Turning Trump’s trade war into a tool to fight climate change
by Sabrina Shankman, InsideClimate News
As the Trump administration’s trade war heats up, a group of experts is proposing a new way to counter protectionism—and prod the United States back into climate action at the same time.
In a commentary in the journal Nature, the team of trade and climate policy experts called for a global punitive tax on imports based on their carbon footprint.
It’s an idea that was invented to address the problem of “free riders”—nations that refuse to join the global practice of putting a price on carbon, such as a tax or a cap-and-trade market mechanism. To avoid giving the free riders a competitive advantage in world trade, the carbon price would be collected on their products as an import tariff at the border.
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