I sit in front of my computer to write down some lines on the failing of the Copenhagen talks. Meanwhile outside the window of this cafe the weather is colder than ever in the Netherlands, at least since I arrive in 2000. Global warming? Global cooling? It is indeed hard to connect the dotted lines in between what every single weather scientist predicts and what we experience in the street. As a matter of fact, if the tragedy of the commons (the scenario where privately owned cows deplete a public owned grass field leaving every cow owner poorer) would not have been invented about two centuries ago, it could be reinvented again to explain global warming. Nobody owns the international climate system, meanwhile all of us pollute it without experiencing individual consequences... Up to the moment that it will too late to do something about it.

But hey, our international civil society has grown in knowledge and organization, and events like the Copenhagen summit had happen in the past, and will go on happening in the future. There is indeed the shared feeling that agreements in between disparate actors should be reached, if we do not want to finally and definitively screw out the place where we live, where our cows feed, where our grandchildren will be born. The well known problem, alas, is that the diversity of our global society has so far defeated the attempts to reach a meaningful agreement on climate change. Everybody seems to be the culprit. I propose an exercise: open the browser of your preference, and google "Copenhagen failing XXX" where XXX is the country or personality of your preference. You will immediately find a press article, a pundit analysis, or an opinion column from a relevant journalist or political movement blaming XXX for the failing of the Copenhagen effort. I believe that after ten minutes of substituting XXX by different -and disparate- names, you will be all the more bewildered and confused, if not fully deprive of hope. If everybody is to blame for our incapacity of agreeing in preserve our common biosphere, what then? What is the next step?

Well, it is true that the internet is a cacophony of different voices, where google connect us with every wacko in the world. But the world at large is amenable of simplification. In the words of more than one participant in Copenhagen, it was very simple:  the first world should put up the money, and the third world should put the willing to use it. In the first days of Copenhagen, indeed, there was hope. Billions where mention and apparently were committed. But the talks failed all the same. Was the money not enough? Or where the third worlders too greedy? As a matter of fact, both and none of the answers are correct.

Towards the end of the previous century, and in this decade, the first world has learn that market driven measures indeed drive the improvement of our societies. Facing the financial meltdown, the fundaments of our economy are left untouched, since we understand that even when mistakes -big mistakes- can and indeed do occur, no alternative is available. The first world has learn that seeing societal problems as market problems is the way to solve them. Facing unemployment or social security, our leaders think in terms of budgets and financial provisions, and so far, our societies progress. On the other side, in the third world, the market has a much narrower and negative association. All across the third world since 1980 a broad implementation of neoliberal guidelines took place, which by the year 2000 have failed to deliver what they promise. It is no coincidence that in the whole of South America traditional left wing governments have majorities never heard of before. With such constituencies and leaderships it was unthinkable that the third world would accept the raw deal that was placed in the table. For many of the leaders of the third world today, the mere acceptation of a bunch of money is equivalent to high treason. Not only to their electors, but to themselves. It was the intellectual arrogance (or laziness) of the first world the mayor factor that undermined the Copenhagen summit. How is possible to believe today that whatever solved our problems will solve the problems of the third world? Far worse, how is it possible to believe that we first worlders are believable trading partners for countries and continents that have been depleted of natural resources by ourselves? Why should they believe that we are not in the prowl again? In the words of one of my many friends in the environmental movement in south america: "they chop down their forests and became rich. Now they want to buy our forests. No way I'm selling". Indeed in Copenhagen the almost defunct idea of environmental colonialism made a comeback. And it took the first world by surprise. Isn't that a good joke? European politicians felt so righteous, that they were horrified of being called colonialists. Very funny indeed.

To go back to the start of these lines. The tragedy of the commons have been routinely used to illustrate the coming global warming tragedy. But it is a misguided metaphor. Because today the great resources that might look like belonging to everybody, actually belong to the third world. That grass field where the cows have to feed is, actually, the amazonian (and other third world’s) forest, processing the pollution of the whole world. And the majority of the industries needing this huge CO2 processing system are nor in Brazil, nor in any other country with pristine nature. Are you still surprised that Brazil was one of the hardest negotiators in Copenhagen? You shouldn't. If I would be you, or any of the first world leaders interested in reversing our warming climate, I would actually listen. Our first offer, of buying some piece of Brazilian forest for the future of our kids in Europe, has not been taken. Instead of hearing ourselves and decide to raise the bidding, or offering something else, it would do good to hear what the grandparents-to-be of those brazilian kids-to-be-born actually want. And you would be surprised: they do not want anything else that what we want: schools, hospitals, security, labor. Are we going to answer this with some euros extras? Or are we going to engage, once and for all, in the dialogue that is asked since the summit of Rio de Janeiro in 1992, a dialogue between south and north for sustainable development?

For as long as the west, or the north, does not recognize that the forests are not to be bought once more, the coming summits a la Copenhagen are doomed to fail.