Climate, Power & the Green Future: Is It Just?
The climate crisis is often described as an environmental emergency. Yet it is equally a political and emotional condition, shaped by steadfast contradiction. Governments speak fluently about sustainability while the economic systems driving climate action remain tied to extraction, growth, and delay. Scientific knowledge expands at an unprecedented pace, even as ecological conditions continue to decline.
The New Scientist has recently reported the destabilisation of Antarctic ice shelves since the 1990s. More broadly—climate reporting, scientific journals, and international assessments have long warned of the consequences of rising CO₂ and greenhouse gas emissions. Today, oceanic changes and shifting climate systems are increasingly apparent.
In response, governments, researchers, and businesses have turned to renewable energy, artificial intelligence, green infrastructure, and technological innovation as pathways toward mitigation and adaptation. Yet these developments raise difficult questions. Who controls these technologies? Who benefits from them? And who is left behind?
For some, the climate crisis feels like the collapse of a familiar world. For others, it reflects less of a political paralysis, but still: a failure of institutions, corporations, and governments to respond at the scale required. Either way, climate change increasingly forces us to confront questions that extend beyond the environment itself. It is also a question of power, responsibility, governance, and the kind of future societies we're willing to build.
For decades, climate action has largely been framed through neoliberal ideas with responsibility shifting from governments and collective institutions towards individuals, markets, and corporations. Recycling and choosing ethical products became central features of climate consciousness. Managing one's carbon footprint was presented as a personal duty. With larger systems driving extraction and emissions (from corporations to arms manufacturers and oil firms) were and are criticised for remaining largely unchanged.
Those in power are too often criticised for inaction, hesitation, and delay. Yet, as Hannah Arendt reminds us, politics is not the enemy of freedom but one of its conditions. What would it mean for governments and institutions to be free to act with purpose in response to the climate crisis?
As Arctic ice continues to melt, regions such as Greenland have become significant not only environmentally but also geopolitically. Questions of climate change increasingly overlap with questions of sovereignty, security, and strategic influence. Newer trends within Climate politics are no longer confined to consumer behaviour or market incentives; but—increasingly—a matter of governance and statecraft. The limits of individual responsibility become clearer as climate change increasingly intersects with geopolitics. As seen previously, however with less force, with international frameworks such as—The Paris Agreement and COP30. These initiatives depend upon collective governance, long-term planning, and international coordination.
Rather than signalling the end of the world, climate politics may be exposing the limits—and perhaps the tipping points—of neoliberal approaches. Alongside the changes presented within climate rhetoric, its discourse and shifting language. Perhaps showcasing how those in power communicate with the public and how they interact with climate change today.
Capitalism deepens the tensions within the climate crisis and is often depicted as a primary driver. Capitalist systems built on expansion and accumulation are increasingly pressured to position themselves as architects of sustainability. Cooperation remains challenged due to issues of efficiency, credibility, and ethical alignment—primarily due to distrust, greenwashing and performative environmentalism.
Despite this, small to large corporations, alongside consultants and technology firms are firsthandedly focused on sustainable initiatives, with founding companies purely for the aims, mission and purpose of sustainability. Today, many corporations are at the forefront of communicating sustainability initiatives and developing green infrastructure to address climate change.
Here, the pursuit of sustainability—is inherently tied to the needs of consumerism, branding and marketisation of which environmental governance has become a defining feature. Beyond the corporate sphere, regional development strategies within Asian states increasingly help to drive the transition towards green investment, often in partnership with Europe. Countries such as Indonesia and other Asian nations are emerging as important centres for climate finance, sustainability initiatives, and low-carbon development. Although contradictory, business and green finance are necessary steps for climate action. For climate action to advance, large corporations must be willing to move beyond short-term profit and accept greater responsibility.
Colonialism and racial inequality are central to understanding how climate change is both produced and experienced. Climate action remains a necessity, but it is one that has been historically—and continues to be—structured through systems of exclusion and unequal power. These systems shape the distribution of environmental risks and resources, meaning that communities with the least political and economic power are often those most exposed to ecological harm.
