Transcript:

How much money do you think the United States has spent since 1945 on the Cold War? Sometimes I ask this question, and from the back of the audience comes an answer, "Billions and billions." (laughter) A huge underestimate, billions and billions. The amount of money the United States has spent on the Cold War since 1945 is approximately $10 trillion. Trillion, that's the big one with the "T."

What could you buy for $10 trillion? The answer is you could buy everything in the United States except the land. Everything. Every building, truck, bus, car, boat, plane, pencil, baby's diaper. Everything in the United States except the land. That's what we've spent on the Cold War.

So now let me ask, how certain was it that the Russians were going to invade? Was it 100% certain? Guess not, since they never invaded. (laughter)

What if it was only, let's say, 10% certain? What would advocates of big military buildup have said? They would have said, "We must be prudent." It's not enough to count on only the most likely circumstance if the worst happens, and it's really extremely dangerous for us. We have to prepare for that. Remote contingencies, if they're serious enough, have to be prepared for. It's classic military thinking. You prepare for the worst case.

And so now I ask my friends who are comfortable with that argument, including the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, why doesn't that same argument apply to global warming? You don't think it's 100% likely? Fine, you're entitled to think that. If it's only a small probability of it happening, since the consequences are so serious, don't you have to make some serious investment to prevent it or mitigate it? I think there's a double standard of argument working, and I don't think we should permit it.

Now, let me indicate what is it you would do if you took greenhouse warming seriously. And what I'm going to try to argue is that virtually every one of the things that you would do to ameliorate greenhouse warming make sense on completely separate grounds. They are worth doing apart from greenhouse warming, unlike the defence buildup, which made no sense whatever, except if you were confident that there was a real danger of Soviet troops pouring across the Elbe.

There was no other mitigating circumstance, the least efficient way to spend money if you want to pump the national economy. It drew all sorts of scientific as well as fiscal resources out of the civilian economy. It is largely responsible for the economic chaos of the United States. Whereas, I will argue, spending money on mitigating greenhouse warming makes an enormous amount of sense for other reasons.