There is an interesting debate stirring in academic economics focused on urban adaptation to climate change.. In one corner, I sit as the reigning optimist. Read my new post published today in the Harvard Business Review blog. Read my 2010 book Climatopolis. In the other corner sit some top economists. There is my friend Klaus Desmet and his co-authors who have written this coastal flooding paper and there is my friend Guy Michaels and his co-authors who have written this empirical paper. Let the debate continue.
A longer version of my vision for how we will adapt is published here. "Free market" types are under-represented in the field of environmental economics. There appears to be some self selection in who chooses to enter this field. An Empirical Claim (that is testable); those who embrace a behavioral economics worldview are much more likely to be environmental economists than macro economists.
The "Doom and Gloomers" are not modeling at least 3 key adjustment mechanisms;
1. Capital does not last forever
2. "higher ground "exists and if we change zoning at such locations to raise population density,millions of people can live productively in coastal urban areas dozens of feet above sea level.
3. Coastal urban productivity is not caused by any place but instead is caused by the spatial clustering of skilled people.Wall Street is productive because of the set of people who cluster there but they can cluster somewhere else.