Republican politicians aren’t known for being particularly receptive to anything involving regulation, climate or European bureaucrats, let alone all three. Somehow, the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, or CBAM, has found an audience in the red representative of a deeply red state.

Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a Republican, recently proposed a bill for a Foreign Pollution Fee Act. This would impose tariffs on imports of goods in 16 industrial sectors based on their greenhouse-gas intensity, as determined by federal bodies. Calculated as a percentage of value, rather than a flat amount, and assessed on intensity relative to what’s seen in the US, the somewhat convoluted bill doesn’t set an explicit carbon price. That would be DOA in this GOP and Cassidy is at pains to dispel the notion, writing in a recent Foreign Affairs article pitching the idea
“the fee is not a domestic carbon price.”