Paris - In a letter to European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, made public Tuesday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has proposed the establishment of a so-called carbon import tax to punish countries who do not conform to greenhouse gas emission limits. In this scheme, nations importing products from these polluter countries would be forced to pay a tariff on the goods or be obligated to purchase emission permits.
"Such a mechanism is, in any case, necessary to motivate these countries to support the effort" of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, Sarkozy wrote.
The French president also called for a "progressive convergence towards the same volume of carbon dioxide emission per resident in every country of the Union."
On January 23, the European Commission is set to propose a series of laws aimed at forcing key EU industries to cut down the amount of greenhouse gases they produce.
Industrial lobbyists and trade unionists have already warned that this could make European industries move their production facilities to non-EU countries with no such environmental rules.
If that happens, the EU should tax relevant products from those countries in order to avoid unfair competition, they say.
According to a draft of the commission's legislation, the Brussels-based executive is to analyse the situation in global trade in 2011, in order to decide whether some sort of carbon import tax might indeed be called for.
France will take over the European Union's rotating six-month presidency in July.
