O2 tax” on imports from countries not respecting a post-Kyoto regime was launched by the French parliament in a report on climate change in the spring of 2006.1 It attracted much more media attention when the then French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin proposed to study such a tax in the fall of 2006.2 President Jacques Chirac also mentioned it in early 2007.3 Since then, the new President Nicolas Sarkozy and his government have picked up the theme. France has made it increasingly clear that it wants a discussion on what it calls “bor