Who Decides How We Respond to Global Warming?
For a long time, preventing climate change” has been the central aim of climate governance. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate advocates to senior UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate policies.
Yet climate change has arrived and its real-world consequences are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also include conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Coverage systems, property, aquatic and territorial policies, employment sectors, and community businesses – all will need to be radically remade as we respond to a transformed and growing unstable climate.
Ecological vs. Political Effects
To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against coastal flooding, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps questions about the organizations that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers toiling in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we implement federal protections?
These questions are not hypothetical. In the United States alone, a surge in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we respond to these political crises – and those to come – will encode fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than real ideological struggle.
From Specialist Systems
Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the prevailing wisdom that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, including the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and balancing between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.
Yet even as climate moved from the preserve of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that rent freezes, universal childcare and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.
Moving Past Catastrophic Perspectives
The need for this shift becomes more evident once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something utterly new, but as existing challenges made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather part of existing societal conflicts.
Emerging Policy Battles
The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in high-risk areas like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide universal catastrophe coverage. The contrast is pronounced: one approach uses price signaling to encourage people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other commits public resources that permit them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more current situation: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will triumph.