The plan gets bogged down in international politics, while the counterplan's domestic solution is the best policy option.
Noah Kaufman et al 20, an economist who has worked under President Biden as a Senior Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers. He received his BS in economics from Duke University, and his PhD and MS in economics from the University of Texas at Austin. John Larsen is a director at Rhodium Group and leads the firm’s US power sector and energy systems research. Ben King is a research analyst at Rhodium Group, focusing on US energy policy and markets. Peter Marsters is a former Research Associate at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University SIPA, "Output-Based Rebates: An Alternative to Border Carbon Adjustments for Preserving US Competitiveness," 12/03/2020, https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/publications/output-based-rebates-an-alternative-to-border-carbon-adjustments-for-preserving-us-competitiveness/
Specifically, the literature suggests at least three major challenges.
First, while in theory a BCA would tax imports and provide a rebate to exports based on carbon intensity, in reality, a BCA would only apply to a small subset of imports and exports because it would be administratively infeasible to apply the BCA to thousands of internationally traded products.[5] But application to only a portion of products would create unintended consequences; for example, if a BCA covers imports of steel but not imports of cars made with steel, then it might provide an incentive to shift car manufacturing outside of the United States.[6]
A second challenge is determining the carbon content of the imported products covered by the BCA. It would be difficult to estimate the actual carbon content of every product, and, even if that were possible, foreign producers could sell their cleaner products in the United States and their dirtier products in markets with less stringent regulations. To provide the right incentives, the fee should ideally be assessed based on the total emissions caused by the production of the specific imported product at a given time, but that depends on the characteristics of the exporting country’s energy system and is probably not administratively feasible to determine.[7] Some scholars have proposed an imperfect middle ground, whereby foreign products are charged based on the average carbon intensity of a firm’s production in each exporting country.[8]
A third challenge relates to regulations in other countries. Some proposals suggest applying the fee equally to all imports, regardless of whether the emissions of foreign competitors are comparably regulated at home.[9] This would cause some products to be taxed or regulated twice for the same emissions unless the home country put in place a reciprocal BCA. Other proposals suggest charging a lower (or zero) fee on imports from countries with climate regulations. However, no countries’ climate policies consist of a simple carbon price; they are patchworks of regulations and subsidies that are difficult to objectively convert into a single metric. Additionally, some scholars are concerned such an approach could violate the principles of non-discrimination required by international trade law.[10] However, others assert that accounting for other countries’ regulations is the best way to comply with the rules of the World Trade Organization.[11]