climatopolis - milken institute€¦ · tension and excitement is based on the long rivalry between...

77First Quarter 2011

b o o k e x c e r p t

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b y m at t h e w e . k a h n

*Basic Books, all rights reserved.

Matthew E. Kahn, the author of Climato po

lis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter

Future,* which is excerpted below, is hard

to pigeonhole. Yes, he’s an economist – and a distinguished one, with a PhD from

Chicago, a professorship at UCLA and dozens of research

papers in print. But he is also a prolific and inventive

blogger (greeneconomics.blogspot.com) who’s opined

about topics ranging from celebrity real estate brokers to

China’s rising interest in Western-style toilets. And along

with his wife, the economic historian Dora Costa, he

wrote a remarkable book about the Civil War that has

clear implications for a very modern issue: the value of diversity in the military. ¶

Climatopolis is both a contrarian analysis of the consequences of global warming for

cities and a paean to the value of markets in solving grand social problems. Oh, and

did I mention it could also serve as a tip sheet on where to buy real estate after the polar

ice caps melt? — Peter Passell

ClimatopolisHow Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter Future

78 The Milken Institute Review

When the Yankees play the Red Sox, or

when the Patriots face the Giants (as in the 2008 Super Bowl), part of the

tension and excitement is based on the long rivalry between New York City

and Boston. From at least the time the Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to the

Yankees, people from Boston have lived in the shadow of New York City.

Which is the better city in which to live and work? In the contemporary skills econ-omy, the cities that can lure and retain talent will boom – the city that can attract the next Google has a bright future. Today, coastal cit-ies, such as Boston and New York, and sunny, warm-winter cities are winning the competi-tion. Losing cities, such as Cleveland and De-troit, are slowly decaying as the housing stock and industrial capacity that was built during the manufacturing heyday of the 1950s rusts away. Detroit’s population has shrunk from 1.8 million in 1950 to 912,000 in 2008.

The same dynamics are playing out in Ger-many and England. Northern industrial cities, such as Manchester, are shrinking at the same time high-skill southern cities at London’s fringe, such as Reading, are growing.

The point is, cities compete. They compete for resources, for bragging rights and most especially for population. Cities have to pro-vide the amenities – from safe streets to clean air – that attract new residents and keep the old ones. And those residents, or most of them, have the ability to vote with their feet. They can move across the country or even to a new country, to wherever their skills will take them that seems appealing.

Our hotter future, though, will completely change the urban pecking order. The future won’t look like it does now – but then it never has. As Harvard economist Frank Knight

wrote in 1921, “The existence of a problem of knowledge depends on the future being dif-ferent from the past, while the possibility of a solution of the problem depends on the fu-ture being like the past.” While Knight is un-likely to have pondered the issue of climate change almost 90 years ago, he did anticipate the fundamental challenge of predicting how we will individually and collectively cope in our hotter world.

More than 80 percent of Americans live in cities, and commuting costs (which include time) typically force us to work nearby. In choosing a city, we face trade-offs. A PhD economist who loves to surf will have mixed feelings about joining the University of Chica-go’s faculty. While she would be fortunate to work at a great university, she might not find Lake Michigan’s waves much of a challenge. In a nutshell, we seek out cities simultaneously offering a great quality of life and good job prospects. Few cities offer both – some offer neither. Facing the market price of housing in different cities and knowing your own priori-ties, you must choose what is best for you.

Climate change will shake up the quality-of-life rankings as climate amenities shift and the risk of drought or flooding (or both) changes. Some of Italy’s superstar cities, like Venice, will face significant new risks while in-land cities such as Milan will not. Major coastal cities will have to wrestle with tough engineering and public health challenges.


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This excerpt explains how the competitive landscape for cities will shake out as things get hotter. At the end, I offer you a sneak pre-view of the best cities to live in rankings around the year 2100. Whether you should buy real estate in such cities today, I leave to you.

the current menu of destination choicesEven though the Internet now gives some of us the option to telecommute from a log cabin in the woods, most people still want to live in cities. Cities help us to acquire new skills, and to meet and trade with others. And there will always be a new generation seeking to network and to establish their reputations, looking for friends and romance and culture. Television shows such as Seinfeld and Sex in the City were set in New York, not the Kansas plains.

