Bogotá. Colombian President Gustavo Petro on Tuesday criticized the world’s governments before the United Nations General Assembly for being “incapable” of effectively combating climate change, in a speech in which he also singled out those who “applaud the genocide” in Gaza.
The high-level meeting of the 193 member nations of the United Nations began on Tuesday under the shadow of growing divisions, large-scale wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, and the challenges posed by climate change.
In turn, Petro linked the inaction of some governments to curb the impact on the planet of the factors that influence climate change with the position of those governments – without mentioning any in particular – regarding the deaths caused by the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
“Today things are worse than a year ago,” Petro said, referring to his previous speech at the UN in which he warned that humanity was extinguishing itself. “Scientists said that if the Amazon rainforest burned, we would reach the point of no climatic return… Well, the Amazon rainforest is burning; the end has begun.”
The president complained that, as the president of a country without nuclear weapons or dollars, his words would not be heard by the governments of powerful countries. He then directed his speech to persuade the populations of every “corner” of the world to form an “army of life” that, without weapons, could generate pressure to fight climate change.
“It is in this inequality that we have achieved – the greatest in our history as a species – that we find the logic of the mass destruction unleashed by the climate crisis and the logic of the bombs dropped by a criminal like (Benjamin) Netanyahu on Gaza,” Petro claimed, resuming criticism of Israel’s warlike actions in Gaza.
As he left the UN session, he once again linked his criticism of the lack of resources to combat climate change to his criticism of the fact that money is being invested in wars such as those between Israel and Hamas “to spread death.”
Colombia broke off diplomatic relations with Israel in May, after bilateral relations had become extremely tense since the beginning of the conflict. It also suspended the export of coal to Israel, one of the main products it sent to that country.
Petro, the first left-wing president in his country, reiterated that a “genocide” is taking place in Gaza that has ended the lives of thousands of children, while “the presidents of the countries of human destruction laugh in these corridors.”
The Colombian president has also focused his speeches internationally on advocating for strong actions to be taken to decarbonize the economy, a plan that his government is promoting in Colombia, where new contracts have been stopped for exploring oil, gas and coal deposits within the framework of an energy transition that has made the sector nervous, since it is still an important part of the Colombian economy.
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– 2024-09-26 16:00:38
