IMF Managing Director: ‘We Can Survive’ Inflation and Recession, Not a Climate Crisis — We Factor Climate into ‘Everything’

During an interview with CNN on Wednesday aired on Thursday’s edition of CNN International’s “Amanpour,” International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva stated that while “we can survive inflation. We even can survive recession.” We can’t survive a “climate crisis” and the IMF brings climate factors into “everything” they do.

Host Christiane Amanpour asked, “This United Nations conference was meant to deal with, among other things…climate. The secretary general has said this is the issue without which everything else can just — we can forget about it if we don’t fix this one. And yet, this week, there was meant to be a heads of state climate conference. Biden isn’t going. Macron isn’t going. They’ve all got other things to do. At what point do we make this central and serious? Because, frankly, do you not agree that our energy crisis now is because we didn’t take sustainability and green and alternative energy seriously?”

Georgieva responded, “So, look, we can survive inflation. We even can survive recession. It has happened in the past. What we cannot survive, literally, is [an] unmitigated climate crisis. We are talking about an existential threat to humanity. I am very keen to see that we absorbed the science and translate it in our actions. … I can tell you, proudly, the IMF today is [a] systemically significant institution in the fight against climate change. We bring it in everything [we] do, in our policies, in our financing.”

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