We have released the genie from the bottle: climate change is coming, and there’s no stopping it. The question, according to Matthew Kahn, is not how we’re going to avoid a hotter future but how we’re going to adapt to it. In Climatopolis, Kahn, one of the world’s foremost experts on the economics of the environment, argues that cities and regions will adapt to rising temperatures over time, slowly transforming our everyday lives as we change our behaviors and our surroundings. Taking the reader on a tour of the world’s cities— from New York to Beijing to Mumbai—Kahn’s clear-eyed, engaging, and optimistic message presents a positive yet realistic picture of what our urban future will look like.
Matthew E. Kahn is a Professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment, the Department of Economics, and the Department of Public Policy. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Before joining the UCLA faculty in January 2007, he taught at Columbia and the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He has served as a Visiting Professor at Harvard and Stanford. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago. He is the author of Green Cities: Urban Growth and the Environment (Brookings Institution Press 2006) and the co-author of Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War (Princeton University Press 2009). His research focuses on environmental, urban, real estate and energy economics. He blogs on these topics at greeneconomics.blogspot.com.
