MR. BIRNBAUM: Hello, everyone. Thanks so much for coming here today. I’m Michael Birnbaum. I cover foreign affairs at The Washington Post. I’ve also covered climate, and I was our bureau chief in Berlin, Moscow, and Brussels. I’m delighted to be joined today by Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s envoy for climate issues and a state secretary in the foreign ministry. This summit today is going to take us all around the world, the continent. We’re going to go continent by continent, exploring the impact of climate change and the solutions at hand, and it’s just very exciting to start off in Europe with Germany. Jennifer Morgan, thank you so much for joining us. MS. MORGAN: Oh, it’s a real pleasure to be here. Thank you. MR. BIRNBAUM: So all around the world, and including in Europe, we’ve seen record-breaking temperatures this year. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has said, “The era of global warming has ended. The era of global boiling has arrived.” Have we entered a new climate era? MS. MORGAN: I think we’ve entered a new climate era. I think that we’re seeing that the issues that the scientists told us about years ago that might come in the future are happening now. We’re seeing in Germany, two years ago, a flood in the Ahr Valley that cost 30 billion euros. We’re seeing floods that are happening still now in Central Europe. You know, I mean, everyone knows probably someone or some village or some town that has experienced the heat, the droughts, the floods. It’s not a tomorrow issue; it’s a today issue. And so I think that the rubric that we need to invest today in order to avoid something tomorrow is fundamentally changed. We have to invest today because it’s costing lives and economies today. MR. […]
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