Which Authority Determines How We Adjust to Global Warming?
For many years, halting climate change” has been the singular aim of climate politics. Throughout the ideological range, from local climate advocates to elite UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate strategies.
Yet climate change has arrived and its tangible effects are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, aquatic and spatial policies, employment sectors, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we adjust to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.
Natural vs. Governmental Effects
To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against ocean encroachment, enhancing flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing avoids questions about the systems that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to act independently, or should the central administration guarantee high-risk regions? Do we maintain 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 companies' discretion, or do we enact 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 danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers threatened 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 unprecedented levels – 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 governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than genuine political contestation.
From Specialist Frameworks
Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the dominant belief that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, covering the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are conflicts about principles and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.
Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of decarbonization. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that rent freezes, comprehensive family support and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more economical, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.
Beyond Catastrophic Narratives
The need for this shift becomes more evident once we abandon the doomsday perspective that has long characterized climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather connected to ongoing political struggles.
Forming Governmental Battles
The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended 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 cost indicators to encourage people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – while the other commits public resources that permit them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more current situation: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will triumph.
