Colombian president-elect proposes Latin American dialogue with US on energy transition

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The president-elect of Colombia, leftist Gustavo Petro, proposed this Sunday that Latin American countries unite to talk with the United States and lay the groundwork for an “energy transition” in the face of the ravages caused by climate change.

“I propose to the Government of the United States and to all the governments of America to sit down and talk to establish the steps for the energy transition, the steps for the construction of a decarbonized economy, the steps for the construction of an economy of life in all America,” Petro said in his first speech after winning the second round of the presidential election.

In this regard, the president-elect said that the priority of his government’s diplomatic policy would be to put Colombia “at the forefront of the world in the fight against climate change”.

“Science has told us that as a human species we can perish in the short term (…), that the dynamics of accumulation that an unbridled market, that unbridled desires of greed, that a process of unbridled consumption are about to end the very basis of existence. That is not what the left or the right-wing tell us; it is what science tells us,” he affirmed.

He added that after winning, almost all the presidents of Latin America called him, for which he proposed “a dialogue in the Americas without exclusions of any people, of any nation,” with the United States on “what it means that” in that country “greenhouse gases are emitted like in almost no other country”.

He went on to say that in the south, “we assume them, we absorb them” in the Amazon.

“If they are emitted there, and we absorb them here, why don’t we dialogue? Why don’t we establish another way of understanding each other?

WAR ON OIL

That dialogue, Petro considered, will allow “saving humanity,” and for that reason, he invited Latin American progressivism to “stop thinking about social justice, redistribution of wealth, that a future sustained based on high oil, carbon, and gas prices is possible”.

“It is unsustainable for human existence. I propose to the progressivism of Latin America that it is possible to think of a productive and non-extractivist Latin America that deepens knowledge to the highest spheres of knowledge of humanity. A Latin America together that can shout to humanity that the time has come to change to live tastily,” he concluded.

Petro’s government program proposes to move “from an extractivist economy to a productive economy”.

In that line, he assures that Colombia must make a “gradual transformation of the economic apparatus based on the depredation of the planet, unproductivity, unemployment, and deep inequality”.

“In our government, the exploration and exploitation of unconventional oilfields will be prohibited, and the pilot projects of ‘fracking’ and the development of offshore oilfields will be stopped. No new licenses will be granted for exploring hydrocarbons, nor will large-scale open-pit mining be allowed,” states the campaign document.

With information from EFE