Given this definition, I am willing to state that I am one of these folks. I do support a carbon tax now but I'm confident that urban capitalism will evolve and adapt to protect us from what we unleash. It would be cheaper, and less risky for the vulnerable who live in risky places and face serious migration costs, for us to "buy insurance" now by reducing our GHG emissions but I reject that we doomed.
I am not a scientist so I do not know if the warming will be limited (this is the mapping from CO2 concentrations on global average temperature). Implicit in Mr. Gillis' quote is some deep pessimism about our individual and collective ability to read the NY Times and to process information that would simultaneously help us to adapt to the new challenges we have unleashed. Gillis also questions whether future entrepreneurs (think of Musk and Zuckerberg) are up to the challenge of designing technology that will meet our future demands for safety and robust risk avoidance in the face of climate change. We will need;
I am not a scientist so I do not know if the warming will be limited (this is the mapping from CO2 concentrations on global average temperature). Implicit in Mr. Gillis' quote is some deep pessimism about our individual and collective ability to read the NY Times and to process information that would simultaneously help us to adapt to the new challenges we have unleashed. Gillis also questions whether future entrepreneurs (think of Musk and Zuckerberg) are up to the challenge of designing technology that will meet our future demands for safety and robust risk avoidance in the face of climate change. We will need;
1. drought and heat resistant sources of food
2. Buildings that function in extreme climate scenarios
3. Buildings that can withstand flooding
4. distributed energy generation so that the grid isn't knocked out.
5. distributed water purification systems
6. redundancies in supply chains to insure against inevitable shocks (i.e snowplows at airports where it rarely snows such as Atlanta)
7. The ability to migrate across cities to increase our menu of options of where to live.
7. The ability to migrate across cities to increase our menu of options of where to live.
For every urbanite, think of your daily life. If climate change will disrupt this life, then what can you do to protect yourself to minimize the impact? If your current location is not well suited for these shocks, then home prices will fall there but you can move and rebuild on higher ground. Changes in zoning laws will allow more homes to be able to be built there. To see more about these thoughts, read my paper; Climate Change Adaptation: Lessons from Urban Economics.