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

Dec 7th 2023|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”