 Hello everybody, this is Bill McKibbin Um, and I'm grateful for the invitation to speak about the climate cost of war in Iraq The first thing to remember of course is that were it not for our dependence on oil that probably wouldn't have been a war in Iraq I remember one of the signs and I saw one of the first demonstrations I attended against that war and it said How did our oil get under their scene? That's the That's the bottom line and it's one of the reasons that many of us work so hard to get us off Oil and coal and gas and on to peaceful energies sun and wind But you've asked a series of good questions more specific ones about the effect the Climate effect of that war and wars in general And I will do my best to provide a little bit of an answer I'm very grateful to my colleague Vanessa Arcara and to our great friends at oil change international a Washington think tank who have done some really Good work on trying to answer precisely these questions and that's the source of these numbers um And the numbers are so large because the money spent and the fuel burned over there was enormous Oil change international projects the total u.s. Spending on the iraq war could have covered all the global investment in renewable power generation needed between now and 2030 In order to halt the rise and the planet's temperature That is had we spent that money not on Bombing iraq but on sun and wind we would have done what we needed to do The war itself released at least 141 million metric tons of co2 equivalent Since its inception in march of 2003 So for instance, that's about the equivalent of adding 25 million cars to the road in the u.s. This year Uh, if you rank the war in iraq as a country And that it's a country in terms of emissions it would emit more co2 each year than 139 of the world's nations That is to say this one war produces more carbon than 60 percent of the world's countries Uh Are about two and a half times larger than what would be avoided between 2009 and 2016 Were california simply to implement the auto emission regulations it's proposed um so The other way to look at it is in terms of money The 600 billion dollars that congress put into military operations in iraq That could have built 9 000 wind farms In the u.s. With the capacity to meet a quarter of the world's current electricity demand other country's current electricity demand In 2006 the u.s. Spent more on the war in iraq than the whole world spent on investment in renewable energy um, that's Gives you some sense of the scale I mean it's incredibly Carbon intensive business war. Um, it's not just the oil well fires and the gas flaring It's even things like the boom in cement consumption when you have to repair and rebuild all the things that you blew up On and on and on And I think it speaks pretty powerfully to the fact that Well, we can't afford to keep doing this can't afford it economically, but can't afford it because it takes All the focus and all the energy and all the money that we need to do real things I wrote a piece this summer Saying that if you Wanted a war we've actually got one underway a war. We're not actually fighting back in um It's a matter of course, but the war is the war that carbon dioxide is waging on us Perhaps we're waging it on ourselves since we're the ultimate source of that co2 um In many ways, it's a real war obviously presents much more of a threat to us than saddam hussein ever did um We're losing territory daily as ice melts as islands submerge as coastlines become Uh less habitable We're losing lives daily as disease spreads. We're seeing Great destabilization not only the war iraq destabilized places like syria so did um Biggest drought we've ever measured and what we used to call the fertile crescent that sent a million syrian farmers Off their land and into the cities and help destabilize the Assad regime So on and on and on um, um the links between all these Sadnesses become clearer and clearer And our work now is I think to focus as hard as we can Um on making sure we don't have more wars and on making sure that the focus that does go with a war Is turned instead to real problems and on the list of real problems right there at the very top in Two-point type is climate change So thank you all very much for your work