Finance & economics | Making friends

How to sell free trade to green types

This year’s COP offers an opportunity to make the case

Environmental activists display placards during a demonstration at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai.
Photograph: Getty Images
|Dubai

Environmentalists do not get on with free-traders. Suspicion is the norm, if not the outright hostility on display at the “Battle of Seattle” in 1999, which took place between riot police and activists outside a meeting of the World Trade Organisation (wto). When Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, boss of the wto, went to the cop climate summit in Glasgow two years ago she was the first head of the trade club to attend the portion reserved for ministers and senior officials. She is once again at this year’s summit, which began in Dubai on November 30th, to explain how trade can save the planet.

This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “Making friends”

From the December 9th 2023 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

More from Finance & economics

Solar panels installed on the roof of a building at Skardu in Pakistan's Gilgit-Baltistan region.

Cheap solar power is sending electrical grids into a death spiral

Pakistan and South Africa provide a warning for other countries

People walk at Zaryadye park with the Kremlin and St. Basil's Cathedral in the background in Moscow, Russia.

Russian inflation is too high. Does that matter?

In a strong economy, price pressure can endure for a long time


illustration of a house cut in half diagonally, the lower corner being a bill.

Why you should repay your mortgage early

For the first time in decades, the arithmetic suggests settling housing loans


How AI will divide the best from the rest

Optimists hope the technology will be a great equaliser. Instead, it looks likely to widen social divides

The danger of relying on OpenAI’s Deep Research

Economists are in raptures, but they should be careful

Elon Musk is failing to cut American spending

DOGE has so far disrupted everything in government bar the deficit