Debra Waggoner is the Director for Global Affairs at Corning Incorporated.  On November 20, she was one of the three business speakers who talked about the importance and the potential benefits of the environmental goods agreement (EGA) being negotiated at the WTO in Geneva.   The event, a blend of government and business presentations, was "A Double Opportunity: The WTO Environmental Goods Agreement," and it was jointly sponsored and produced by GBD and the National Association of Manufacturers.

Ms. Waggoner had props, show-and-tell, two of them actually.   One was the substrate she is holding in the picture below.  The other was a beaker of black carbon or soot.   That was a sample of what a similar substrate, one for diesels,  would have extracted from the exhaust of a cross-country truck.   

 
Here is the full paragraph with today's quote:

As Ms. Waggoner told the story, GM had the basics of the catalytic converter, but it needed the element that would actually remove the particulate matter from the exhaust and keep it from polluting the air.  That was the substrate.  First, Corning had to invent the product that would get the job done; then it had to devise a manufacturing system for producing it; and it had to build the plant to do it in.  They did it all in short order and the results have been impressive.

Speaking of the Corning substrate, Ms. Waggoner said, "It's pulled 1.5 billion tons of NOx [nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide] from U.S. air.  It has improved health.  It has pulled out 3 billion tons of NOx from other countries around the world."   And it has all grown.  This kind of pollution control work is now a $12 billion industry, employing some 65,000 people in the United States.

As Ms. Waggoner put it, the regulations under the Clean Air Act created "a virtuous cycle" that led to innovation, the product she was holding up for the audience.  It is a product for which global demand is growing, and Corning is investing still more to meet that demand.   In 2013, the company announced it was putting $250 million into a new facility near Corning, New York, for the manufacture of certain substrates.  That facility, Ms. Waggoner said, will generate 250 jobs for the building of the plant and another 250 permanent jobs for the people who will be needed to run it.   

Where Does The Environmental Goods Agreement, the EGA Fit In?  In the first instance, the EGA is about tariffs.   Corning's substrates, Ms. Waggoner said, face an average tariff around the world of 17.5 percent.  Getting rid of those tariffs should make both for a cleaner environment and for better business. 

Our understanding is that the countries negotiating the EGA held their third round of talks in Geneva last week, and that those talks were focused on specific sectors and on petitions for expanding the list of eligible products beyond the 54 that were agreed to in APEC.   We hope and assume that this last round went well.  The EGA talks need momentum now.  They still have a long way to go.