Urbanites have many choices of where to live. While language barriers and cultural dif-ferences do create high psychic costs for mov-ing within the European Union, mobility is relatively easy across states and regions within the United States. Roughly 3 percent of Amer-icans change states every year. The United States contains 60 metropolitan areas with at least 900,000 people and 164 metros with at least 250,000. While all big cities have com-mon features, such as Starbucks and a down-town, these cities differ in any number of ways. Some are coastal, while others are in-land. Some are new, built mainly after World War II, while others peaked 50 years ago. Some cities are hot during the summer, while others remain cool. Some are known for their green beauty, while others have a legacy of past manufacturing, of gritty industrial and commercial real estate.


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the new, hotter playing field

While climate change will not affect the qual-ity of football played in enclosed stadiums like the New Orleans Superdome, it will shift the objective reality of what day-to-day life is like in individual cities. Low-probability, high-risk scenarios (e.g., massive floods) will also become more likely. The challenges and opportunities that will arise will have major economic consequences. Over the next 50 years, hundreds of millions of new homes and countless new commercial buildings will be built. In our hotter world, will major mega-cities emerge in what are today sleepy towns?

If Americans’ sole goal is to survive in the face of climate change, we could build new cities far from the coasts and close to the Ca-nadian border – say, in North Dakota. We have seen such rapid urban population

growth before. In 1950, only 25,000 people lived in Las Vegas. By 2008, the city had grown to 560,000, and over 1.8 million peo-ple now live in the greater metropolitan area.

Visitors are amazed at how creative invest-ments have transformed this moonscape. In Las Vegas, after all, you can find small-scale versions of the Eiffel Tower and New York’s Central Park. This could be a preview of what is to come. While it may not be “authentic,” it does suggest the transplantation possibilities enabled by financial capital combined with imagination. The current residents of Fargo, North Dakota (pop. 95,000), might not be too happy about having loudmouthed New Yorkers move in by the millions, but would certainly be impressed with the cash they might offer for local land. (Today, one can purchase a prime acre of land in Fargo for roughly $100,000.)


In truth, we will not be able to replicate New York’s culture or San Francisco’s toler-ance in a safe city in our hotter world. Thus, each of us will face fundamental trade-offs. While we all seek the free lunch of an afford-able, high quality of life, an ironic byproduct of our individual attempts to find such cities means that they won’t exist! The most attrac-tive cities will effectively ration access with higher home prices and relatively low wages.

the super bowlThe educated are highly mobile and are will-ing to move when they anticipate better op-portunities. A city that wants to thrive thus must pay careful attention to whether skilled workers want to be there. Attracting and re-taining the skilled is the key determinant of long-run city growth. While metros used to compete for manufacturing gigs so they could have a stable middle class, they now compete for knowledge workers.

The U.S. population is increasingly con-centrated in the South and West. In 1900, 38 percent of the nation lived in these regions; by the year 2000, the figure had grown to 58 percent. This regional migration has led to huge population growth in newer cities, in-cluding Phoenix, Las Vegas and Dallas, and little or no growth in older, colder ones, such as Buffalo and Cleveland.

Climate change will slow or stop the growth of these newer cities. Their summers will become too hot, and water is likely to be-come too scarce. And if people no longer de-sire to live in such cities, job growth will slow, too. In the modern economy, few industries face geographic determinism the way, say, the steel industry once did: a Starbucks or a large law firm can locate anywhere.

In the recent past, somebody who wanted to toil in the car industry had to come to De-troit. Today, a startup automaker, such as

Coda Automotive, can be headquartered in Santa Monica, as its bosses enjoy the sunshine and easy access to flights to China where the company’s electric vehicle is being produced.

Major cities compete for good buzz; they want to avoid labels such as Murder Capital of the U.S. – or, for that matter, Smog Capital or Traffic Capital. In the age of the Internet and cheap air travel, even the best public relations firms cannot trick the public into believing that a dirty, dangerous city is great. As climate change unfolds, a humid city such as St. Louis may face a worse mosquito problem. Poten-tial migrants will make informed decisions.

urban quality of lifeConsider Pittsburgh in the 1950s or Manches-ter in the 1870s, cities in which heavy manu-facturing was the golden goose, creating jobs and opportunity. In those days, there was a fundamental trade-off: Workers in dirty, pol-luted cities sacrificed quality of life in return for a good paycheck. Today, cities have a strong economic incentive to offer very dif-ferent experiences, and some have been smart (or lucky) enough to harness industrial change to their advantage.

