from Grist:
Don’t like the climate? Move to Fargo, says author of ‘Climatopolis’by Jonathan Hiskes
16 Sep 2010 12:21 PM
Matthew Kahn, professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment, the Department of Economics, and the Department of Public Policy.UCLA environmental economist Matthew Kahn has a knack for unusual research. He found that Google searches for "global warming" decrease when unemployment rises, ranked the 435 members of the U.S. House from greenest to brownest, and discovered that the decline of manufacturing in Rust Belt cities like Pittsburgh led to improved air quality, which in turn attracted skilled workers and contributed to an economic renaissance.
His new book, Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter Future, argues that while it's too late to avoid the major effects of global warming, that's OK because most people will simply move to places that are effectively adapting to the changes. And here we'd been so worried! Kahn, a University of Chicago graduate, takes the school's free-market tradition to an extreme, arguing that rational agents in a market economy will simply "vote with their feet" and make winners out of the cities that are most able to innovate and attract new residents. It's a provocative argument, to say the least.
Kahn came by the Grist office for a chat during a book-tour stop in Seattle.
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Q. Your book argues that we're probably unable to stop significant climate change, but that most people will adapt and be just fine. How did your research lead you to that conclusion?A. There are three lines of research behind my optimism. One is our ability to form expectations of the future. There's a literature in economics on our ability to anticipate future problems and invest beforehand to reduce our exposure to them. The second piece is literature on innovation: When even just a few of us anticipate coming days of scarcity, that creates huge economic opportunities to seize the day.
The third piece of my optimism is our past predilection to vote with our feet. If a city goes to hell in terms of high crime, people move to some other area. Landowners in that area suffer a land value loss. Politicians of that area are suddenly in control of a worthless area. When Detroit lost its jobs, people moved away and stopped moving there. Climate change will lower quality of life in certain cities, and that will induce migration, but also innovation.
Q. Your book describes the Mariel boatlift of Cubans moving to Miami. Why is that a useful example?A. Back in Jimmy Carter's day, a very large number of Cubans showed up unexpectedly in Miami with no warning ahead of time that they were coming. This raised rents and lowered wages. Economists documented that residents in Miami started to migrate to other cities such as Atlanta, so that, in the medium term, wages and rents quickly went back to where they originally were.
If the people of Miami had been tipped off that the boatlift was coming, people who had been on the verge of moving away would have left earlier and there wouldn't have even been short-term disruption. The difference between climate change and the Mariel boatlift was the Mariel boatlift was unexpected. There was no equivalent of climate scientists sounding the alarm.
Q. What kind of places are going to do the best and the worst as the climate changes?A. I would not be buying land in Las Vegas or Phoenix right now. I think that Seattle will compete much better in the hotter future.
In Manhattan and New York City, there's ongoing talk about the potential of sea-level rise caused by climate change. An optimist would say you move Wall Street to Greenwich, Conn. But if there's abrupt climate change, then you can't really be optimistic.
So an implicit assumption in the book is that climate change will occur gradually. I'm not a climate scientist, but you have to have quite an accelerated model to believe we could wake up tomorrow and be in completely different climate conditions than we are today. We can expect a continuity to sea-level rise and temperature spikes. .............(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.grist.org/article/2010-09-16-climatopolis-matthew-kahn-migration-climate-displacement/
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