Who Chooses How We Respond to Global Warming?
For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the primary goal of climate policy. Across the political spectrum, from community-based climate campaigners to high-level UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate plans.
Yet climate change has materialized and its tangible effects are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also encompass conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, residential sectors, water and territorial policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be radically remade as we respond to a transformed and growing unstable climate.
Ecological vs. Societal Effects
To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing avoids questions about the systems that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the national authorities backstop high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers working in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we enact federal protections?
These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a increase in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we respond to these political crises – and those to come – will embed fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.
Transitioning From Specialist Models
Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the common understanding that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus moved to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen countless political battles, spanning the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are struggles about values and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely carbon accounting.
Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of decarbonization. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more affordable, but resource-heavy, 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 stop future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.
Moving Past Doomsday Narratives
The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we move beyond the catastrophic narrative that has long characterized climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something utterly new, but as known issues made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather connected to current ideological battles.
Forming Strategic Debates
The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to expose 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 difference is stark: one approach uses economic incentives to push people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through market pressure – while the other dedicates public resources that allow them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more present truth: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will triumph.
