. Arms were twisted. And the vote on a decarbonization programme that India helped to draft was deferred by a year.