The President of the Republic, Gustavo Petro, raised this Wednesday, before the World Economic Forum in Davos, a decarbonized capitalism to face the climate crisis and avoid the extinction of the planet.
This was proposed in the session ‘Leading the charge through the new normality of the Earth’, within the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos (Switzerland).
Can the capitalism that we have known in the last 30 or 40 years overcome the climate crisis that it helped to cause?” asked President Petro, adding that “if the answer is negative, we are wasting time, as we approach the point of no return”.
The Head of State stressed that capitalism “has caused a kind of global anarchy of capitalisms, of individual business capitalists trying to maximize their profits”, which is based on coal, oil and gas as a source of energy.
For this reason, he proposed “a decarbonized capitalism, the capitalism that could overcome the climate crisis”, which would have to make some fundamental changes in the way of life.
“For example, that capitalism would have to say explicitly that the only way to stop the climate crisis is to bring coal and oil consumption to zero. Zero emissions,” he stated.
President Petro added that this would mean climate summits, known as COPs, have binding power.
He noted that if a State evades the World Trade Organization treaty, it has a sanction, and “on the other hand, what the COP decides are suggestions that a ruler may or may not take into account, they are just advice.”
For this reason, he asked “that within a decarbonized capitalism the COPs have binding power, that is, that their decisions are orders”, which “would imply that the treaties of the World Trade Organization, that the treaties of the International Monetary Fund, are subject to the climate agreements and not the other way around”.
President Petro also spoke about the financing of the transition, and said that at the recent COP27 he called for a formula for adaptation and mitigation of the climate crisis, and the response of several world leaders was that the solution was to go into debt.
“Today all countries are over indebted. How are we going to get more indebted to make the transition? ”, she stressed, and reiterated the importance of mechanisms to swap debt.
“These issues, which a decarbonized capitalism would address, are not in the discussion today. And as long as they are gone, there is no human capacity to move to a decarbonized economy,” the President pointed out.
In this segment, the President of Colombia shared the debate with businessmen Marc Benioff and Andrew Forrest, and the former Vice President of the United States and environmental leader, Al Gore, among other guests.
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A productive economy with clean energy
Petro said that Colombia and the region must move from “an extractivist economy, that is, one that extracts from the ground and sells without transforming it, to a productive economy that generates much more work.”
In the session ‘Leadership for Latin America’, within the framework of the WEF, in which he intervened as a guest, the Colombian Head of State indicated that this productive economy “can be of increasing and not decreasing returns, like oil and coal, and that it would have to be linked to land, necessarily, to water, agriculture and the knowledge industry”.
At the event, which was moderated by Marisol Argueta de Barillas, Head of the Regional Agenda for Latin America and Member of the WEF Executive Committee, President Petro expressed that his proposal includes “a Latin America and a Colombia that builds a knowledge society in the midst of the energy transition”, which could “launch us forward, even following the path in which the countries of Southwest Asia already took advantage of us when they were poorer than us”.
In addition to President Petro, the presidents of Costa Rica, Rodrigo Chávez Robles, and of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, and the Vice President of the Dominican Republic, Raquel Peña, among others, participated as panelists at the event.