Few things have loomed larger in Brexit imaginary than the stupendous trade deals the UK will get as soon as it frees itself from the thicket of European Union regulation. The government hopes to hash out deals with both the EU and the United States by the end of the year, when the transition period ends and Britain is no longer bound to Europe’s rules.

It’s an ambitious goal, but not impossible. President Trump is “bullish” on a UK deal, the American ambassador Woody Johnson recently said, adding that Trump, like the prime minister, wants to “get it done”. They make it sound so easy. And it’s true that Donald Trump has so far favoured quick and dirty deals with individual countries over complex, multinational agreements. But trade negotiations will also mean facing the world’s largest economy at the bargaining table alone, with little leverage and a ticking clock. The US will push aggressively against anything that blocks American companies from doing business here, and there are few things on which the two countries are more divided than climate policy.

The UK has ambitious plans to decarbonise by 2050, while the US has little policy and no targets to speak of. So the government will struggle to come to an agreement without sacrificing its already fragile climate commitments. Trade deals are increasingly about the alignment (a very EU-ey word) of standards and regulations to allow foreign goods and services into our borders. And it won’t surprise anyone to learn that alignment with the US rarely leads to stronger regulation; instead, trade agreements often act as a powerful and undemocratic tool to erode or supersede existing protections.

The common example is the fear of poorly checked, chlorine-washed American chicken being sold in the UK. But the gulf between the US and UK on climate is even larger than on food standards. Documents from a 2018 meeting, leaked in November, set out a harsh starting position: the US will not discuss the climate crisis or include the term in any deal, which means it won’t consider existing climate policies legitimate grounds for opposition to any of its demands.

This suggests the American negotiators will push to weaken existing low-carbon standards, or worse – given the UK has many climate targets but little actual concrete policy as yet – lock in clauses favourable to the fossil fuel industry that can’t be easily overturned by domestic legislation. This would effectively head off climate policy before it can be written. A similar thing played out before negotiations when the UK was part of the EU: in the now stalled Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the US pushed for wording that would prevent initiatives to help renewables compete with fossil fuels. That demand is likely to be repeated, with the American fossil fuel industry keen to get fracked gas as well as oil from tar sands into the UK.

The government’s recent fracking ban could also come under pressure from US companies looking to operate here. In practically all the sectors identified by the committee on climate change as requiring decarbonisation policies – agriculture, power generation, transport – there will be a push to lock in market mechanisms, enshrine “competition”, and head off attempts at regulation.

Perhaps most worryingly, the US has also indicated it will push for any agreement to include an investor-state dispute settlement – a controversial mechanism that gives foreign companies access to a supranational tribunal where they can sue entire countries within the bounds of the trade agreement but outside their own legal system. These have been used by companies to recoup “lost profits” when countries try to introduce environmental legislation: for instance, the Canadian province of Quebec was sued by an oil company under the North American Free Trade Agreement after it banned fracking in 2011.

With an ISDS, a bad deal for climate would not only harm existing standards, it could also prevent climate policies being made in the future, either because they contradict the agreement or because they could open the government to trade disputes.

The Foreign Office’s contorted language of Brexit is a smokescreen | Jonathan Lis Read more

Climate policy wouldn’t cover a product quite as viscerally unappealing as chlorinated chicken, or an institution as beloved as the NHS, both of which have focused public anger on the usually arcane process of trade negotiation. The risk with climate is that a trade deal would involve death by a thousand cuts for regulation, with changes across the entire economy – none big enough to contest on their own.

It doesn’t have to work this way: the EU is currently proposing a “carbon border tax” that would force trading partners to comprehensively consider the climate impact of all their products and services, an example of how trade policy can be used to strengthen global climate efforts. But Liz Truss, the minister in charge of negotiations, and Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, are deregulators of the highest order. Both were co-authors of the 2012 book Britannia Unchained, which criticised the UK for a “bloated state, high taxes and excessive regulation”. They maintain that the government is committed to its existing climate targets, but it’s unlikely they’ll actually back the protections we need in order to meet them.

• Stephen Buranyi is a writer specialising in science and the environment