Between 1951 and 2000, the number of manufacturing jobs in Manhattan declined from 1,082,000 to 146,000. Service employ-ment filled much of the gap. This shift to ser-vice industries has had large environmental benefits for major cities ranging from New York to Pittsburgh to Chicago.

The trend is not unique to the United States. Over the past 30 years, London has lost 600,000 manufacturing jobs – and gained 600,000 jobs in business services, as well as 180,000 jobs in entertainment, leisure, hotels and catering. The industrial transition from manufacturing to finance and other services has increased the number of urbanites who have a stake in maintaining their cities’ high quality of life.


Indeed, quality of life is a key component help-ing wealthy cities stay successful, providing politicians with strong incentives to create liv-able green localities.

To this point (and in sharp contrast to crime or air and water pollution), urban cli-mate has been fixed. You can’t make your city sunnier or less snowy – San Diego has nicer weather than Detroit. But that’s about to change: a city whose climate amenities im-prove due to climate change will enjoy a windfall as more skilled people arrive. The tax base will increase, financing improvements in local services such as public schools. And the added purchasing power will create a snow-ball effect as amenities beef up the tax base and make other amenities more affordable.

some gutsy predictionsClimate modelers are building better and bet-ter models of how specific geographical areas’ climates will change under different global greenhouse emissions growth patterns. The payoff to such number crunching is a series of scenarios about future summer heat waves, sea level rise and rainfall patterns.

The Community Climate System Model predicts that the typical U.S. county’s average annual temperature will rise eight degrees and its rainfall will decline by three-tenths of an inch between now and late in the century. But this average masks huge variations. The model predicts that there are 150 counties whose average temperature will rise by only three degrees, while the average temperature in another 150 counties will rise by over 12 degrees! Iowa and North Dakota, for example, are expected to grow much warmer. Histori-cally, the average February temperature in North Dakota has been a frigid 15 degrees. The CCSM model predicts that this will dou-ble to 30 degrees by the end of the century, while August average temperatures will rise

from 69 degrees to a balmy 83.Some of the most dire computer predic-

tions focus on the fate of cities on oceans. Over the last 60 years more and more people have chosen to live in coastal U.S cities, rang-ing from San Diego to Boston. Counties lo-cated within 50 miles of an ocean or the Great Lakes make up just 13 percent of the conti-nental United States’ land area. But those counties were home to 50 percent of the pop-ulation in 2000. Moreover, income per square mile in those counties is more than eight times that of inland counties. Coastal cities are densely populated and rich because their amenities and climate make them attractive.

The same general patterns hold in the Eu-ropean Union. One-third of the population lives within 50 kilometers of the coast. In the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, the figure is 75 percent, while in Denmark it is close to 100 percent.

Many of us have thus chosen to put our-selves at risk from rising sea levels. This coastal migration pattern has already in-creased damage from hurricanes and other storms because of the sheer quantity of peo-ple and property along the coasts. Presum-ably, coastal dwellers who really do fear cli-mate change will move inland. By the same token, if climate change gradually raises the sea level, we’ll also invest to protect the prop-erty at risk.

This strategy makes perfect sense unless the climate changes abruptly. In this case, a coastal city could disappear before we had time to protect it. Indeed, if we believe that such nightmare tipping-point scenarios are plausible, we should seriously consider evac-uating such cities.

some specifics from san diegoSome cities are commissioning research to provide a glimpse of what they might look


like in a hotter world. A study of San Diego concluded that, by 2050, its sea level will be 12-18 inches higher and the average tempera-ture will be 4.5 degrees warmer. The region will require 37 percent more water while the supply from current sources, such as the Col-orado River, will be reduced by 20 percent. Climate change will cause the fire season to start earlier, and the number of days with ideal conditions for wildfires will increase by one-fifth. Peak electricity demand will in-crease by some 70 percent.

At the same time these changes are taking place, the portion of San Diego’s population that is elderly will increase sharply, in part be-cause seniors are less inclined to move in re-sponse to a changing environment. And that spells even more trouble for San Diego be-cause the old are more sensitive to heat ex-tremes and ambient pollution than the young.

