D oes humanity have a moral obligation toward the estimated millions of individuals who will be displaced from their homes over the course of this century primarily due to sea-level rise (SLR) as the earth's climate warms? If there are indeed sound reasons for the world to act on their behalf, what form should these actions take?As scientific evidence for the adverse effects of human-induced climate change grows stronger, it is becoming increasingly clear that these questions are of urgent practical interest and require concerted international political action. In the course of this century and the next, the earth's climate will almost surely get warmer as a direct result of the emissions accumulated in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution. This warming will very likely result in heat waves, heavy precipitation in some areas, extreme droughts in others, increased hurricane intensity, and sea-level rise of about one meter-although recent findings suggest this rise could quite plausibly be greater than that by century's end. 1 Forecasts of how many people will be displaced by 2050 by climate change vary widely, from about 25 million to 1 billion. The difficulty in accurate forecasting lies not only in the uncertainty regarding future climate change impacts and adaptation measures but also in estimating the outcome of the several complex factors driving migration. 2 * The authors are singularly grateful to the Rockefeller Foundation for having supported them for a residential fellowship at the Bellagio Center, Italy, in 2007, where some of the initial ideas for this paper were developed. They are also most thankful to the reviewers and the editors of this journal for their close reading of earlier versions and for offering substantial suggestions for improvement, as well as to other colleagues too numerous to be named.

The private car and the public freeway together provide an ideal -not to say idealized -version of democratic urban transportation . . . The watchful tolerance and almost impeccable lane discipline of . . . drivers on the freeways is often noted, but not the fact that both are symptoms of something deeper -willing acquiescence in an incredibly demanding man/machine system . . . It demands, first of all, an open but decisive attitude to the placing of the car on the road surface [and] a constant stream of decisions that [could be regarded as] a higher form of pragmatism. (Banham, 1971) Individualism is a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself. (Tocqueville et al., 1966: 477) In the West, by and large, we are all liberals now. Instead of ignoring or affecting to deplore this, we should be recognizing and reaffirming it. Or else, you never know, it might one day no longer be true. (Economist, 1996) Automobility, or the entire gamut of practices that foster car culture, qualifies both as product and producer of modernity. Its constitutive visual image is one of dignified convoys of individual cars, vehicles whose solitary drivers can remain separated from each other as they collectively pursue private goals on public highways. As such, this picture captures the salient features of cars in a post-Enlightenment order: the experience of driving, identified by the quiet pleasures of the open road, speed, power and personal control, neatly complements the functionality of covering distance, managing time and maintaining certain forms of individuation. One might thus portray an ontology of automobility that reinforces its teleology; together, they establish characteristically that which is modern and, by definition, permanently desirable.Although surprisingly few liberals would boast about it, automobility is not only well attuned to the demands of late modernity, it is also perhaps the most important modern development that could fulfil the unremitting liberal demand for individual autonomy. The single consistent theme running through liberal political theory is the ideal of a free person whose actions are her own. 1 Automobility, on its part, has become the (literally) concrete articulation of liberal

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