Which Authority Decides The Way We Respond to Global Warming?

For a long time, halting climate change” has been the singular objective of climate politics. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from local climate activists to elite UN representatives, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its real-world consequences are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on averting future catastrophes. It must now also include debates over how society handles climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, aquatic and territorial policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adapt to a transformed and growing unstable climate.

Environmental vs. Political Consequences

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and adapting buildings for extreme weather events. But this structural framing avoids questions about the institutions that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to act independently, or should the federal government guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers toiling in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we establish federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we respond to these political crises – 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 experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.

Transitioning From Technocratic Frameworks

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the common understanding that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, covering the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are struggles about principles and mediating between competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate shifted from the domain of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained limited 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, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more affordable, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Transcending Catastrophic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people forced out 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 unique specialist task, then, but rather part of ongoing political struggles.

Developing Governmental Debates

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 danger zones like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide universal catastrophe coverage. The divergence is pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – while the other allocates 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 discarded. 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 reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will prevail.