What Entity Decides The Way We Respond to Global Warming?
For decades, preventing climate change” has been the primary objective of climate politics. Across the diverse viewpoints, from local climate advocates to elite UN representatives, curtailing carbon emissions to avoid future disaster has been the central focus of climate policies.
Yet climate change has come and its real-world consequences are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on averting future catastrophes. It must now also include conflicts over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Insurance markets, residential sectors, water and land use policies, employment sectors, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adapt to a altered and more unpredictable climate.
Ecological vs. Governmental Effects
To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against coastal flooding, enhancing flood control systems, and adapting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this structural framing sidesteps questions about the organizations that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers toiling in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we implement federal protections?
These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a increase in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to fit 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 decrease their water usage. How we answer to these societal challenges – and those to come – will embed completely opposing visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.
From Expert-Led Systems
Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus shifted to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, covering the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are struggles about values and negotiating between competing interests, not merely emissions math.
Yet even as climate moved from the realm of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that lease stabilization, comprehensive family support and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more budget-friendly, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.
Beyond Catastrophic Narratives
The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something completely novel, 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 separate engineering problem, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.
Developing Strategic Battles
The terrain of this struggle is beginning to take shape. 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 complete governmental protection. The divergence is sharp: one approach uses economic incentives to push people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – while the other allocates public resources that permit them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more present truth: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will triumph.
