Who Determines How We Respond to Climate Change?
For many years, halting climate change” has been the central goal of climate policy. Throughout the political spectrum, from community-based climate campaigners to senior UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate strategies.
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 averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, water and territorial policies, employment sectors, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adjust to a altered and growing unstable climate.
Natural vs. Political Impacts
To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and adapting buildings for extreme weather events. But this infrastructure-centric framing sidesteps questions about the organizations that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to act independently, or should the federal government 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 management's decisions, or do we implement 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 vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we respond to these political crises – 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 technical matter for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.
Transitioning From Specialist Frameworks
Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the dominant belief that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, covering 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 ethics and balancing between competing interests, not merely emissions math.
Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that rent freezes, universal childcare and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more budget-friendly, 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 address the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.
Beyond Doomsday Perspectives
The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long characterized climate discourse. In arguing 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 manifest not as something completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather connected to existing societal conflicts.
Developing Policy Conflicts
The terrain 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 complete governmental protection. The difference is stark: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through market pressure – 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 sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more immediate reality: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will succeed.
