Originally published in The Economist. Read the full article.
As demand rises for ways to ease the pain of climate change, supply will respond. A growing market for goods prompts producers to innovate—and work by Matthew Kahn of Johns Hopkins University and Daxuan Zhao of Renmin University suggests that the same logic applies to adaptation. Firms researching zero-emission energy and carbon sequestration hope to create a market (or are betting that governments will eventually do the job for them by getting serious about emissions). By contrast the market for better means of coping with climate change is already growing daily.