Opinion – Candido Bracher: Wealthy nations act as land grabbers of the atmosphere that belongs to us all

An Aesop’s fable, translated and adapted into several languages ​​and cultures since antiquity, recounts the challenge thrown to the sun by the wind to determine who would be the strongest. They decide among themselves that the winner will be the one who succeeds in stripping a traveler who walks a lonely road of his mantle.

The wind starts blowing with increasing intensity, but his efforts only result in the wanderer wrapping himself more and more in his cloak, ending up lying on his stomach, to prevent the cloak and himself from being blown away. When the exhausted wind gives up, the sun comes out from behind the clouds where it has collected, slowly warming the earth with its rays. The traveler then spontaneously takes off his cloak and continues on his way.

I was a child when I heard the story for the first time, and its moral has become a permanent reference for me, not least because I saw it always practiced by my father. In order to obtain people’s cooperation, it is much better to understand their objectives and try to combine them with ours than to impose oneself by force.

Over the years, the fable helped shape my conciliatory character, which makes me attribute conflicts almost always to the lack of application in the search for negotiated solutions, lack of creativity, arrogance or haste. Thus, revolt and imposing attitudes were associated with adolescence, while dialogue and concord emerge as mature behaviors.

It was, therefore, with surprise that, already in my sixties, I realized the intensity of the feeling of frustration and indignation that the absence, once again, of tangible results in a global climate conference, in this case the COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.

After two weeks of discussions, the final documents do not bring concrete commitments to reduce investments in fossil fuels and preach the accelerated development of “low emission” energy systems, which it is feared could be used to justify the expansion of gas projects Natural. As a meager compensation, only agreement was reached in principle for the establishment of a fund to compensate poorer nations for losses caused by extreme weather events.

This would be an attempt to mitigate the perverse fact that the world’s wealth —generated in large part through the burning of fossil fuels— is concentrated in the developed countries of the global north, while the most serious reflections of the resulting greenhouse gases (GHG) of these processes occur in the poor and emerging countries closest to the equator.

Perhaps poisoned by black bile, or an adolescent relapse, I cannot help seeing in the behavior of developed nations a recurrence of the haughty posture with which the rich often listen to the pleas of the poor. That must be why Bertolt Brecht’s phrase, which fascinated me so much in my youth, came to mind: “Of the river that drags everything away, it is said that it is violent. But no one calls the banks violent that oppress him.”

Compensation for the damage resulting from global warming in itself is a mere palliative, which does nothing to reduce the GHG emissions that cause it. In this regard, the prevailing perception at the end of COP27 is that the goal of containing global warming to 1.5ºC over pre-industrial temperatures is no longer realistic. It is at this point that I identify the main source of my indignation: while the poor and emerging nations find themselves dependent on the “benevolence” of the developed world, the biggest emitters —which are also the richest nations— continue to occupy the atmosphere with their GHGs, without paying anything for it.

It can be argued that, in the absence of a law establishing the incidence of fees on these emissions, retroactive charging would be unfair, when the deleterious effects of these gases are only now known. (The matter is subject to discussion, since there are cases in which laws can have retroactive effect, as in war compensation, for example). In any case, this argument could not be applied to emissions in the last 20 years, which occurred with full knowledge of the damage associated with them.

Charging for current GHG emissions would not only generate resources to mitigate the effects of global warming, but would also have a powerful catalyzing effect in definitively overcoming the problem, as it would discourage the burning of fossil fuels and automatically make all new technologies aimed at more competitive. to its replacement. Added to this is the decisive role that these resources would have for the conservation and recovery of forests across the globe, especially in tropical countries.

For Brazil, which at COP27 took on the challenge of reducing illegal deforestation in the Amazon to zero, the funds paid by the issuing countries will be essential to ensure the sustainability of preservationist policies. Among them, priority should be given to combating illegal occupation of public lands, which is responsible for at least 30% of deforestation in the region. This is the process by which the grileiro invades and degrades a land that belongs to all of us, with the aim of establishing his possession over it, causing direct and indirect damage to all.

Would it be unfair, hasty or immature to associate land grabbing with the process by which some rich nations use their gases to occupy the atmosphere that belongs to all of us without paying anything for it, leaving the world with the resulting serious climatic consequences?

For our new government, which is expected to make a “great turnaround” in terms of environmental policy, in addition to the challenge of preserving the forest is the even more complex objective of leading diplomatic efforts to articulate global climate governance, that it cannot do without the establishment of a world price for carbon, to be paid by the emitting nations. I fear that it will take much more than the exercise of a conciliatory spirit to succeed in this task.