Kevin Dempsey, the president of the American Iron and Steel Institute, an industry group, said that the tariffs had been “very effective” compared with previous one-off trade actions that had only targeted specific countries or specific products.

“Things would be, without those tariffs, much worse for the industry,” Mr. Dempsey said.

Read the full article here.

On the US side, Kevin Dempsey, president of the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI), said he doesn’t want to speculate on potential policy actions since the president-elect is not yet in office.

However, “I will say that we do believe that tariffs are a legitimate tool for governments to use to address a range of difficult and important issues,” he told SMU.

Dempsey pointed out that both the US and Canada have increased tariffs on Chinese steel and electric vehicles in recent months “in response to massive Chinese government subsidies and other forms of unfair trade.”

He also noted that “American steel producers believe these tariff actions were fully justified, but we also believe more needs to be done.

“My hope is that the governments of the United States and Canada will work together to address these challenges that impact both countries, just as they did when they negotiated the USMCA during President Trump’s first term,” Dempsey concluded.

The statement from AISI was emphasized in the introductory remarks made by the sponsors of the bill.

“Although this requirement has not yet come into force, domestic steelmakers report they believe this future rule is already having an impact, and they expect this requirement could also drive increased sourcing from the region in the future,” Dempsey said.

Click here to read more in the October 10 version of Politico Morning Trade.

The US Energy Department rolled out a pilot project Sept. 25 to measure the greenhouse gas intensity of certain industrial products, including steel. The Biden administration has sought to tackle steel emissions as part of a wider effort to increase the US industrial base in a climate friendly way.

The pilot program is a step toward assessing the environmental footprint of industrial products and promoting the output of domestic producers, said Kevin Dempsey, president and CEO of the American Iron and Steel Institute.

“We need a trade policy that ensures that all of the efforts being made domestically to invest in all this much cleaner production, which is expensive, is not undercut by imports of much dirtier but much cheaper steel from abroad,” Dempsey told S&P Global Commodity Insights. “For that, we really need to have measurements on the average emissions intensity of the full range of steel products made in the US as a baseline to compare to the emissions intensity of steel products coming from overseas.”

Measuring average emissions would open the door to establishing a “border fee” that accounts for the difference in emissions intensity between domestic products and imports “so that the dirty but cheap imports do not undercut the domestic product,” Dempsey added.

Read the full article here.