Today’s Financial Times has a story, “Food safety clash gives taste of battles ahead” that does not mention the increasing drive by Europe – facing the costs of its unilateral if failed insistence on sticking with Kyoto’s rationing scheme – to impose trade barriers on imports on the grounds that the energy imbedded in the products represent an unfair subsidy due to not having been punitively taxed in the name of global warming. But it should be read in that context (as described previously in PG here).
FWIW, those in the know tell me that the fear of the U.S. jumping on board with such an agenda (through the Bingaman legislation) – as a payoff to labor in the event we also jump aboard Europe’s self-inflicted Emission Trading Scheme approach to “global warming” – has left China firmly in the administration’s camp when it comes to negotiating a post-Kyoto alternative (shhh, can’t call it that). How disappointing it would prove to many on Capitol Hill and elsewhere should Bingaman’s misguided effort result in Bush pulling off that coup (such characterization premised on the “do your own thing” approach the administration vows).