Cap-and-trade’s impact on refining

From Environmental Capital:

Energy and climate legislation in Congress will create plenty of winners and losers, but one group in particular looks to get battered: U.S. refiners.

That’s the finding of a new report by energy consultants Wood Mackenzie, which says that cap-and-trade legislation will cost U.S. refiners about $100 billion a year by 2015 and put them at a competitive disadvantage to refiners in Europe. (The refining industry’s already warned about pain from climate legislation.)

There are still plenty of uncertainties about how climate legislation would affect the refining industry. Wood Mac’s analysis, for instance, is of the House version of climate legislation; the Senate version has even tougher rules for refiners right now.

It’s also not clear if refiners would be able to pass on the cost of carbon legislation to consumers. If they do, it would add 45 cents to the price of a gallon of gas, Wood Mac says.

But refiners may not be able to pass on the additional costs because of the threat of a flood of cheap gasoline imports from Europe. Current legislation leaves a loophole in which imported gasoline wouldn’t be subject to the same restrictions.

Which means that the government’s environmental plans could end up undermining another administration goal—energy security—by increasing the share of imported fuels.

True (and others - such as Geoff Styles, repeatedly - have noticed) but this would be fairly easily fixed by a border tax on imported gasoline, no?

(Hmm, I have pretty vocally opposed "border adjustments" before – is this position inconsistent? I'm afraid it might be...)