Climate conflicts, green transition and the clash with freedoms

Abstract

It is widely recognized that urgent and multiple institutional efforts are needed to mitigate anthropogenic climate change in time. This transformation requires not just technological and infrastructural factors but also socio-cultural ones. For the ecological transition to be realistically possible, institutions must be read to rearticulate economic, political, and cultural structures to contain climate change and adapt to a greener and more sustainable society in the coming years. On the one hand, it is undeniable that institutional power must be much more incisively used than before to contain human-induced climate change. But, on the other hand, it needs to be clarified if freedoms might be affected and, in case of a positive answer, how they might be affected. Given the pertinence and urgency of the problem, the paper proposes to explore the conflicts between, on the one hand, the requirement to use institutional power more ambitiously to contain anthropogenic climate change before it reaches its tipping points and, on the other, the commitments from liberal democracies to guarantee the most comprehensive scheme of liberties and freedoms to people, such as the political, economic, and civil one.