Trade, tariffs and carbon pricing may not make for intriguing conversation around the holiday dinner table, but they are increasingly important topics as nations wrestle with reducing climate warming emissions. The next Trump administration — even without climate policy as a priority — could see tariffs based on foreign greenhouse gas emissions as a way to advance U.S. manufacturing interests.

This was the subject of a recent online forum hosted by the Maine State Chamber of Commerce and Science is US, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit initiative of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Since the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015 with its country-specific pledge approach to international climate policy, nations have been developing domestic plans to reduce climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions. The country-specific approaches can take a variety of strategies, though many include carbon pricing which the World Bank describes as quantifying the “external costs of carbon emissions — costs that the public pays for in other ways, such as damage from climate change to crops and health care costs from heat waves and droughts or to property from flooding and sea level rise — and tie them to their sources through a price on carbon.”

When a price is put on carbon pollution, businesses have an incentive to take action to reduce emissions and invest in cleaner production. When such a price is applied to imported goods, this incentive applies to foreign producers and global businesses, too. But countries could also develop stronger carbon pricing policies in response — to reduce the impact of these new fees on their exports.

This idea isn’t theoretical. To address greenhouse gas emissions from imports and level the playing field with domestic manufacturers, the European Union is in the process of implementing carbon border adjustment tariffs to accompany its own domestic carbon pricing policy. The European Union will impose tariffs based on their carbon intensity: Some of the highest carbon intensive products are iron and steel, aluminum, cement, chemicals, electricity, fertilizers, and hydrogen.

When products move between the E.U. and countries with carbon pricing policies in place, the E.U. may make carbon tariff rebates available. The Group of 20 industrialized nations (G20), which consists of 19 nations and two collective members — the E.U. and the African Union — represent 85% of the world’s gross domestic product, 75% of global exports and 80% of the world’s population. Of the G20 members, only three have not adopted carbon pricing to lower greenhouse gas emissions — Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

U.S. Sen. Angus King of Maine, who participated in the forum, called for the adoption of federal legislation to support research to determine the carbon intensity of a range of products, which might serve as the first step toward establishing climate tariffs on imported goods. “Good policy starts with good data,” he says.

The imposition of climate-related tariffs, he argues, would level the playing field for U.S. businesses who produce comparatively carbon-efficient, and given President Trump’s support for applying tariffs of varying levels to products imported into the U.S., it is Sen. King’s hope that the next administration would find a climate tariff acceptable.

In the absence of a national carbon pricing strategy, states are on their own to set emission reduction goals and identify the strategies to achieve them. Maine, for its part, adopted the “Maine Won’t Wait” plan in 2020 and published an update to it in November. On the West Coast, Washington state citizens last month voted to keep its own carbon pricing system that started in 2023.

As Professor Barbara Kates-Garnick of Tufts University told the forum, states and their regional partners can lead the movement toward cleaner forms of energy and reduce reliance on fossil fuels. While onshore wind and biomass generate much of Maine’s renewable energy, she believes Maine’s push to build floating, offshore wind turbines represents the type of innovation that will help the state reach its emission-reduction goals while producing good jobs that pay well and are resilient without hurting our marine environment.

As a native Mainer, I say the state can’t wait.

A graduate of Brunswick High School, Dr. Palmer is an expert on the economics of environmental, climate and public utility regulation. She is a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, an independent, nonprofit research institution in Washington, D.C.