Transcript
STROBE TALBOTT: I'm Strobe Talbott, the President of Brookings, and I want to welcome you all here this morning for what I'm sure you all agree is not just a very important event on an important subject but a very timely event as well. I cannot think of a better example than climate change of a global issue and, indeed, a global challenge that is also a challenge to American national policy. And that, of course, is our topic today.
Brookings is very proud to be cosponsoring this event with our friends from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, and in a moment Eileen Claussen will come to the podium and preview the program for the day. She is the President of the Pew Center. She's a former colleague of mine and a very good friend, and I'm glad that she's now a collaborator with the Brookings Institution on this project.
Eileen is also a true expert on the subject that we are going to be discussing today. She has devoted much of her career to these issues. That is not a claim that I can make. Much of my career has been focused on other threats to international security and, indeed, threats to the survival of the planet and the species. I've been working on such issues as nuclear weaponry, the arms race, the Cold War. But as a citizen, I have come to appreciate, as I suspect all of you in this room have, that global warming is in the same league in terms of both something to worry about and also something to do something about and also in terms of its importance, its complexity, and the danger that it poses to all of us.
There is, of course, a difference between manmade weaponry that can unleash forces of nature that would trigger catastrophic destruction, perhaps global destruction, in a matter of hours and man-induced disruption of the forces of nature that can wreak horrendous destruction over a period of decades and centuries by degrading the Earth's ability to sustain life in general and human life in particular.
The United States, of course, is a major contributor to the problem of climate change, and it behooves us, both for that reason and also because of our leadership position in the world, to be a major contributor to the solution. Achieving that goal is going to require a much more sophisticated, constructive, forward-looking, and civil discussion than has been the case so far. To date, the debate on this issue has been characterized by far more heat than light. This issue has been both polarized and polarizing.
June 24 transcript (PDF—404kb)
June 25 transcript (PDF—196kb)
conference agenda (PDF—128kB)