WASHINGTON — Efforts to mitigate climate change are prompting countries across the world to embrace dramatically different policies toward industry and trade, bringing governments into conflict.These new clashes over climate policy are straining international alliances and the global trading system, hinting at a future in which policies aimed at staving off environmental catastrophe could also result in more frequent cross-border trade wars.In recent months, the United States and Europe have proposed or introduced subsidies, tariffs and other policies aimed at speeding the green energy transition. Proponents of the measures say governments must move aggressively to expand sources of cleaner energy and penalize the biggest emitters of planet-warming gases if they hope to avert a global climate disaster.But critics say these policies often put foreign countries and companies at a disadvantage, as governments subsidize their own industries or charge new tariffs on foreign products. The policies depart from a decades-long status quo in trade, in which the United States and Europe often joined forces through the World Trade Organization to try to knock down trade barriers and encourage countries to treat one another’s products more equally to boost global commerce.Now, new policies are pitting close allies against one another and widening fractures in an already fragile system of global trade governance, as countries try to contend with the existential challenge of climate change.“The climate crisis requires economic transformation at a scale and speed humanity has never attempted in our 5,000 years of written history,” said Todd N. Tucker, the director of industrial policy and trade at the Roosevelt Institute, who is an advocate for some of the measures. “Unsurprisingly, a task of this magnitude will require a new policy tool kit.”The current system of global trade funnels tens of millions of shipping containers stuffed with couches, clothing and car parts from foreign factories to the United States each year, often at astonishingly low prices. But the prices that consumers …
Climate Change May Bring New Era of Trade Wars, as E.U. and U.S. Spar – The New York Times
