DEMOCRACY’S greatest virtue is its humanity. It trusts people to think, argue, dissent, and decide. It believes political legitimacy comes from consent, not coercion, and that progress is best made through persuasion rather than force. Bertrand Russell’s Liberal Decalogue remains a powerful moral compass for this worldview — one rooted in doubt, critical thinking, respect for dissent, and the refusal to sanctify authority.

But what happens when a crisis demands speed, certainty, and unilateral execution — qualities that liberal democracies, by design, resist? As the climate crisis accelerates and the world edges beyond the 1.5°C threshold, this tension has moved from philosophical debate to an existential question. Can liberal democracies with their slow churn of deliberation, electoral cycles, and competing interests take the drastic actions needed to avoid catastrophic warming? Or will authoritarian regimes, for all their moral costs, prove more capable of implementing harsh but necessary measures? The critical question is whether democracy can survive the climate emergency and is liberalism ill-suited for an age of hard choices.

The answer lies in an uncomfortable but essential examination of liberalism’s strengths and weaknesses when confronted with planetary emergency.

Liberalism was built in an age when the greatest threats came from the overreach of power — kings, tyrants, majorities, churches. Its commandments were forged to protect the individual from being crushed by political authority. Russell captured this ethos perfectly: do not be certain, do not suppress opinions, overcome opposition through argument not power.

These principles create the deliberative ecosystem that democracies prize. But they also slow everything down. In stable times, caution is a virtue. In a rapidly heating world where emissions must halve within a decade, it becomes a barrier.

Climate change demands immediate sacrifice, while the benefits are distant and diffused.

Climate action in democracies is fragmented by electoral short-termism, interest-group capture, misinformation and judicial/bureaucratic constraints.

Democracies encourage exactly what Russell cherished: dissent, debate, hesitation, the weighing of competing evidence. But the climate system does not pause for public consultations. Ice sheets do not wait for consensus. Authoritarian regimes, can, in theory, bypass these obstacles. They do not face elections. They can plan long-term. They can suppress opposition. They can silence climate denial. They can impose strict consumption limits or transform energy systems through top-down control.

In the climate context, authoritarian systems have the structural advantage of speed (no legislative bottlenecks), coherence (long-term planning without electoral turnover), enforcement (policies can be made and rules imposed swiftly), and insulation from populism (leaders not beholden to voter backlash).

If the goal is rapid decarbonisation within a decade, authoritarian efficiency appears seductive. Yet this narrative has limits and fatal flaws.

Authoritarian regimes can act quickly but only if they choose to. They can also choose denial, secrecy, and grand projects that worsen vulnerability. Climate policy requires transparency, science, data sharing, and accountability — traits authoritarian systems routinely suffocate. Their weaknesses include suppression of truth, corruption, lack of public trust, curtailed civil liberties and policy fragility.

In short, authoritarianism can deliver fast results, but it can also deliver fast disasters.

Democracies are messy, but they have proven capable of extraordinary structural transformations when public urgency aligns with political will. The United States mobilised for World War II at unprecedented speed. Social democracies in Scandinavia decarbonised their power sectors with public consent. The EU’s Green Deal — though slow — is one of the world’s most comprehensive climate frameworks.

The problem is not democracy itself — it is democratic complacency. Liberalism depends on inf­or­med citizens and courageous leadership. Climate change, however, demands immediate sacrifice, while the benefits are distant and diffused.

Here, Russell’s commandments reveal a deeper tension: climate action requires certainty, authority, and limits — exactly the impulses liberalism warns against.

Yet democracy’s strengths are uniquely suited to the long-term, generational character of climate transitions through policy buy-in, free media and transparency.

Democracy struggles with urgency, but it excels at endurance.

The climate crisis is accelerating faster than democratic systems are adapting. This has prompted some scholars to speculate about “eco-authoritarianism”— the idea that survival may require centralised, coercive power.

But this path is dangerous. A climate emergency managed by unchecked authority risks creating a green dystopia: surveillance justified by carbon accounting, disenfranchisement masked as ecological necessity, and forced relocations with silenced dissent.

The real challenge is not to abandon democracy, but to reconstruct it for an age of planetary limits. Democracy must evolve from a politics of infinite choice to a politics of survival-driven realism.

Russell’s Liberal Decalogue champions humility, dissent, truth, and freedom — virtues essential for a just society. But liberalism was not designed for an age when inaction carries existential risk. The climate emergency is forcing democracies to confront a paradox: to preserve freedom, they must restrict it; to protect individual rights, they must impose collective limits.

Authoritarianism may appear more capable of making painful decisions swiftly, but its opacity, repression, and fragility make it dangerous and unreliable as a planetary steward.

The answer is neither to romanticise authoritarian efficiency nor to cling defensively to liberal inertia. It is to build a more decisive, resilient, and future-oriented democracy — one that retains its moral core while shedding its procedural complacency.

In the end, the climate crisis will test not just our technologies or economies, but our political imagination. Only a democracy that learns to act as if the future matters will survive it.

The writer is chief executive of Civil Society Coalition for Climate Change.

aisha@csccc.org.pk

Published in Dawn, December 24th, 2025