What Entity Determines The Way We Respond to Global Warming?

For many years, preventing climate change” has been the central goal of climate politics. Across the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate campaigners to high-level UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has arrived and its tangible effects are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include conflicts over how society addresses climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, aquatic and land use policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a changed and growing unstable climate.

Environmental vs. Governmental Consequences

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against ocean encroachment, enhancing flood control systems, and modifying buildings for extreme weather events. But this structural framing sidesteps questions about the systems that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the national authorities backstop high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers laboring in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we enact 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 vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells 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 decrease their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will embed completely opposing visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.

Transitioning From Expert-Led Frameworks

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, spanning the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about values and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that housing cost controls, comprehensive family support and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more budget-friendly, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Moving Past Apocalyptic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond the catastrophic narrative that has long prevailed climate discourse. In insisting 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 manifest not as something utterly new, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather connected to current ideological battles.

Emerging Strategic Debates

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to subject 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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The divergence is sharp: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of organized relocation through commercial dynamics – while the other commits public resources that permit them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more present truth: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will prevail.