(Image: President’s Office)
Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro arrived in Brazil on Thursday to attend the COP30 UN climate conference.
Delegates from around the world convened in Belem, the capital of the Amazonian state of Para, to discuss progress and plans to combat climate change.
Petro proposed investing $500 billion to boost the generation of clean energy in Latin America and the Caribbean.
On our continent, $500 billion in investment is needed in South America and Mexico to make real its potential for clean energies that reaches 1,400 gigawatt-hours per year, according to studies; this capacity, carried by electric cable, can completely clean the electricity generation matrix of the USA. This would be the first great step to stop the climate collapse.
Gustavo Petro
In a post on social media platform X, the president criticized the CO2-emitting countries, i.e. the Global North, that favored war and weapons over climate and life.
Petro also took a jab at United States President Donald Trump, stating that Trump’s attitude is not only “dismissive,” but goes against “the life of all humanity.”
While many of the CO2-emitting countries dedicate their money to making more weapons, returning the world to military nuclear tests and increasing the risk of nuclear war, invading countries, implementing fascist policies against immigrants within their own borders, launching missiles in total disproportion of force against poor employees of the narcos, they set aside the fundamental purpose of humanity: replacing coal, oil and gas, the hydrocarbons, with a decarbonized economy suitable for life.
Gustavo Petro
The president also criticized the fossil fuel lobby present at the COP30 and urged radical action against climate change.
The COP is an annual UN conference of nearly all countries that signed and ratified the Climate Convention.
A major framework that was adopted under the COP21 is the Paris Agreement.
In the French capital, the countries agreed to keep the global temperature increase well below 2°C with efforts to keep it under 1.5°C compared to pre-industrial temperatures, which has already failed.
Some of the leaders that traveled to Brazil vowed to try to reverse the trend and retake goal to prevent a 1.5°C increase in global temperatures.
