The Cost of an Overheated Planet

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“Setting a real price on carbon emissions is the single most important policy step to take,” said Robert N. Stavins, director of the environmental economics program at Harvard University. “Pricing is the way you get both the short-term gains through efficiency and the longer-term gains from investments in research and switching to cleaner fuels.”

Some academics see an analogy between a global warming policy and the pursuit of national security in the cold war. In the late 1950s, American military spending reached as high as 10 percent of the gross domestic product and averaged about 4 percent, far higher than in any previous peacetime era. A Soviet nuclear attack was a danger but hardly a certainty, just as the predicted catastrophes from global warming are threats but not certainties.
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But even today, there are sizable opportunities, by insisting on more efficient energy use, that are not being seized, according to the McKinsey Global Institute. In a new report, the institute, a business-oriented research group that is part of McKinsey & Company consultants, estimated that the yearly growth in worldwide energy demand could be cut by more than half through 2020 — to an annual rate of 0.6 percent from a forecast 2.2 percent, using current technology alone.
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Yet even in realms of social policy, where uncertainty is high, there is an implicit calculation of costs and benefits. In the case of global warming, the cost of society’s insurance policy may well be worth it, measured in the damage averted.
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The piece points out that the estimated cost of 1% global economic activity to mitigate global warming would be about the cost of Resident Bush's tax cuts, or the war in Iraq.

And the longer we wait the harder it will become to alleviate the suffering we're setting ourselves up for.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/business/worldbusiness/12warm.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1