https://www.city-journal.org/article/eu-green-deal-parliament-environmental-labor-mandates
Most Americans pay little heed to the machinations of the European Parliament, the European Commission, or the various regulatory bodies of the European Union. They should. As part of its expansive EU Green Deal, Brussels bureaucrats have been working to put American companies that do business in Europe—or even those that merely do business with companies that do business in Europe—under the thumb of onerous environmental and human rights standards. This extraterritorial regulatory power grab would apply even when the European diktats directly conflict with American law.
The threat of overseas governments regulating American businesses is the “fifth horseman of the regulatory state,” to borrow a framing one of us (Copland) used in a 2018 City Journal article. In that article, subsequently expanded into a book, Copland described how regulation by administration, regulation by prosecution, regulation by litigation, and progressive anti-federalism combined to control huge swathes of economic activity largely untethered by national elections. To those four, we can now add: regulation from abroad.
This fifth horseman poses dangers similar to those of progressive anti-federalism. If we should worry about local officials in, say, New York City or San Mateo County, California affecting national policy, then we should be at least as concerned about far-reaching regulatory efforts from foreign governments that purport to transform American corporate governance.