Much work remains to be done to create a concrete proposal on levying tariffs on imports from countries that are not as aggressive as the U.S. is about battling climate change, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said in a brief Capitol hallway interview Aug. 10. Such a tariff is planned as a pay-for in the upcoming spending bill for education and daycare, income support, health care, housing and environmental priorities. "People have asked, 'What is this really all about?'” he said. "We have defined this as making sure that, as our workers and our manufacturers push very hard to modernize our infrastructure, make it greener and cleaner, that other countries don't undercut our workers and manufacturers. That is the philosophical foundation."
International coordination on how to account for embedded emissions in traded products is essential, Canada asserted in a recently published white paper about its exploration of a carbon border adjustment tax. "Work on international border carbon adjustments is in progress. An important part of advancing this work is ensuring a common understanding. To this effect, the government will continue its important conversations with Canadians and international partners, including the United States and European Union, in the coming months," the government wrote.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai told Washington state farmers Aug. 5 that she wants to make sure agricultural exporters "can bring your products to new markets and new customers," and that she is holding trading partners accountable for their commitments, such as improved dairy access in Canada and opening Mexico to American fresh potato exports. Tai was visiting the district of Rep. Suzan DelBene, a Democratic leader for free trade and a House Ways and Means Committee member. This followed a similar visit last month to Rep. Ron Kind's district in Wisconsin, where she had the same message to farmers. Kind, too, is a prominent Democrat supporting free trade and a Ways and Means member. In June, Tai visited Flint, Michigan, home to Rep. Dan Kildee, a Ways and Means Democrat who always talks about how trade devastated manufacturing workers in Flint. She heard from workers who told her how trade had affected them.
More than 30 trade groups, led by the U.S.-China Business Council, are asking the Biden administration to retroactively restore product exclusions that expired last year, open a new exclusion application process "and continue negotiations with China to remove both nations’ counterproductive tariffs as soon as possible." In an Aug. 5 letter, the groups said China followed through on phase one promises to open to financial services providers and eliminate market access barriers for beef and some fruits and grains. They acknowledged that China is not on track to meet its purchase commitments, and said that China needs to be prodded to fully implement some other structural commitments, "particularly in the areas of biotechnology, patent linkage, services (including financial services), and protection of intellectual property rights."
An annual survey of U.S. firms with operations in China that are members of the U.S.-China Business Council found that about 80% of firms said that U.S.-China tensions affected their businesses. Of that group, about half said it caused lost sales in China; about a quarter said they lost sales due to Chinese retaliatory tariffs.
Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., told an Atlantic Council webinar that although business executives have told the bipartisan Climate Caucus that they want a carbon tax, it's more likely that a carbon adjustment tax would come first in Congress. Coons, speaking Aug. 3, said, “It seems that we may actually be able to move first, to assessing what the regulatory price already is on carbon in our economy and setting a border carbon adjustment” tax. He said it makes sense to work on that now because Canada, the United Kingdom and the European Union are all planning similar strategies.
The bipartisan infrastructure bill being debated in the Senate this week invests $17 billion in port infrastructure, according to a White House summary of the more than 2,000-page bill. That money would go to maintenance backlogs, emissions and congestion near ports, and for electrification and other low-carbon technologies at ports of entry. It also invests $25 billion in airports.
A Senate bill that would create an export certification system for Native American cultural items passed out of the Indian Affairs Committee July 28. The bill, which was introduced by Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., also has a House companion bill, called the Safeguard Tribal Objects of Patrimony Act of 2021. In addition to the export certification system, it explicitly prohibits the export of Native American cultural items that were illegally obtained, and requires that the Interior Department convene a Native working group of Indian tribe and Native Hawaiian representatives “to provide advice on issues concerning the return of, and illegal trade in, human remains and cultural items.”
The shift from NAFTA to USMCA has been taxing for vehicle manufacturing sector companies, panelists on a KPMG seminar said about the trade deal, one year in. But for Georgia-Pacific, compliance is simpler after the rewrite. Myesha Cottom, director of international trade at Georgia-Pacific, said that getting rid of the template for NAFTA goods and going to minimum data elements means less administrative burden. "I’m optimistic that the administrative burden will continue to decrease," she said during the July 28 webinar.
Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., along with two other House Republicans, introduced a bill that would require the administration to impose sanctions on "persons who are knowingly responsible for or complicit in, or have directly or indirectly engaged in, supporting the illegal occupation of Tibet." The bill's text was published July 26. "In rejecting the seven-decade long illegal occupation of Tibet by the forces of the Chinese Communist Party, the United States of America would provide relief to a long-suffering people and reinforce its reputation as a strident defender of global human rights," the bill says. The bill says that the administration would be required to impose the sanctions within 180 days of the bill becoming law, unless the president says that not applying sanctions to a certain party is in the national interest of the U.S. In that case, he would have to give Congress a justification for the waiver.