While such predictions should be treated with caution, they do provide a useful heads-up for political leaders. Consider both the predictions of increased water shortages and soaring peak electricity demand. Underlying both are two other predictions: The number of people likely to be living there and what their average income is likely to be. Richer peo-ple demand more power and water, and the sheer size of the region scales up the demand.

The flaw in such forecasting is the diffi-culty of predicting technological advances. Forecasters cannot know how much appli-ance energy efficiency will improve by the year 2050. If they are assuming that future air-conditioners will be no more efficient than the counterparts today, they are likely to vastly overstate energy demand caused by the need for cooling. But, even with this caveat, the exercise is useful because it offers some sense of the issues San Diego will face.

The Pacific Institute (a think tank in Oak-land) estimates that a 1.4-meter sea level rise

will put 480,000 Californians at greater risk of a major flood event, with a probability of about 1 percent annually. For those of you who slept through your intro to statistics classes, this is similar to playing Russian rou-lette with a gun that has one bullet and 100 chambers.

If we take these forecasts seriously, we will respond by reducing our exposure – we’ll adapt. More people will choose not to live in flood zones. Those who remain can be en-couraged to live in the sort of floating homes that Brad Pitt is developing for New Orleans. Some Californians may view the coastal areas as too risky and the inland areas as too hot. They may choose to move within the region to Idaho or Montana. The Pacific Institute predicts that in the San Francisco Bay Area, the population vulnerable to serious flooding is currently around 140,000. A 1.4-meter in-crease in sea levels would almost double the number at risk from a 100-year flood event. The price tag for protecting such vulnerable areas by building seawalls and levees would be at least $14 billion (in year 2000 dollars), with maintenance costs of another $1.4 bil-lion per year.

In a metropolitan area of over three mil-lion, an extra 130,000 at risk seems a relatively small number. This may sound heartless, but the people living in flood plains can protect themselves. Put simply, they can move out. If they continue to live in harm’s way, I am not convinced that they should be viewed as vic-tims if they gamble and lose.

I recognize that the urban poor will need a nudge to protect themselves against climate change. If it is widely understood that coastal areas are becoming riskier, real estate prices will fall and the bargains will serve as a pov-erty magnet. Think of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, and who is likely to remain there as hurricane risk increases. Anticipating this


challenge, environmental justice advocates would be wise to lobby for zoning changes that designate at-risk areas for wetlands rather than for housing.

Resettlement of urban minority commu-nities raises a host of difficult issues. But past government efforts, such the U.S Housing and Urban Development’s Moving to Oppor-tunity program, have shown the benefits of relocating poor households to middle-in-come neighborhoods. For example, teenage girls who have moved from ghetto areas under the MTO program do better in school and are less likely to become involved in risky behaviors.

Of course, in a diverse population some people will be willing to gamble and live on the coast. One of my favorite teachers at the University of Chicago told us that a profound idea in economics is that deaf people should live next to airports. He had nothing against the hearing-impaired. His point was that if you are deaf, the noise from airports disturbs you less than it would a person who can hear the jets taking off. Since homes close to the airport are cheaper than homes farther away, deaf people could gain access to cheaper housing at little loss of quality. In a similar sense, as climate change unfolds coastal loca-tions will still be beautiful, but they will be more risky locations to live. This will lead daredevils, who recognize the risk but enjoy taking gambles, to live there.

how will at-risk cities compete in a hotter world?Remember the old Watergate question of what people knew and when they knew it? If climate change’s impact on your city mainly translates into more frequent heat waves and drought and increased summer pollution, you will quickly feel it and be able to make a rational decision about whether to stay or go.

But suppose climate change proves to be a sudden unpredictable killer.

In this case, residents may not perceive an objective change in the city’s quality of life. And if they don’t believe their city is at risk, landowners and incumbent industries may prosper. In fact, those who do have an inkling will have the financial incentive to cover up the fact that climate change imposes objective risk.

Such cover-ups are a common theme in popular environmentalist culture’s view of big business. Hollywood has generated many hit movies based on the idea that cigar-chomping businessmen make big profits while exposing the unsuspecting public to en-vironmental risk (think of Mr. Burns on The Simpsons). Whether it is John Travolta play-ing a lawyer battling polluting factories in A Civil Action or Julia Roberts discovering that a power plant is poisoning a town’s water supply in Erin Brockovich, studio executives know that the public enjoys rooting for the righteous little guy in his fight against Goliath. These snapshots of popular culture reveal deep cynicism about capitalist growth and the motives of capitalist firms.

