Creating environmental protection trade barriers would likely result in a global catastrophe, a war bigger than World War I and World War II combined.  This is what most of us have been led to believe.  However a true examination of an energy and trade policy must break out the winners and losers within the domestic political arena.  By doing so, the rationale for a policy, conscious or otherwise, become more clear, allowing an independent legislator to make a better decision based upon facts.  Are not legislators, judges of the public interest, appointed by the people, who are sovereign?  Or is it a legislator's role to intervene as a sovereign himself?  An CO2 tariff would likely have a net positive benefit upon the economy of the United States, while also simultaneously addressing climate change. 

A CO2 tariff would function by measuring the amount of carbon dioxide emitted from the production of a product and placing a price on imported goods which of certain classes, such as electronics, toys, and other manufactured goods.  Similar guidelines would apply to domestic manufacturers of the same class of goods, making it a fair law.  This tariff might cause recipricol retaliation on the part of our trading partners.  However, right now, we have our partners by the balls.  Our main export these days is US Treasuries.  If US treasuries default, then global casino finance would be over as we know it.  All those dollars everyone got from all those years o f selling us stuff will be lost. So we will get a global bailout one way or another.  In truth, the far more likely outcome of such a tariff, would be a radical global shift to carbon neutral technologies, which already exist and would only take a few years to commercialize. 

At the present moment, we live in a world of unprecedented peace, where we still control the few nuclear weapons.  It is not in our trading partner's interests to see the United States fall into insolvency.  Thus, the most likely behavior of our counterparts is to manufacture their products within the boundaries of our regulations.  By crating a tariff in specific, high emitting areas, domestic producers will flourish because they are the closest to the market where the regulations originated.  California's adoption of stricter emission standards in cars is a good example of this mechanism.  The Car companies did not stop selling to california.  Michigan did not declare war on California. Instead, the rest of the country eventually adopted the technology developed to remove pollutants from car emissions.  No one put recipricol tariffs on Californian Wine.  The will be the last chance to make a bold move to stop Climate Change in its tracks.  Dynamic systems such as the global climate system, do not move linearly, and when they jump, the make leaps and bounds before settling down.