Good News & Bad News, page-35793

Very interesting interview wrt the EU Critical Minerals Act. To my way of thinking, the EU’s CO2 regulations will be a major challenge from the get-go, thus unlikely to meet most of their stated 2030 targets. I’m not against the CO2 regulations, that’s a good thing, but so many barriers before they get started, which all this same talk started back in 2017, a few battery and EV factories since, that’s about it at this point.

Anyways, I have a question wrt the carbon tax they are planning to implement for critical mineral imports, discussed at about the 14-minute mark. Maybe someone here can help me understand how they reduce the carbon footprint of an imported product by placing a tax on that product as it crosses the EU border. I understand the mechanism is to encourage exporters to clean up their act, but in simple terms, we’ll take your filthy product anyway and boost our tax revenues while we are at it.

I think it’s going to be an expensive experimental path to nowhere, business will move operations elsewhere, as we have already seen over the past little while following the introduction of the US IRA, though must say the EU’s ambitions/targets are mild, but grand in complexity, to say the least.