Every shipment may soon carry a carbon passport

Under a discussion model prepared by an inter-ministerial group on trade and climate, every consignment entering a bloc would arrive with a machine-readable document describing not the object inside but the energy burned to bring it into existence. Physical inspection would continue much as now: weight, tariff code, origin. A second process, running elsewhere and possibly in another country, would read the file. In practice it is the second process that would decide whether the crate moves on or turns around.

The document has a working name — the carbon passport — which its drafters dislike, on the grounds that a passport belongs to a person and this one would belong to a pallet of galvanised brackets. They have proposed no alternative. Nothing in the drafting process has ever survived contact with a phrase that fits in a headline.

The file would state the emissions embedded in the goods: the fuel burned at the plant, the grid the plant drew from, and the same figures again for the components the plant bought in. The difficulty begins at the third layer, because that is where most industrial emissions sit and where the least documentation exists. A factory of eighty people would be required to know things about its suppliers that nobody has ever asked its suppliers.

“We are not taxing goods, we are pricing information,” a spokesperson for the working group would say. “A clean product with no records is treated as a dirty one, because in the absence of records that is the only assumption a customs system can safely make. We accept that this is unfair to the well-run factory with bad filing.”

The predictable consequence, already legible in the consultation responses, would be a market in compliance rather than a market in decarbonisation. A mid-sized exporter outside the bloc would choose between two investments: cleaner production, which takes years and capital, or a consultancy that can assemble the dossier, which takes a month and a retainer. The model does not say which one a business under pressure would pick. It does not have to.

The clause trade lawyers would circle is the default value. Where no verified data exists, a standard figure derived from the weakest performers in the sector would apply. This is intended as an incentive, and works as one only where the exporter can afford to prove otherwise. A plant modernised last year in a country with thin certification infrastructure would be assessed as though it were running the oldest furnace on the continent, and would be invited to appeal, in a language that is not its own, against a number generated in one.

None of this would stop trade. It would relocate it, from the loading dock to the filing cabinet. The crate would cross the border eventually. Its paperwork would arrive first, and would cost more.