From a climate change speech today by President Obama:
And I'm directing my administration to launch negotiations toward global free trade in environmental goods and services, including clean energy technology, to help more countries skip past the dirty phase of development and join a global low-carbon economy. They don’t have to repeat all the same mistakes that we made.
More details here:
Negotiating Global Free Trade in Environmental Goods and Services:
The U.S. will work with trading partners to launch negotiations at the World Trade Organization towards global free trade in environmental goods, including clean energy technologies such as solar, wind, hydro and geothermal. The U.S. will build on the consensus it recently forged among the 21 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economies in this area. In 2011, APEC economies agreed to reduce tariffs to 5 percent or less by 2015 on a negotiated list of 54 environmental goods.
The APEC list will serve as a foundation for a global agreement in the WTO, with participating countries expanding the scope by adding products of interest. Over the next year, we will work towards securing participation of countries which account for 90 percent of global trade in environmental goods, representing roughly $481 billion in annual environmental goods trade. We will also work in the Trade in Services Agreement negotiations towards achieving free trade in environmental services.
It's hard to imagine all of this happening given the battles going on right now over AD/CVD tariffs on certain environmental goods, but I wish them luck!
