This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, July 25th, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown.

The political struggle over how best to deal with climate change has focused primarily on mitigation,

preventing as much climate change as possible.

Matthew Kahn, and professor of economics at the University of Southern California,

argues that urbanization as much to teach us about adapting to a potentially warmer world.

We spoke last week in Bozeman, Montana.

Economists and when other people use the term mitigation and adaptation with respect to climate change. What are they

talking about? It's a good question. Mitigation means reducing the world's

total tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

Adaptation means given what we've already released,

how do we continue to have a good life in the face of what we've released?

Do mitigation and adaptation fall along partisan lines in terms of the desire to fix the climate

change problem with respect to humans specifically?

So I think all of us want to be healthy, comfortable and safe.

I think that in academic communities I used to be at UCLA's Institute of the Environment and the

academic community is convinced that climate change is a real threat and that greenhouse gas emissions contribute to it.

There's a debate about our ability to handle what we've unleashed and I have been on the optimistic side that while taking the challenge of climate change very seriously

That we have a number of tools namely urbanization to help us to adapt.

In terms of adaptation, you say urbanization is a key, but what does that mean and why,

how should we be thinking about urbanization as a key to dealing with the climate change

that humans have already caused?

So let me answer that indirectly, and you may not like this.

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