Jessica Lemos is a the director for international trade at the National Association of Manufacturers, NAM.  Today's quote is from her "Shopfloor" blog of July 9.  We assume she wrote this from Geneva.  We know she was there the day before, July 8.  The first sentence of her report reads:

With help from several key hyperlinks, Ms. Lemos has managed to pack an enormous amount of useful material into just a few paragraphs.

Of course, there is some history here.  A lot of that history is in APEC, but the declaration from the 2001 ministerial conference in Doha, Qatar, also has language on this topic.  A note on the WTO website summarizes the relevant portion of the Doha mandate this way:

We are not sure of the status of those environmental talks within the Doha Round.  Our understanding is that the EGA negotiations that were launched on July 8 are for a separate, plurilateral agreement.  They are taking place under the auspices of the WTO, but they are not part of the Doha Round.
The participating countries are:  

As Ms. Lemos said in her blog:
NAM is not alone here.  An impressive open letter from business associations around the world argued for "an ambitious international agreement to eliminate tariffs on a broad range of environmental goods and services."   Issued on July 8, its 48 signatories included groups from Australia, China, Japan, the EU, the United States, and several other countries.   And a number of those groups are GBD members, including NAM, the Coalition of Service Industries, the Information Technology Industry Council, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Finally, while Trade Promotion Authority, TPA, is not our subject, it is worth pointing out that the TPA legislation introduced last January did include a reference to negotiations on environmental goods and services.   That was the Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities Act of 2014 - S. 1900 in the Senate and H.R. 3830 in the House.  In listing Congress's priorities for labor and the environment, the authors of that legislation said one priority should be:
 

Different Perspectives. We have two comments.  The first is that there are two very different but not at all incompatible ways of looking at these negotiations.  One is to focus on the environment and what a successful EGA negotiation could do to advance environmental objectives.  USTR Michael Froman talked about those goals back in January, when he announced the proposal for the EGA talks.  He said:

Using the example of the Coca Cola company, which operates in 200 countries, Ms. Lemos too highlighted the potential for positive environmental benefits from these talks.   She wrote:

That is all fine.  Fine too is the argument, implicit in today's featured quote, that those in favor of trade liberalization generally should seize on the EGA negotiations as an opportunity to move that ball forward - perhaps the best one available.  The letter from the 48 associations touched on that broader idea, saying: 

Not everyone, however, is quite so enthusiastic or comfortable with trade liberalization beyond purely environmental objectives.  Ilana Solomon of the Sierra Club, for one, is skeptical:  "There is no definition yet of what actually constitute an 'environmental good," she said, "and many of the goods being considered are actually harmful to the environment."

Connecting the Dots.  Our second comment - a hope really - is that the world needs to connect the dots between the EGA and the speech Roberto Azevêdo gave in Geneva on Monday.  Addressing the board of the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the Director-General of the WTO talked about the need to address quickly the impasse over trade facilitation, which now threatens the Bali package.   If the trade facilitation problem is not solved quickly, he said, "Many areas of our work may suffer a freezing effect." 

With apologies, the image is a chilling one.  And yet, though separate from the Bali-Doha imbroglio, the EGA talks offer some hope.   If the 14 countries negotiating that agreement could skate quickly to the finish line of a deal,  the result would be a boost to the WTO as well as a boon to those who trade in the affected products.  But it will take political will, which in this case means facing down the inevitable chorus of critics.   There is no such thing as an easy trade deal.  Not any more.  Not even this one.