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At the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Belém, Brazil, we sit down with Colombian environmentalist Susana Muhamad, who served as Colombia's minister of environment and sustainable development from 2022 to 2025. Muhamad discusses the U.N.'s mandate to mitigate the acceleration of human-caused climate change and condemns the powerful, diverting influence of the fossil fuel lobby. Muhamad, who is of Palestinian descent, also responds to the United States' attacks on boats in the Caribbean and to the ongoing Israeli genocide of Gaza. "These are not issues that are not correlated," she says. "Humanity can do better. [We] can be very proactive and productive in shifting this situation of climate crisis, rather than continue investing in arms, in armies and in defense."
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As Democracy Now! broadcasts from the COP30 U.N. climate summit, we speak with Kumi Naidoo, the longtime South African human rights and environmental justice activist who is president of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. He discusses U.S. absence from climate talks, Gaza, and wealthy countries refusing to take accountability for the climate crisis. "We're not asking the rich nations for a charity here. We are asking them to pay their climate debt."
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