Effectively what would happen is high CO2 parts (such as concrete) would be manufactured in a country that doesn't tax it. If you say "Oh, well we'll just tariff it!" then the next step would be to ship it to a country without said tariff. That country could then move the goods directly to the taxed nation or it could ping pong a bit till it reaches it's end goal.
Would that raise prices? Absolutely, but probably less than the $100 tax would. All the while increasing the amount of CO2 emitted due to all the shipping that would occur.
And, if you don't think that would happen, just look at how it's worked out with child labor laws.
The balancing act would be to tax hard enough to make industries want to decrease their emissions, yet low enough that importing isn't more economically viable. As a bonus, you could spend that revenue in building out clean energy sources to effect change faster.
Duties are based on the country of origin, a middleman country would have to do something substantial to the goods to change the country of origin (for example taking wafers and manufacturing them into bare printed circuit boards).
Even with a country doing something significant they could still be subject to counterveiling and/or anti-dumping duties for another country. For example the tariff 8517700000 which is frequently used for parts of mobile phones like the screen/keypad/bezel/antenna from say Vietnam are still potentially subject to ADD/CVD for China. Or photo-voltaic cells/panels universally flag as potentially subject to ADD/CVD regardless of the declared country of origin.
In examples like the above two part of the scope of the investigation involves companies in those countries known to use things from CN, such as aluminum extrusions for the 8517700000, that are subject to ADD/CVD so they have to disclaim it on a case by case basis or pay the ADD/CVD charges.
Source: this is what I do for a living and the 8517700000 VN example is actually from this morning with some mobile phone displays.
Take food as an example. With the recent china soybean tariffs the way that some manufactures got around it was first shipping the goods to Thailand.
From there it is either processed or re-exported.
https://www.scbeic.com/th/detail/product/4730
So long as the middleman country/countries have lax regulations and the actors aren't pushing heavily on them, then goods can flow (all be it at increased cost due to additional shipping/repackaging).
Yeah, except people have tried to do this with aluminum by bringing it through Mexico and it doesnt' really work. This is partly why say 8517700000 from Vietnam like in my example is potentially subject to anti-dumping as if it were from China.
https://fortune.com/2016/09/09/chinese-aluminum-giant-is-tie...
Sure, it works for some handbags or sunglasses, even a few cargo containers of product, but any meaningful amount and forget about it.
Trees and other plants take carbon from air, energy from the sub, and use it to build themselves. We take carbon from them and put it back into the air, using the excess energy to move and think.
Which was in the air in the past few months to handful of years depending on how fresh the food is and what it is (plant, animal). Unlike the CO2 from fossil fuels which was sequestered for millions of years. And had that not been harvested for food, it would have sat their being decomposed in a field somewhere returning that carbon right back into the atmosphere via animals and bacteria snacking on it as they broke it down.
The oil and coal only happen when organic matter is subjected to pressure and non-porous geological layers. Otherwise you get peat fields and those emit methane.