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In my opinion, no. There are all sorts of problems with this approach. We have to recognize that if any product were to be banned, it would have to be meaningfully compared to all other products and found to be significantly "worse" than most of them. This is extraordinarily hard.First, who calculates the carbon footprint? This is by no means an easy question, since performing a life cycle assessment is actually an extremely data-intensive task that also happens to be spectacularly imprecise. There is no scientific framework by which a life cycle assessment result can be reviewed and found accurate enough to support legal action- among the most ambitious is California's AB 32 program, which attempts to enforce stringent caps on emissions based on standardized modeling of the GHG intensity of major combustion processes, but it is addressing a relatively narrow part of the economy, and still requires a significant research infrastructure to support. The number of people who understand how it is done is very small- and in fact most of the work is done by a single consulting company and validated by regulators in-house at the Air Resources Board. For most products, the research infrastructure is not available.Even if the framework were available, calculating the carbon footprint for a product would require massive amounts of data, most of it proprietary. We would have a similar conflict-of-interest problem to the one faced by the US in regulating toxic substances: the companies that make the substances are the only ones with enough information to tell if they are toxic. Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs, also known as ISO 14026) are supposed to address this, but they are still embryonic. They can support comparing similar products to each other, current techniques are not scalable nor particularly repeatable.And, just like toxicity is an ill-defined question, so is the carbon footprint. The major points of contention have to do with "system boundary" definition: what aspects of a company's activity are to be included in the footprint? Manufacturing infrastructure? Office space? air travel for upper management? There are also matters outside the company boundary that may be relevant: the carbon footprint of most products depends heavily on how the consumer uses them- so who does the modeling for that? Do we count infrastructure necessary to support shipping, packaging, retailing, disposing of the product? In the EPD case, Product Category Rules (PCR) are supposed to provide guidance on how to do this for a specific product category, but do not currently support meaningful comparisons of products from different categories (because the Rules established by different PCRs would be different).Say we established, through some transparent, stakeholder-driven approach, how to systematically answer these questions in a way that treated different products consistently, different companies fairly, avoided double counting and under-counting, and was capable of properly differentiating between producer and consumer responsibility. Who is going to crunch all these numbers? Who is going to validate them? Once the results became important in a regulatory context, the issues of validation and verification (in the face of privacy concerns), and then reporting and revision, would very quickly become political.Anyway, even if we did somehow develop a framework to make these estimates quickly and accurately enough to support major regulations (which is exactly the focus of my professional work), I would still oppose the "ban" approach. I would rather see something like a carbon tariff-- one that could be applied correctly to both goods produced domestically and imported goods, in order to not be punitive to domestic manufacturers-- that would empower both consumers and producers to change their behavior in order to lower their carbon footprints-- with both eyes open.