In his review of Stephen Gardiner’s A Perfect Moral Storm: the Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (LRB, 24 May), Malcolm Bull airs a much needed discussion as to how far democracy can respond at all adequately to the challenge of climate change. He discusses, for instance, ‘the tyranny of the contemporary’, whereby democracy is concerned exclusively with the rights and interests of a present generation, future generations not being represented, their needs therefore neglected.

He considers two ways to escape this quandary. There is a Burkean ‘virtual representation’ of those dead and those yet to be born, connecting a …