Adaptation

Adaptation to climate change effects has become an emerging market segment. Lovins, 252
Villages and roads that used to be on the (melting) permafrost will need rebuilding/relocating. Floods are coming and we need sea-wall design and implementation (esp. for storm surges), inland areas need efficient space use for coastal climate refugees to occupy, power lines will need to be more resistant to extreme climates esp. ice. Alaska is figuring out how to relocate villages from flooding. California needs to get better at firefighting and desalination because heat and drought are only getting worse. Also need bridges higher than before for storm surges. Heat waves get dangerous, we need early warning systems for these (e.g. senior centers) Begley

Progress

Cities (New York, Seattle) and states (California, Alaska, Maryland, Oregon, Washington) have adaptation plans Begley //TODO: read these

Some worry that focus on adaptation will create financial incentives for climate change acceleration. Others argue that we will need adaptation services/technologies regardless of how fast we curb emissions, so we should start now.

Hybrid cars have taken more than 10 years to claim less than 3 percent of the market Smil, 25
In large cities (where electric cars for commute make the most sense), 30–60% of cars are parked curbside. Since most electric car scenarios envision overnight charging in garages, how would these curb-parked cars be charged? Smil, 25
Most published scenarios put likely share of pure electric cars at no more than 25% by 2050 Smil, 25
We don’t produce enough energy to charge 100% of cars, and can’t scale up to it quickly. Assuming that the overall demand of a midsized electric car is around 6MW/year, if all American cars suddenly became electric, we would immediately need new power generation equal to 25% of all of the energy used in the United States in 2008. Smil, 26 We can’t produce that much more energy soon. It took 15 years (1993–2008) to spin up that quantity of power the last time we did. Smil, 26

[aggarwal]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040619013001917 "Aggarwal, Sonia and Harvey, Hal. 'Rethinking Energy Policy to Deliver a Clean Energy Future.' Energy Innovation, 2013."