With tremendous difficulty, and after grueling negotiations that exceeded the set date, the Copenhagen Agreement on climate was able to be reached, despite many reservations from those present. The participants, both experts and politicians, had become overwhelmed amidst technical discussions over how to harmonize between stopping global warming, caused by the emission of greenhouse gases, and the need of the globe's inhabitants for food, growth and progress. It is no coincidence for the discussion over this difficult, if not impossible, equation to be restricted to one between the United States, China, India, Brazil and South Africa, while the role of the remaining participants, including the Europeans, became limited to one of watching and waiting. It is also no coincidence for the support of these countries for the final version of the agreement to represent the pathway to being adopted at the summit. That is because these four countries, by virtue of the nature of their economy and energy needs, sum up, on the one hand, the core of the problem, and, on the other, the relationship between industrial countries and developing countries that have the greatest impact on the world's economy. As it has become well known, global warming has been linked to the greenhouse effect resulting from fuel and energy used in industry, as well as from deforestation and the use of deforested areas for agriculture and grazing, and also from raising cattle necessary for food production. In other words, the greenhouse effect is linked to the growth of industry, agriculture and transport. And this will go on as long as progress is necessary, in light of extreme dependency on traditional energy, which experts and specialists see no way of doing without in the foreseeable future. In spite of the increasing resort to nuclear, wind and solar energy, and tremendous investments in this field, clean alternative energy that does not pollute and does not produce greenhouse gases still represents only about one percent of effective needs. In other words, the countries of the world are still in dire need of the energy of oil and fuels that cause the greenhouse effect, as well as of grazing lands and agricultural land that do away with the forests that cleanse greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide (CO2). And no industrial or developing country will venture to commit to limiting its growth. This is what the Chinese delegation negotiating in Copenhagen clearly expressed when it stressed the presence of 15 million hungry people in their country whom they would not be able to feed if they were to commit to a schedule for reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases. Thus, any progress presumes increasing the greenhouse effect, and this is where the problem lies, as those who have achieved progress seek to impose participation and equality in combating emissions, which for developing countries would be equivalent to preventing them from achieving progress. Indeed, such equality would be for emerging and poor countries equivalent to a death sentence to the possibility of their industrial and agricultural progress and of their meeting the basic needs of their populations. The billions allocated for these poor countries will not contribute to their growth, as long as they are deprived of the capabilities of clean alternative energy and also of making use of traditional energy. Thus these billions take on the aspect of a momentary bribe, much more than they are a solution to the problem of growth. Thus it seems that there technically is no solution to the climate problem, and that the world will remain trapped in this vicious circle of decisions and reservations, as long as we do not head towards a political solution, one that imposes much more on industrial countries than on poor and developing countries. And if there is to be a schedule for reducing the greenhouse effect, it should be directly linked to the level of economic progress of countries, not to equal measures between them. In other words, industrial countries must agree to decrease their emissions of greenhouse gases proportionally with their degree of economic progress, and to give poor countries an opportunity to develop.
