A loud thud is heard every now and then in the Republic Square of Belém (Brazil), the city at the mouth of the Amazon where this year the climate summit was held. After the shot, any passerby calmly approaches, crouches down, picks up an orange fruit from the ground, smells it and keeps it to eat later. They are sleeves, very similar to mangoes, and they fall from the sky.
In that same square full of tubes The Theater of Peace stands majestically. It is very reminiscent of the Amazonas Theater, located upstream from the Brazilian city of Manaus. Both are from the same era, built during the rubber rush of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which brought in buckets of money thanks to exports of that resin.
The Amazon had a monopoly on that latex, as the variety of trees from which it is extracted were found only here. But the lack of vision on the part of businesses and government to use all that income and diversify their development has meant that that splendor has come to naught. First when the seeds of those miracle trees were planted in other tropical areas of the Pacific and Indian Ocean, and then when a more competitive alternative appeared: synthetic plastic. From that period remains a trail of beautiful, abandoned buildings with tiled facades in the Docas de Belém area, at the foot of the Amazon.
Precisely, another paradigm shift, driven by technology and environmental awareness, focused on the Belém climate summit, COP30. The most heated debate and the one most focused on was the need to promote a roadmap to abandon fossil fuels, the main causes of climate change.
Ultimately, this was not achieved, nor was any direct mention of fossil fuels made in the final statement. The blockade of oil-producing countries, led by Saudi Arabia, and the lack of strength of the nations that want to promote this roadmap meant that the summit ended without an agreement on this central point.
The fact that the focus has been on how to leave this addiction behind is somewhat of a climate activist thing. But who benefits most from such a roadmap? First and foremost to humanity and the planet, threatened by the advance of global warming caused by greenhouse gases mainly coming from fossil fuels.
But prominently among those who would win if a clear and internationally agreed roadmap for this transition were established would be those who produce and export these fuels the most.
Consider that you are the CEO of Nokia in the nineties of the last century. He’s on the crest of a wave, his Finnish company is the largest cell phone manufacturer in the world because it makes them really well. But someone comes from the future and explains to him what will happen in the next 10, 15 or 20 years with the telephone revolution. Maybe that CEO, his name was Jorma Ollila, would change the direction of his company and use all those huge profits to invest in cell phones that did more than just calling and texting. sms. But that didn’t happen and Nokia went bankrupt.
A roadmap for abandoning fossil fuels within the United Nations calls for someone from the future to tell those who now live on fuels that the world will change and what that change will look like. It means making the transition, which is already underway – just look at China and its commitment to renewable energy and electric cars – even fairer for those who now depend so heavily on oil, gas and coal. Therefore, oil countries that have actively blocked references to fuels and the roadmap should be the first to support it.
In fact, among the 80 countries that supported the initiative, two stand out significantly: Colombia and Brazil. Both are oil and coal producers. Both support the roadmap. Because they need it, because they need this transition to be just so that their economy doesn’t become even more unbalanced when they stop having that income, because the advance of renewable energy and the electric car means that their coal, oil and gas can no longer be burned.
A roadmap is, for fossil fuel producers, the alternative to simply waiting in the park for bushes to keep falling from the sky. Because, eventually, the trees they grow on will eventually burn out due to warming and die.