The core issue here is inside information. The firms know something that the public doesn’t. At-risk cities, such as Venice, have the same incentives as the corporate “Mr. Big” to suppress information about their city’s health in the face of climate change. And narrow, market-driven pursuit of self-interest creates the possibility of tragedy if a low probability flood event does occur.

While economics is called the dismal sci-ence, my field does offer some optimism con-cerning how to pry loose information about the risks cities face from climate change. Scholars who have studied competition be-tween businesses in the same industry have noted that the competition gains when ru-


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mors and smears of their rivals become public. Best to illustrate with an anecdote. When I

was a kid, I loved a bubble gum called Bubble Yum that was produced by the Life Savers Candy Company. A rumor spread that there were spider eggs in the gum. The manufac-turer was driven to taking out full-page ads in The New York Times to counter these claims. And while I have no reason to believe Bubble Yum’s competitors were behind the rumors, I’ll bet they gained at Life Savers’ expense. Which brings us back to Venice: tourist desti-nations competing with Venice will have strong incentives to publicize their own charms and relative safety.

do greens do it better?Coastal cities below sea level face greater threats from climate change than does, say, mile-high Denver. But it would be a mistake

to engage in geographical determinism. There are a number of strategies that a city could embrace to minimize the impact of climate change. Whether a city will have enough in-centives to do this, however, hinges on who lives there. Contrast a city filled with Rush Limbaughs to one full of Al Gores.

In cities such as Boston, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Ore., young, highly ed-ucated liberals cluster, fostering an environ-mentalist spirit. Ambitious politicians, such as Gavin Newsom, the former mayor of San Francisco, actively identify with a green agenda. In Portland, successful campaigning led to the demolition of a freeway in order to connect downtown to the Willamette River waterfront.

Such liberal/environmentalist cities attract individuals who genuinely care about having


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a small carbon footprint and want to live with others with similar tastes. Once such green paradises form, they feed on them-selves. Think of Berkeley, California, where I live several months a year. It seems that every other registered vehicle is a Prius, while solar panels adorn every other roof. Berkeley resi-dents are walking the walk, using public tran-sit and, in many cases, refraining from eating meat. The residents of such cities are well versed on the basic climate research high-lighting its likely impacts. This extra knowl-edge makes them wise voters and consumers in the face of climate change.

Environmentalist cities also tend to be home to the well educated. And people with more education tend to be more patient and more likely to support costly investments that address long-run environmental threats. This

sets a virtuous cycle in motion, providing in-centives for the media to research and present stories on the environment. People with more education tend to be more active politically, choosing policies that both reduce a city’s carbon footprint and protect it from the likely impact of climate change.

A righteous city filled with Al Gore clones could pursue several adaptation strategies. It could update building codes, push developers to avoid building in flood and fire zones, and build climate-friendly, compact structures. Such a city would figure out how to take ad-vantage of shade plants to minimize the urban “heat island” effect that increases de-mand for air-conditioning. This city would price electricity and water to encourage effi-ciency and conservation. In turn, residents of this city would not resist the increased incen-tive to buy energy-efficient products. None of


these initiatives are costless, which explains why environmentalist cities will be more likely to make the sacrifices.

Such first-adopter cities will create bene-fits in the long run for other cities by creating demand for green products that will become cheaper as the technology is refined and pro-duction is scaled up. But some of these bene-fits will only be enjoyed locally, as green cities attract firms with expertise in installation and maintenance of such products.

green cities versus climate-safe citiesNow imagine that Al Gore is given the job of assigning households to live in either Boston or Houston. Boston, let us assume, will be at risk from climate change-related shocks, but its residents will have a small carbon foot-print because they will drive little and con-sume electricity generated from renewable sources like wind and solar. Houston is just the opposite. Those who face no direct risks from climate change generally leave huge car-bon footprints because they drive more and use electricity generated by coal-fired plants.

Al Gore thus has a tough choice. He can send people to Houston, where they’re safe from scary climate risks (think flooding) but where they will emit more carbon and exacer-bate climate change for everyone else. Or he can send them to Boston, where they become proverbial canaries in the coal mine, but will do less damage to the environment.

