Bloomberg: "Flood Proofing"

One big misconception about adaptation is that it's some do-gooder thing the greens would want us to do, but the serious people of energy here just shouldn't. Gernot "juggernaut without the jug" Wagner, I'm a climate economist at Columbia Business School.

We basically know that the problem are misguided market forces that are not guiding things in the right direcetion, and whilethe problems are economic, the solutions are, too.

What is adaptation? It is resilience investments, it's making sure that those desirable locations, these valuable properties retain their value.

We have to adapt to what's in store. That's clear. Even if we stopped emitting CO₂ today, we're going to warm substantially and live with the consequences. So we need to do both mitigation and adaption.
 

When you wear a seatbelt, you drive faster. Or you're encouraged to bike faster than you should, by the false security of the bike helmet. That's moral hazard.

Back to climate: When we introduce this specter of "wait, we can just adapt. We can just build seawalls. We may not need to cut CO₂ emissions that much that quickly after all." Not true.

The trick, of course, is to use the need to adapt to then also motivate us to cut emissions more.

Quoted in: "The Colossal Hidden Infrastructure Keeping Cities Dry and Growing," Bloomberg Primer (20 May 2026).