What Entity Decides How We Respond to Global Warming?

For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the primary goal of climate governance. Across the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate campaigners to senior UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the central focus of climate plans.

Yet climate change has arrived and its material impacts are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also embrace struggles over how society handles climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, hydrological and territorial policies, national labor markets, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a altered and increasingly volatile climate.

Ecological vs. Governmental Consequences

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against coastal flooding, improving flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing sidesteps questions about the systems that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the federal government backstop high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers working in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, 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 vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to fit 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 governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish radically distinct visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

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 embodied the prevailing wisdom that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. 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 lithium nationalization in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are struggles about values and balancing between opposing agendas, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate shifted from the realm of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that housing cost controls, universal childcare and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more affordable, but resource-heavy, 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 – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Moving Past Doomsday Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something utterly new, but as existing challenges 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 distinct technical challenge, then, but rather part of ongoing political struggles.

Developing Strategic Battles

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in vulnerable regions like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide comprehensive public disaster insurance. The difference is stark: one approach uses economic incentives to push people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through commercial dynamics – while the other commits 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 discarded. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more immediate reality: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will prevail.