What Entity Chooses The Way We Respond to Global Warming?

For decades, “stopping climate change” has been the singular goal of climate governance. Throughout the political spectrum, from grassroots climate advocates to high-level UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to prevent future crisis has been the guiding principle of climate plans.

Yet climate change has arrived and its tangible effects are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include debates over how society addresses climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, hydrological and spatial policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adjust to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.

Environmental vs. Governmental Impacts

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against coastal flooding, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this infrastructure-centric framing sidesteps questions about the institutions that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the central administration guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers laboring in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. 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 endangers to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity 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 answer 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 genuine political contestation.

Moving Beyond Expert-Led Systems

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the prevailing wisdom that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus shifted to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen countless political battles, spanning the eco-friendly markets 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 mining industry support in Germany. These are conflicts about values and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate moved from the realm of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A completely holistic 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.

Moving Past Apocalyptic Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the apocalyptic framing 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 oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something totally unprecedented, but as existing challenges made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather connected to ongoing political struggles.

Emerging Governmental Conflicts

The battlefield 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 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 contrast is pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to push people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other dedicates public resources that enable 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 discarded. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more current situation: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will prevail.