In a perfect world, our cities would offer Houston’s protection from climate risk and Boston’s small carbon footprint. In our world, cities lie between these extremes. If we all lived in at-risk Boston, we would be aware that we will suffer greatly from climate change. We would vote for policies that protected us from climate change out of self-interest. But if we’re cocooned in Houston, we would not

feel this urgency and would view costly car-bon mitigation regulation as a benefit only to others.

Climate-safe cities can thus undermine ef-forts to build political coalitions willing to sacrifice to mitigate carbon now. While Al Gore and the Sierra Club would probably not admit it, they need human shields to con-vince people to vote for $4-a-gallon gas and other costly steps needed to slow climate change. There are not enough altruists in the United States to get the Congress to sign such regulation.

naming the low-carbon citiesIn a time when the United States produces one-fifth of the world’s climate-changing emissions, green cities are helping to mitigate the global challenge of reducing atmospheric carbon. So which is the greenest? In recent re-search, I ranked 66 of America’s largest cities with respect to their household carbon diox-ide emissions. [See page 96 for a sampling.]

The rankings are highly intuitive: San Francisco easily topped Houston. Houston’s hot, humid summer climate requires much more electricity for air-conditioning. Its cheaper housing encourages households to buy more, which increases their energy con-sumption. Its low population density and dis-persed employment means that people must rely on private vehicles for transportation and few use public transit.

Note, too, that electricity in Houston is generated by dirtier plants than at those in San Francisco. My study quantifies cross-city differences for the year 2000. It remains an open question how this ranking of cities would change in the presence of a carbon tax or other incentives that forced emitters to ac-count for the consequences of their emissions.

One might expect localities to facilitate the construction of new housing in low carbon


cities. But this is not the case. The cities with the smallest carbon footprint per person are also the least likely to permit new housing.

On one level this should not be surprising: environmentally minded people are inclined to choose to live in areas without sprawl, where open space is protected. And for better or worse, green cities engage in a form of NIMBYism that deflects growth to other cit-ies that are less concerned by the threat of cli-mate change.

best climate cities, circa 2100When I was a kid I loved The Book of Lists, which first came out in 1977. While I do not remember the list of famous people who died during sex, I do have a vague memory of the worst places to hitchhike, people misquoted by Ronald Reagan, and breeds of dogs that bite people the most. Now that I am old enough to write books, I feel the urge to con-tribute my own list focused on naming cities likely to remain safe and comfortable as cli-mate change unfolds.

In forming this list, I would have liked to be scientific about my methods. But it is quite difficult to compare cities with respect to the adaptation policies they now have and the policies they will have down the road.

While I recognize that enlightened policies could help at-risk cities to adapt to climate blows (for example, zoning to push housing away from flood zones), I will focus on char-acteristics of cities that we know will persist over time and will help them to cope with cli-mate change.

With this caveat, here is my list of the United States’ top five climate-resilient cities:

• Salt Lake City• Milwaukee• Buffalo• Minneapolis• Detroit

It is no accident that these cities are not on the coasts. While climate change will throw a variety of punches, sea level rise is the nastiest challenge among them. Elevated, inland Salt Lake City and the other cities on the list will not flood.

Nor is it an accident that the cities on this list all are located in the northern United States. Their summers are relatively cool right now and unlike, say, Phoenix, they are un-likely to suffer severe heat in the climate-changed future. None of these cities face is-sues of drought or serious ambient air pollution.

Who will want to live in these cities? While the extremely risk-averse among us will be the most likely to seek out these cities in a hotter world, the rest of us face trade-offs. Though I have not tried to incorporate adap-tation policy choices into my rankings, it should be clear that a city such as Salt Lake City that faces relatively little climate change risk can get away with doing relatively little to adapt compared to more-at-risk cities, such as New York City and Los Angeles.

Turning to the rest of the world, Moscow scores high on my list, as do Berlin, Paris, Krakow, Calgary and Beijing.

These cities are inland, of course, and un-likely to suffer significant flood damage. Each now has relatively cool summers and is un-likely to become unbearably hot down the road. Warmer winters are always a highly val-ued amenity and each of these cities will ben-efit from climate change-induced winter warmth.

Yes, the unexpected summer heat wave of 2010 killed thousands in Moscow but a “silver lining” of this shock is that Moscow will be bet-ter prepared for the next heat wave. After expe-riencing such rare summer heat, households will install air-conditioning and take other proactive steps to protect themselves. m

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