What Entity Determines The Way We Respond to Global Warming?

For many years, preventing climate change” has been the central aim of climate politics. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate activists to elite UN delegates, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future disaster has been the central focus of climate policies.

Yet climate change has come and its tangible effects are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace debates over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, residential sectors, hydrological and territorial policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a altered and growing unstable climate.

Ecological vs. Societal Effects

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against coastal flooding, enhancing flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps 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 function without restriction, or should the federal government guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a increase in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets 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 prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we answer to these societal challenges – and those to come – will embed completely opposing visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than real ideological struggle.

Moving Beyond Expert-Led Systems

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus moved to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen countless political battles, covering the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are fights about principles and negotiating between competing interests, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the affordability emergency, 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 political imagination to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Moving Past Doomsday Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power 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 compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather continuous with existing societal conflicts.

Emerging Policy 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 make vulnerable 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The contrast is pronounced: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through market pressure – while the other commits public resources that allow 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 neglected. But the singular emphasis 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.