Is intelligent alien life common in the universe?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is intelligent alien life common in the universe?". Your opponent's style: Carl Sagan

THB that ports should impose environmental tariffs on ships that fail to meet sustainability standards

You're conflating a regulatory tool with an economic solution, and that's where your argument collapses. Environmental tariffs don't actually *reduce* emissions, they just redistribute where polluting happens. A ship blocked from one port simply reroutes to another with laxer standards, moving the problem rather than solving it. You're also ignoring that developing nations' shipping infrastructure already operates on razor-thin margins, so tariffs become a hidden tax on their exports, not a climate lever. The real bottleneck isn't port access, it's fuel technology and retrofit costs. Penalizing ports won't accelerate that innovation. Why target the symptom when the disease is decades behind on shipping fuel standards?