Which Authority Determines How We Respond to Climate Change?
For decades, halting climate change” has been the primary aim of climate politics. Across the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate campaigners to senior UN delegates, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate plans.
Yet climate change has materialized and its real-world consequences are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include debates over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, water and land use policies, employment sectors, and local economies – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.
Ecological vs. Societal Effects
To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing ignores questions about the institutions that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the federal government backstop high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers working in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we establish 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 endangers to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will encode completely opposing visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for specialists and technicians rather than real ideological struggle.
Transitioning From Specialist Systems
Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the common understanding that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus moved to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen any number of 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 state control of resources in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and mediating between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.
Yet even as climate migrated from the preserve of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of decarbonization. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that rent freezes, comprehensive family support and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more affordable, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.
Moving Past Apocalyptic Framing
The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the doomsday perspective that has long prevailed climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something utterly new, but as existing challenges 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 distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with current ideological battles.
Emerging Governmental 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 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 push people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through market pressure – 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 singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more present truth: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will prevail.
