Environment 
Trade 
International For decades, the dominant view among policymakers was that trade and environmental policy should be kept out of each other’s way. However, over the last few years there is growing acceptance of the links between trade and the environment. Estimates from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a club of rich countries, find that CO2 emissions associated with trade make up over a quarter of the global total.
In 2008 41% of American adults told the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank and pollster, that protecting the environment should be a top priority for the president and Congress, but that number rose to 64% in 2020. A survey of Europeans in 2021 found nearly one in five saying that climate change was the world’s most serious problem, slightly ahead of poverty, hunger, lack of drinking water and infectious diseases.
If policymakers want to toughen standards at home, they will also need to take trade into account and the World Trade Organization (WTO) should consider environmental issues. One possibility is to use trade to reinforce international climate agreements, though so far this has been mainly a European project.
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