Category Archives: Climate Change

EU Carbon Border Adjustment Could Facilitate a Global Climate Solution

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May 27, 2024 — The European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) has begun asking EU importers to report data on emissions of greenhouse gases by their foreign suppliers (direct, but also indirect, i.e., embodied in the electricity they use).  The first round of reports were due January 31 of this year.  European importers are required by July to have established access to the data on emissions embedded in their suppliers’ products. The full CBAM regime, with European penalties against imports from countries that don’t price carbon as the EU does, will go into operation on January 1st, 2026.   It will have a major impact on producers of carbon-intensive products among EU trading partners. read more

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Solving Western Water Shortages

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May 31, 2023 — A two-decade drought in the western United States, the worst in more than 1,000 years, has pushed chronic water shortages to a critical point, notwithstanding above-average precipitation this past winter.  Similar water shortages afflict Europe and some parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, and Latin America.

Forty million people in western US states get much of their water from the Colorado River. On May 22, their representatives reached a supposedly historic agreement to solve their conflicting claims for the time being.  California, Arizona and Nevada managed to negotiate how to allocate reductions of 14% by 2026, in water drawn from the river. read more

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Let the WTO Referee Carbon Border Tariffs

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December 2, 2022 — The most important task in confronting global climate change is the need to enforce serious quantitative limits on Greenhouse Gas emissions, such as the Nationally Defined Contributions which were originally negotiated in the 2015 Paris Agreement.  The 27th Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC,  which concluded in Sharm-el-Sheikh November 20, did not tackle this task.  Carbon border equalization measures, including tariffs against carbon-intensive imports from lax countries, might supply the teeth that have been missing from such agreements.  But they also risk advancing protectionism, which would ultimately slow the needed global energy transition.  Adjudicating the fairness of carbon tariffs would be a good job for a reinvigorated WTO. read more

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