As Naomi Klein argues, the climate crisis is inseparable from wider systems of inequality that determine whose environments are protected, whose labour is exploited, and whose futures are treated as expendable. In this sense, climate change is not only an environmental issue but a political one, embedded within histories of colonial extraction and racialised development. Climate power does not reside in a single institution, but operates through interconnected systems of governance, capital, and infrastructure spanning governments, corporations, technologies, and everyday practices. These systems organise decisions about energy, land, and environmental access across uneven global and local scales.
At the same time, climate discourse increasingly reflects broader struggles over legitimacy, justice, and political authority. As access to clean environments and sustainable futures continues to mirror existing social inequalities produced by these systems of power—environmental justice still has a long way to go.
Addressing climate change therefore requires not only adaptation and mitigation, but also the transformation of the systems that produce and reproduce uneven vulnerability.
Attending the dismantling of these systems opens up the scope of political imagination and climate mitigation.
Compared to previous decades, climate change has moved from being treated as a marginal environmental concern—often associated with environmental activists or as a problem affecting distant places—to becoming one of the central political, economic, and cultural issues of our time.
But the struggle? Is not only over emissions or technology but the results by which life is organised.
However, the struggle when combatting climate change is not always the result of emissions or technology itself, but the results and order of which life can and should be organised.
Regarding the environmental clause—melting ice, oceanic changes, extreme weather are examples of sightings and forecasts. With growing uncertainties not only on the environment itself, but regarding truth, authority, power and justice.
For the general public, climate denial, conspiracy and apocalyptic narratives unfortunately produce environments—of which shared understanding and political hegemony—become harder to sustain. Too easily, ordinary people find themselves suspended between awareness and powerlessness, responsibility and exhaustion, urgency and repetition. Climate rhetoric is too easily shaped by polarisation and climate politics remains tied to competing interests, fragmented governance, and conflicting visions of the future.
Amongst chaos, anxiety inevitably grows. Not only emotionally—but also politically. It becomes an exacerbation within the system, biting the tongue of action and constraining political imagination within an already pressured domain.
In Poetry Is Not a Luxury, Audre Lorde argues that expression is not secondary to political life, but part of how societies process reality itself. In moments of uncertainty and political fragmentation, climate discourse—much like art—begins to reveal deeper emotional and political truths.
As Audre Lorde writes,
"Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought...it is the skeleton architect of our lives."
In a similar way, climate rhetoric increasingly helps bring clarity through the fog of competing narratives.
Climate systems are deeply interconnected, with changes in one region often producing effects far beyond their origin. The challenge is not only that the planet is warming, but the speed and unevenness with which these changes are unfolding.
In reviewing Climate, Power & the Green Future, I return to four key areas of reflection, with particular attention to climate anxiety and the broader questions that arise when responding to climate change as both an environmental and political condition. First, a consideration of neoliberalism, governance, approach and limits.
Secondly, in an era of climate denial and polarised debate, money should become not only a resource but a language through which climate action is communicated and normalised—to help shape public understanding and political legitimacy.
Third, the need to acknowledge race and racism as central indicators of the uneven impacts of climate change, alongside the ongoing necessity of dismantling white supremacy. Fourth, the challenge facing green political futures and climate liberalism of avoiding absorption into overly optimistic narratives that obscure the structural drivers of ecological crisis. Taken together, climate change and the climate crisis offer an opportunity to examine the political landscape: how responsibility is shaped, how economic structures shape collective imagination, and how societies navigate uncertainty.
The climate crisis unfolds alongside the profound impact of human activity and as a crisis of the past—alongside the echoing duration and impact of the present. As we confront the possibility of "the end" — or as I prefer to say the ‘end’ as we know it — climate rhetoric, belief, and discourse should overtime become self-revelatory. Like puzzle pieces, the unfolding of fabric, or the gradual revelation of sculpture, they expose the deeper forces shaping our political, environmental, and collective futures. Throughout this reflection, and by highlighting key questions and identifying key markers of the climate landscape and with reference to my personal opinion. I ask further: who holds power: particularly in the domains of climate anxiety and climate crisis? How can climate action become more just and what continues to obstruct that possibility? The challenge?—How do we best counteract the conditions prohibiting action? And what discoveries and responsibilities remain?
Written by Malaika Fallah
Malaika Fallah is a writer at the intersection of politics, philosophy, and culture. Her work explores identity, belonging, and power through the lenses of geography, queer theory, and lived experience.
