Who Decides The Way We Respond to Global Warming?
For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the central goal of climate governance. Throughout the political spectrum, from local climate campaigners to high-level UN delegates, reducing carbon emissions to prevent future crisis has been the guiding principle of climate strategies.
Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also embrace struggles over how society handles climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, hydrological and territorial policies, workforce systems, and local economies – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.
Ecological vs. Societal Consequences
To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this structural framing avoids questions about the organizations that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to act independently, or should the central administration backstop high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit 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 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 high-risk markets 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 equip 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 paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we react to these political crises – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.
From Expert-Led Models
Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the common understanding that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus transitioned to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, covering the sustainable business 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 coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are fights about values and negotiating between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.
Yet even as climate migrated from the preserve of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the economic pressure, arguing that housing cost controls, universal childcare and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more budget-friendly, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. 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 reshaping everyday life.
Transcending Apocalyptic Perspectives
The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power 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 completely novel, but as familiar problems made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled 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.
Emerging Governmental Battles
The terrain of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to subject 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The contrast is sharp: one approach uses cost indicators to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other dedicates public resources that enable 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 neglected. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more current situation: 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.
