What Entity Determines How We Respond to Global Warming?
For decades, preventing climate change” has been the singular objective of climate politics. Spanning the political spectrum, from local climate activists to senior UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate plans.
Yet climate change has come and its tangible effects are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Coverage systems, housing, aquatic and land use policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be radically remade as we adjust to a altered and increasingly volatile climate.
Ecological vs. Societal Effects
To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, enhancing flood control systems, and modifying buildings for extreme weather events. But this infrastructure-centric framing sidesteps questions about the systems that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to act independently, or should the central administration guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers toiling in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we establish federal protections?
These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a surge in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record lows – 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 governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for specialists and technicians rather than real ideological struggle.
From Technocratic Models
Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the common understanding that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, including the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely emissions math.
Yet even as climate moved from the realm of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that housing cost controls, comprehensive family support and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more affordable, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.
Beyond Catastrophic Framing
The need for this shift becomes more evident once we abandon the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something completely novel, but as familiar problems made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather part of ongoing political struggles.
Developing Policy Battles
The landscape 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 danger zones like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide comprehensive public disaster insurance. The contrast is pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to push people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – while the other dedicates public resources that permit them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more current situation: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will prevail.
