United States President George W. Bush finally announced his country's proposal for fighting the greenhouse effect. Seven months after having rejected the Kyoto Protocol because he considered it to be without scientific basis, detrimental to US economic interests, and unfair in not obliging medium-sized nations (like Brazil and India) to reduce their gas emissions in the same proportion as that imposed on industrialized countries, Bush made public the plan that, he promised, would not have any of the defects of the Kyoto Protocol and would achieve the same, if not better, results. 
	
	
 Basically, the Bush plan makes the reduction in pollution gas emissions conditional on the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate. Emissions of these gases should rise at a slower pace than that of the GDP, he says. The first problem pointed out by critics is that Bush has created a new concept, that of "greenhouse gas intensity," which could be defined as the volume of gas emissions divided by GDP. It is this index that will be reduced, according to the White House, by 18 percent over the next 10 years. But what the US Government does not emphasize is that the natural tendency of the economy is for services to increase their participation in the GDP, and for industrial activities, which are the biggest energy consumers, to diminish. Therefore, that so-called 18 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions could, in fact, represent a real increase in the absolute quantity of such gases. Some environmental entities calculate that Bush's plan will lead to the US's emitting!
, in 2010, 29 percent more greenhouse gases than it did in 1990. 
	
	
 Technical arguments could go on an on, and matter little here. More important are two indisputable conclusions, both potentially embarrassing to the Bush administration and extremely threatening to the world as a whole. 
	
	
 The first is that, once again, the current US administration, faced with a controversial issue, is situating itself alongside the explicit interests of companies in the energy sector. The long- standing ties Bush and several of his leading advisors have with these companies allow us to suppose an ultimate conflict of interests that would only increase with the government's persistent alignment with their goals. The Enron scandal is already taking a significant political toll of the Bush team, which will tend to increase. But the consequences of the divorce between the US and the international community in the Kyoto Protocol case could be even more serious. 
	
	
 The second conclusion is that, contrary to what some optimists were predicting after 11 September, Bush seems to have decided to stick to a course of arrogant unilateralism when conducting his foreign policy. The break with Kyoto had been a pre-attack marker in the Bush administration, for having demonstrated the latter's absolute indifference to the opinion of even its closest allies, such as Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan. After the World Trade Center and Pentagon tragedies, there were some who thought that Washington's rapprochement with its traditional partners was inevitable, with the goal of defeating the threat of international terrorism. 
	
	
 However, after a brief period of shock, Bush resumed his solitary road, as he clearly demonstrated in his State of the Union speech, in which he threatened the "Axis of Evil" countries (Iran, Iraq, and North Korea) without consulting the Europeans and Japanese, who do not necessarily agree with the appropriateness of antagonizing the governments of those nations. 
	
	
 The announcement of a plan that is supposedly an alternative to the Kyoto Protocol, but which in practice rejects it in a way that cannot be taken seriously by the countries who committed themselves to it (among which is Brazil), only deserves rejection in response and to provoke in retrospect an enormous concern about what the only world superpower intends in future.