Transcript: Protecting Our Planet: The Role of Technology

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MR. DENNIS: Hello, and welcome to The Washington Post Live. I’m Brady Dennis, a national environmental and climate reporter here at the Post. Thanks for joining us today for two conversations about the role of technology in curbing the impacts of climate change.

My first guest today is the executive secretary of UN Climate Change, Patricia Espinosa. Secretary Espinosa, thank you for joining us today.

SEC. ESPINOSA: Hello, Dennis. It’s a pleasure to be with you today.

MR. DENNIS: Good to see you.

We saw there in the intro, some clips from the most recent IPCC report, which is a series of scientific findings about the impacts and the science around climate change, and one of the things that the IPCC has told us is that there are technologies that already exist that can help us mitigate the impact of climate change and to slow it from getting worse. Would you talk us maybe through some of what those technologies are, some of what they look like, where we’re seeing them in the real world, and also about the global challenges with implementing them on a broad scale?

SEC. ESPINOSA: Well, thank you for this opportunity to be able to talk about our agenda, the agenda to address climate change, which continues to be the most important and alarming existential threat for humanity, and let me just underline this at the beginning of this conversation.

Also, thank you for touching on the issue of technology which has been actually, in the history of humanity, one of the drivers for change, for changing our way of life, for changing the way that we use resources, sometimes for the good and sometimes not so much for the best of humanity and nature.

I want to say currently we are seeing very exciting and positive developments in the area of technology, and you have presented some of them in your brief video, introductory video. Of course, technologies for renewable sources of energy have really seen an incredible progress. Their costs

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