Orit Frenkel is the Senior Manager for International Trade and Investment with the General Electric Company. On November 20, Ms. Frenkel spoke at an environment and trade event in Washington. Today's quotes were taken from that event.
This was
"A Double Opportunity: The WTO Environmental Goods Agreement." Held at the National Press Club, it was a joint project between the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the Global Business Dialogue. There were two government speakers and two from the private sector.
Linda Dempsey, NAM's Vice President for International Economic Affairs, set the stage for the discussion and served as moderator.
Because the topic was the EGA, the first of today's two featured quotes deals directly with those negotiations. Like every other speaker on November 20, Ms. Frenkel talked about the product list. Its core is a group of 54 environmentally related goods that had been identified in APEC for tariff reductions by the APEC countries - reductions but not elimination, which is the goal of the EGA. As Ms. Frenkel noted, GE makes 49 of those products - including wind turbines and solar panels. As she explained:
"I think that 60 percent of the WTO countries impose a mean tariff of 7.4 percent on wind turbines. Over 40 percent impose a tariff of 8.8 percent or higher on solar panels."
But also like others on the panel, she would like to see the APEC list expanded. Why? Because there are lots of other things GE makes that are good for the environment but not yet on the EGA negotiating list.
Durathon batteries are in that group. These are industrial batteries that store energy. They are a hand-and-glove product for wind turbines, for example, because wind energy is erratic. When the wind is blowing, there is more energy than the system can use, and when it is not blowing, well, no energy is produced. Durathon batteries can smooth that cycle out.
Other products Ms. Frenkel mentioned are
off-grid reciprocating engines that can run on a variety of fuels,
smart meters that optimize energy usage in larger systems, and various other products from fuel efficient locomotives to aircraft engines that can run on biofuel, which GE is now testing.
All of this begs the question, what will the final EGA list look like? Clearly it is still being negotiated. According to a recent Politico article, the 14 countries negotiating the EGA decided on a list of categories for the EGA products earlier this month. They have not settled on a product list, but they have agreed on ten broad categories. The categories are:
air pollution control;
solid and hazardous waste management;
wastewater management and water treatment;
environmental remediation and clean-up;
noise and vibration suppressors;
clean and renewable energy;
energy efficiency;
environmental monitoring;
analysis and assessment;
resource efficiency and "environmentally preferable products."
We are not sure when the EGA negotiators will settle on an initial list of products to be negotiated, but one speaker last month suggested that milestone might be achieved in the first half of 2015.
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But let's step back up a moment. The EGA - the Geneva process - has been going on for just half a year. The first round of talks was held this past July. GE's commitment to the environment has a longer history, a history in which 2005 was a watershed year.
Ms. Frenkel put it this way:
"In 2005 actually, our chairman [Jeffrey Immelt] had a lot of foresight and started a new initiative that really is the double opportunity. We call that [initiative] Ecomagination. You've probably seen all of our nice commercials. ... He really took a leap by thinking that going green was going to both help the environment and be good business. So he committed to invest R&D and launch a whole lot of new solutions that were going to save money and reduce the environmental impact for our customers."
GE, of course, is one of the world's largest companies, with some 300,000 employees worldwide and revenues last year (2013) of $146 billion. Here is Ms. Frenkel on what Ecomagination has meant:
"Since 2005, Ecomagination has really become the company's most successful cross-company initiative. We've invested over 15 billion in R&D and generated more than $160 billion in sales of our Ecomagination products. We've also made it part of our operations. We've reduced our own internal greenhouse gas emissions by 32 percent and our fresh water use by almost half."