Barack Obama’s well-known intention to institute a cap-and-trade system on carbon emissions by U.S. businesses could make future trade wars with China inevitable, according to this report in The Vine, the environment and energy blog of the US magazine, The New Republic.

The logic goes like this: A cap-and-trade system ultimately attaches a high costs to polluting beyond a certain defined limit (the “cap”), raising costs for industries that either consume a lot of power or create a lot of pollution or both. As a result, it will: (a) make U.S. firms less competitive than counterparts in countries where one can pollute for free, and (b) encourage U.S. firms to relocate production to such countries to get around the problem.

The resulting exportation of pollution wouldn’t help the global warming problem at all, and indeed, it’d put the Obama administration in hot water with voters for driving more U.S. jobs overseas. So … the administration is already signaling it’d seek to plug that hole by imposing tariffs. “If other countries don’t impose a cost on carbon, then we will be at a disadvantage … [and] we would look at considering perhaps duties that would offset that cost,” the blog quoted Energy Secretary Steven Chu as telling a Congressional panel on Tuesday.

This would likely become the first shot in a trade war, with China retaliating with sanctions of its own, the U.S. responding, and so on and so forth … Not a scenario that leads to happy endings in an interdependent global economy that’s already under considerable pressure. Trade relations with India would probably go down a similar path quickly, should anyone seek to relocate their pollution there (although Western companies have traditionally focused heavy-industry investment in China, looking to India for software and services).

As noted in this blog previously, China and India have almost identical official positions on climate change: i.e. that industrialized Western nations bear the bulk of responsibility, having emitted the bulk of greenhouse gases that has accumulated over decades in the atmosphere. Both also argue that their per-capita emissions remain much lower than those of wealthy countries even today.

Thus, they’re unlikely to either knuckle under to trade pressures to adopt cap-and-trade regimes themselves, or to accept related tariffs. It’s not a philosophical issue, but one of self interest: Both countries are much more highly dependent on coal for energy than industrialized counterparts, so they would be extremely uncompetitive places to locate businesses whose cost structure is — directly or indirectly — tied to carbon emissions.

Watch this space closely.