Watts Up With That? 7/17/2021
While John Kerry is in Moscow to agree some kind of US-Russian ‘climate cooperation,’ the EU is planning to announce carbon trade barriers against the rest of the world, including the US.It was inevitable that the relentless radicalisation of climate hysteria and protectionist carbon border taxes would ultimately lead to a global trade war and the self-destruction of the Western alliance.
Today, we are a step closer today to this geopolitical upheaval that is likely to unravel the international political order for good.
Biden wanted a climate alliance with Europe. He’s getting a fight.
A brewing carbon trade war with Europe threatens to scuttle President Joe Biden’s hopes for cross-Atlantic harmony in the fight against climate change.The European Union’s leadership is set to unveil a proposal on Wednesday to tax imports from countries — including the U.S. — that lack aggressive carbon-reducing policies. That move has sparked fears that protectionism will derail hopes for a new era of international climate change cooperation ushered in by Biden’s presidency.
The Biden administration is wrestling with how to respond to the new tariff threats, even as it works with the EU to remove trade barriers that former President Donald Trump had slapped onto European goods like steel and aluminum.
“You could bring back the kind of trade frictions that have been characteristics of the U.S.-EU relationship with tit-for-tat solutions, and I think that’s a problem,”said John Podesta, who was President Barack Obama’s top climate adviser and is in frequent contact with Biden officials.“
The bilateral relationship between the U.S. and EU democracy is perhaps the most important relationship now to create a structure for solving these global problems, and that’s why this is sort of a test case for that. Can we get our act together now?”
Biden has made addressing climate change one of his administration’s top priorities, but the U.S. is miles behind the European Union, which has created a bloc-wide carbon trading system to wean itself off the greenhouse gas that plays the biggest role in warming the planet. As the EU tightens its regulations on carbon emissions, it’s wary of allowing foreign companies that face no climate-related costs at home to flood its market with cheaper goods.
The tariffs the EU is expected to propose on Wednesday will leave Biden with a grim set of options. The White House could take a page from Trump’s trade playbook and impose its own retaliatory tariffs,or it could seek to challenge the EU’s move by resurrecting the World Trade Organization’s hobbled dispute resolution body, an option sharply opposed by U.S. climate policy advocates.
More:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/07/17/biden-wanted-a-climate-alliance-with-europe-hes-getting-a-carbon-trade-war/
