Climate Change: What Should Liberals Do?

Abstract

Ecological sustainability issues, including the desire to ameliorate climate change impacts upon economic, social and political systems, figure prominently in twenty-first century public discourses. Despite growing community agreement over the need to avert the worst effects of climate change, a perceived lack of political progress in advancing multilateral climate-change policy is fueling dissatisfaction over the capacity of technocratic administration to deliver solutions to tackle this deep-seated and, for some, existential problem. We draw upon classical liberal insights, and utilize the contextually-aware systems approach of “entangled political economy,” to consider a constructive case for actions on climate change.