Which Authority Decides The Way We Respond to Global Warming?

For a long time, halting climate change” has been the central goal of climate policy. Throughout the ideological range, from grassroots climate advocates to high-level UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate policies.

Yet climate change has come and its tangible effects are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace debates over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, residential sectors, hydrological and land use policies, employment sectors, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.

Natural vs. Governmental Effects

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against ocean encroachment, enhancing flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this structural framing sidesteps questions about the systems that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the national authorities support high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers working in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we enact 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 high-risk markets 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 securing an agreement to equip 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 provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we respond to these political crises – 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 technical matter for specialists and technicians rather than real ideological struggle.

Moving Beyond Technocratic Frameworks

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the common understanding that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen countless political battles, spanning the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy 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 principles and mediating between opposing agendas, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate migrated from the domain 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 links climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, universal childcare and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more budget-friendly, 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 – reforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Beyond Catastrophic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long characterized climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something utterly new, but as familiar problems made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather part of current ideological battles.

Developing Governmental Debates

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. 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 complete governmental protection. The contrast is sharp: one approach uses price signaling to push people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through commercial dynamics – while the other commits public resources that enable them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more current situation: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will prevail.