With atmospheric CO2 concentrations at 390 ppm and rising, and the Kyoto Protocol set to expire, recent campaigns by high-profile climate change activists have drawn attention to rapidly closing windows, both climatological and political. At the same time, both academics and activists are increasingly problematizing the use of “apocalyptic” or “catastrophic” narrative frames for climate change communication. This paper critically rehearses some of these critiques, and extends them in a somewhat different direction. Rather than arguing that more “positive” messages are likely to induce desired emission-reducing actions (Ereaut & Singer, 2006; Shellenberger & Nordhaus, 2007), that apocalyptic rhetoric forecloses political debate (Swyngedouw, 2010), or that adaptation will occur as a result of largely ungovernable cultural change (Hulme 2008), I argue that the form of politics as it is conceived in apocalyptic campaigns to mitigate GHG emissions undercuts the possibility of effective climate change adaptation. More specifically, I argue that such “catastrophism” reinforces a political “state of exception,” which militates against the broad development of the capacities to engage in collective and deliberative practices of (re)constituting human communities – the practices of democratic citizenship. These capacities, I argue, are essential both for human autonomy generally, and for adapting to the reality of a deglobalized and carbon-constrained world more specifically.