Which Authority Decides How We Respond to Global Warming?
For many years, halting climate change” has been the primary aim of climate politics. Throughout the political spectrum, from community-based climate campaigners to senior UN delegates, reducing carbon emissions to avert future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate strategies.
Yet climate change has arrived and its real-world consequences are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also include conflicts over how society addresses climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, aquatic and land use policies, workforce systems, and regional commerce – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a changed and growing unstable climate.
Ecological vs. Political Effects
To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against coastal flooding, improving flood control systems, and adapting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this infrastructure-centric framing avoids questions about the organizations that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to operate freely, 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 guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we enact 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 danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought 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 react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish completely opposing visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for professionals and designers rather than genuine political contestation.
Transitioning From Specialist Frameworks
Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the common understanding that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus transitioned to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, covering the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are struggles about values and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely pollution calculations.
Yet even as climate moved from the preserve of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the economic pressure, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more affordable, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.
Beyond Apocalyptic Narratives
The need for this shift becomes more evident once we move beyond the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious 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 forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather continuous with existing societal conflicts.
Forming Strategic Conflicts
The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in vulnerable regions like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide comprehensive public disaster insurance. The divergence is sharp: one approach uses economic incentives to encourage people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through market pressure – while the other allocates public resources that permit them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more present truth: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will succeed.