BALI, Indonesia (AP) -- A joint U.S.-European Union proposal to liberalize trade in green goods and services such as solar panels would boost the availability of technology to battle global warming, a top U.S. trade official said Sunday.
An Indonesian activist at a green protest in Jakarta Saturday.
U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said on the sidelines of the U.N. climate change conference in Indonesia that developing countries have an average of 9 percent tariffs on the list of 43 goods and services.
"The question is, how can we do a better job of making those available and ensuring additional use of climate mitigation technologies?" Schwab said after a meeting of trade ministers at the global warming conference in Bali.
Developing countries at the conference have called on wealthy nations to speed the transfer of climate-friendly technologies to help them reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases blamed for rising global temperatures.
The tariff cuts, made by the U.S. and E.U. last week, would not apply to so-called biofuels, something emerging economies such as Brazil had been pushing for. It is not clear how much support the trans-Atlantic offer will garner in the 151-member World Trade Organization.
Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, who also handles trade issues, objected to the proposal at a news conference after the trade meeting in Bali, saying that the list of goods was flawed because it omitted ethanol. Brazil is the leading exporter.
"This list is incomplete, it won't do much for climate change, it's not proven what effects that these goods will have on climate change," he said. "The single project whose effect on climate change is already shown and demonstrated, which is ethanol ... isn't part of the list."
Amorim said that use of ethanol over 30 years in Brazil had avoided the emission of 670 million tons of carbon dioxide.
The U.S.-EU proposal would only come into force as part of an overall agreement in the Doha round of trade liberalization talks, which have repeatedly stalled since their inception in Qatar's capital six years ago.
The U.S. and European Union targeted 43 goods "with clear environmental benefits," in order to promote their use worldwide and help combat global warming. But they rejected earlier this month a move by Brazil to include biofuels, such as ethanol.
American and European delegates to the WTO argued that the special environmental tariffs ought to be reserved solely for industrial goods, and not agricultural products. Brazil has been touting its sugarcane-based ethanol around the world as a cheap, eco-friendly alternative to fossil fuels that is being held back by high U.S. and European tariffs.
According to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the global market for environmental goods and services is worth several hundred billion dollars each year.
