The NY Times is devoting a fair bit of its real estate to the life of Nora Ephron. I understand that the Times is tired of writing about Europe and Syria and a number of its readers must identify with Ms. Ephron. Gail Collins reports an interesting quote of Ephron's "Once, years ago, we made a list of things to worry about. Her No. 1 was George W. Bush. I mentioned global warming. “Not a middle-aged issue,” she said."
This quote raises a research issue. Do older people place a low priority on climate change relative to young people? As the world's population ages, especially in Europe and the U.S, does this make it harder to build the anti-carbon coalition?
On the adaptation side, younger people are more likely to move across cities than older people --- so today's young who will be middle aged and old when climate change really starts to unfold need to think about what geographic area they want to lock in to. Their home and their friends will be in this place and it will be more costly to move. Predicting areas' future quality of life is tricky (think of guessing NYC's quality of life in the 2012 if you were visiting it in 1975). Abstracting from individual strategies to cope with new shocks, I would bet that cities that continue to attract a larger share of highly educated people will have greater collective ability to adapt to climate change. These cities will have the funding resources and the political will to make new investments and changes in urban planning to cope.
