Second from right, Colombia President Gustavo Petro at Thursday’s close of the WHO Conference on Air Pollution and Health. CARTAGENA – Colombia President Gustavo Petro launched into a blistering attack on the new administration of United States President Donald Trump on the closing day of a three-day WHO conference here on air pollution – warning that progress on critical environmental health and climate topics depends on the “common agenda” that has been fostered by the system of multilateral cooperation – “and if the multilateral system doesn’t exist all of this will be in vain.” The Trump administration, with its ultranationalist agenda, is “repeating the mistakes of history,” that led to the rise of fascism and World War 2” he warned, saying, “we need to act against a vision that aims to impose itself over all of humanity. He warned that in the new international order the US is trying to shape, ideology threatens to overcome scientific facts, adding: “As George Orwell said in 1984, when each individual will imagine their own reality – then one of the victims of that new reality is health.” And the “greed” of unbridled markets dominated by fossil fuel interests, meanwhile, stands in the way of a clean energy transition that would clean up the air and stabilize the climate, he said. Turning calls for change into action The conference featured a call to action signed by organizations representing 47 million health care professionals and other members of civil society. Center, WHO’s Maria Neira. The president spoke ahead of a closing day that saw 17 countries and about 40 cities, civil society organizations and philanthropies make commitments to reducing air pollution – along the lines of a WHO call for halving air pollution-related mortality by 2040. Some 47 million health care professionals also signed […]
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