Who Chooses How We Respond to Global Warming?
For decades, “stopping climate change” has been the primary goal of climate politics. Across the ideological range, from local climate advocates to high-level UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate policies.
Yet climate change has materialized and its real-world consequences are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on averting future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society handles climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Risk pools, residential sectors, aquatic and spatial policies, employment sectors, and community businesses – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a changed and more unpredictable climate.
Ecological vs. Political Effects
To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this structural framing avoids questions about the systems that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers working in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we establish 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 winning an agreement to equip 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 governmental emergencies – and those to come – will embed fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.
Transitioning From Expert-Led 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 market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus moved to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen numerous 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 fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are struggles about values and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely carbon accounting.
Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of decarbonization. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that lease stabilization, universal childcare and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more budget-friendly, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.
Transcending Doomsday Perspectives
The need for this shift becomes more evident once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long prevailed climate discourse. In arguing 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 materialize not as something utterly new, but as familiar problems made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather part of current ideological battles.
Forming Policy Conflicts
The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to expose homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in high-risk areas like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide complete governmental protection. The difference is pronounced: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through commercial dynamics – while the other allocates public resources that permit 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 abandoned. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more present truth: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will prevail.
