What Entity Decides How We Respond to Environmental Shifts?
For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the central goal of climate politics. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate advocates to elite UN negotiators, lowering carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate policies.
Yet climate change has arrived and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Coverage systems, housing, hydrological and spatial policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.
Environmental vs. Governmental Effects
To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and modifying buildings for extreme weather events. But this infrastructure-centric 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 operate freely, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers working in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we establish federal protections?
These questions are not hypothetical. In the United States alone, a spike 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 winning an agreement to install 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 cut their water usage. How we respond to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish 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 genuine political contestation.
From Expert-Led Systems
Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the dominant belief that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved unsuccessful, 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 sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are struggles about values and negotiating between competing interests, not merely carbon accounting.
Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas 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 connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that housing cost controls, comprehensive family support and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more affordable, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.
Transcending Doomsday Framing
The need for this shift becomes more evident once we reject the doomsday perspective that has long characterized climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon 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 totally unprecedented, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced out 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 distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with current ideological battles.
Emerging Governmental Conflicts
The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to expose 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 contrast is sharp: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through commercial dynamics – while the other allocates public resources that allow 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 current situation: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will triumph.
