NEXT PARAGRAPH says BCAs fail.
1AC Morris ’18 [Adele Cecile; senior fellow and policy director for Climate and Energy Economics at the Brookings Institution.; “MAKING BORDER CARBON ADJUSTMENTS WORK IN LAW AND PRACTICE,”; Tax Policy Center; 07-26-2018; https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TPC_20180726_Morris-Making-Border-Carbon-Adjustments-Work.pdf; ror]
BCAs have their downsides. Even if the environmental and distributional motivations are well-intended, BCAs may not raise overall social welfare relative to the same carbon tax without BCAs (Kortum and Weisbach 2017, p. 423). To complicate matters, McKibbin et al. (2018, p. 6) show that the welfare benefits of import BCAs can depend on how the government uses the carbon tax and import BCA revenue. Böhringer et al. (2016) note that whether or not BCAs
“can be designed in a manner that is legal under current international trade agreements is an ongoing and intensively contested debate. Moreover, the task of calculating tariff rates based on foreign pollution levels is likely to be difficult and contentious. For both of these reasons, there may be a risk to disrupting the regime of relatively free trade that has emerged under the …WTO if climate and trade policies are linked via carbon tariffs.”
Others also argue BCAs could backfire by introducing a controversial and divisive measure in the already fraught multilateral climate process (Cosbey et al. 2012). The international friction that arose following the European Union’s imposition of an aviation emissions levy, a BCA-like policy, is instructive. Moreover, using BCAs as diplomatic leverage on the poorest countries could violate the principle of common-but-differentiated responsibilities within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).