Ending Tariffs on Green Goods Will Show Free Trade Can Fight Climate Change

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By James Bacchus, The Guardian Aug 18, 2014

The supposed choice between economics and environment is false, tariff cuts on green goods are a good move

Our economic future cannot be separated from our environmental future. Advocates for trade must understand this and seize the perfect opportunity to prove that freer trade can combat climate change and contribute to more overall sustainability.

Freeing trade and fighting climate change are often portrayed as separate causes, ever at odds, working at cross-purposes, while contributing unavoidably to inevitable trade-offs between economic growth and environmental preservation. The two causes are pursued in separate silos of global concern through separate negotiations employing separate policy and legal languages.

But the landscape is changing. The US, China, the European Union's 28 member states, and 11 others among the 160 member countries of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have launched negotiations to eliminate global tariffs on green goods. There is now the very real prospect that the first binding global agreement to fight climate change will come from what may seem to many an unlikely source – the WTO.

Initially, these new trade talks are solely about tariffs. Total global trade in environmental goods such as wind turbines and solar panels amounts to $1tn and growing fast. Tariffs on some of these products are as high as 35%. Eliminating needless taxes at the world's borders would speed the flow of new green technologies to all the places in the world that need them urgently in the struggle to confront climate change.

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