Democrat senator urges Europe to resist Trump threats over climate policy
Europe and its climate allies should learn to “stick to their guns” when dealing with Donald Trump
If the actions of the Trump administration are threatening to sink global climate action, then a European tariff based on the carbon footprint of imported goods is the “last lifeboat” that could save it, the senator for the US state of Rhode Island, Sheldon Whitehouse, told reporters on Thursday.
“We have to protect it at all costs,” he said.
The EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is a levy on a range of products – cement, aluminium, fertilisers, iron and steel, hydrogen and electricity – whose production entails huge emissions of carbon dioxide. It adds a carbon price similar to that already paid by European manufacturers.
“It’s a very sensible, proper balancing mechanism so that foreign competitors don’t get cost advantaged by cheating on carbon emissions,” Whitehouse said. “If that expands with the UK, Australia, Canada, others adding to it, a pathway to climate safety begins to emerge,” he said.
If it were to be scrapped, that pathway would be closed, he said.
Gangster diplomacy
Senator Whitehouse warned that the recent “thuggish approach” used to wreck an International Maritime Organisation (IMO) deal on greener shipping earlier this month could now be used to target the European tariff with “another Al Capone-style attack”.
Ahead of the IMO vote on a net-zero framework for maritime traffic, the Trump administration threatened to sanction not just states, but the very officials that would have signed that agreement. A fractious meeting ended with the vote being postponed and the deal shelved for a year.
“It was like a bunch of gangsters coming into the neighbourhood and smashing windows and threatening shop owners and saying, if you don’t dump this, we’re done,” Whitehouse said.
The IMO debacle provided a clear lesson for Europe and its climate allies, the senator said: they should learn to “stick to their guns”.
Resistance
The EU has already promised the US “additional flexibilities in the CBAM implementation” when agreeing a trade deal to avoid harsher tariffs from Washington this summer.
“I think if you allow yourself to be intimidated by this administration, they will seize all the ground that you cede them and then come back for more,” Whitehouse said. “It’s only when you stop and fight and push back that you have a chance.”
The senator for Rhode Island is a long-standing and vocal critic of an administration he says is controlled by “the most extreme elements of the fossil fuel industry”.
“So there is no such thing as negotiating with these people,” he warned. “You have to be willing to resist. You have to be willing to litigate. You have to be willing to fight and attack rhetorically to put them on their back foot.”
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