If you want to see what green trade policy looks like, it comes in the form of steelmakers around the world grumbling as they fill in spreadsheets about carbon emissions, and palm oil growers from Malaysia and Indonesia poring over the minute detail of photos from satellites.
The destination for all this information is Brussels. Environmental trade negotiations at a multilateral level are essentially dead in the water: India is blocking the whole principle of discussing climate change at the World Trade Organization. The EU’s unilateral carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) and its forthcoming ban on commodities produced on recently deforested land are two of the few green trade games in town.
This being the EU, the measures are generally fine in theory — and possibly even motivated by principle, you never know — but complex and bureaucratic in practice. CBAM and deforestation are respectively the responsibility of the European Commission’s tax and environment directorates, not the trade directorate, and they are less used to dealing with policy affecting foreign producers. Even commission officials privately admit that implementation, especially for deforestation, has been poor. To foreign exporters, the new EU regulations can look a lot like protectionism via so-called technical barriers to trade.