With its narrow focus on price-based policies and ‘explicit’ carbon prices, the EU carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) aims to prevent carbon leakage by ensuring that imported products ‘bear’ the same exact economic costs ‘borne’ by EU products. The proposed US border carbon adjustment (BCA) and the recent proposal for a global steel and aluminium arrangement (GSAA), by contrast, reflect a broader focus on environmental equivalence and recourse to punitive or quasi-punitive remedies. All recently proposed carbon border measures suffer from specific limitations. Further, albeit to a different extent, they are all associated with problematic aspects in terms of WTO law compatibility. This research note enquires whether the GSAA could be fine-tuned at the regulatory design stage in such a way as to provide an environmentally effective and WTO law compatible way forward. The analysis illustrates that recourse to an installation-based approach, emission limit values and product standards would achieve these goals. Nonetheless, the implementation of this ambitious strategy would be fraught with political obstacles.

欧盟碳边界调整机制 (CBAM) 狭隘地关注基于价格的政策和“明确的”碳价格，旨在通过确保进口产品“承担”欧盟产品“承担”的相同经济成本来防止碳泄漏。相比之下，拟议的美国边境碳调整 (BCA) 和最近提出的全球钢铝安排 (GSAA) 反映了对环境等效性和诉诸惩罚性或准惩罚性补救措施的更广泛关注。所有最近提出的碳边界措施都受到特定限制。此外，尽管程度不同，它们都与 WTO 法律兼容性方面的问题有关。本研究报告询问是否可以在监管设计阶段对 GSAA 进行微调，以提供一种环境有效且与 WTO 法律兼容的前进方式。分析表明，采用基于安装的方法、排放限值和产品标准将实现这些目标。尽管如此，这一雄心勃勃的战略的实施将充满政治障碍。