The United Nations (UN) Conference on climate change held in Egypt ended in a pessimistic atmosphere, without registering any significant advance and noting worrying signs for the world's environmental agenda.
How can poor countries be persuaded to renounce their right to development in the name of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, when countries with strong economies, such as the United States, China, and India, announce an increase in the use of fossil fuels, especially coal, the most polluting of all? There are 9 thousand coal-fired power plants in the world in operation and there is no prospect of deactivating them in the short or medium term.
The news is not good for Brazil, which must wait for the escalation of international pressure on the Amazon issue, which definitely occupied the main table in the great hall of global geopolitics that discusses climate, environment and warming.
The Conference in Egypt repeated the same difficulties of previous meetings in managing the contradiction between rich countries, proponents of drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and developing nations, supporters of the flexibility that would allow their inhabitants to reach a minimum level of consumption and comfort.
The international division of labor in matters involving the environment proposed by the rich countries for Brazil is as follows: I emit carbon here to maintain my standard of living and you sequester the carbon emitted in the Amazon and Cerrado areas, a revenue destined for other large holders of tropical forests such as Congo and Indonesia. By the way, a positive note of the Sharm el-Sheikh meeting was exactly the document gathering Brazil, Congo and Indonesia in a consortium of owners of the largest tropical forest areas on the planet.
The first great world climate conference took place in Stockholm, in 1972, and had Brazilian diplomacy as a major protagonist. On that occasion, the head of the Brazilian delegation, Ambassador Araújo Castro, imposed a major defeat to the developed countries' pretension of separating the protection of the environment from the right to development. The Brazilian diplomat accused rich countries of seeking to freeze world power and, in the name of the environment, to block developing countries' access to natural resources and raw materials.
Times change, wills change, as the poet taught, and the truth is that global warming has offered the rich the moral, scientific, and political justification to subtract the right to development from the debate on climate change. In Egypt, Brazil was divided and weakened, represented by two delegations, the official one, of the current government, and the unofficial one, of the elected government, an ornamental presence, without weight in the final decisions, as demonstrated at the end of the conference. The double mission of Brazilian diplomacy - to collaborate with the world in preserving the planet and protecting our right to development - will demand from it the best of its memory and virtues.
