Talking about what to do about climate change with liberals can be pretty frustrating, and I think I have found the reason why. The conversation invariably takes place within one or more of what I'm going to call the individualist, statist, and technological framings. These framings are all bad, and even libs usually recognize the answers you get from them as unsatisfying.
The individualist framing assumes a ton of market zealot bullshit. It leads to solutions that are at best totally unrealizable on the scale of the whole society, and at worst have you do a bunch of work to achieve nothing but personal absolution.
The statist framing falsely assumes that it is us and not the oil companies who control the governments. It leads to solutions that are permanently five years in the future, totally passivating us.
The technological framing assumes science will eventually solve every problem without a need for societal change. I would not bet the entire human civilization on it happening this time. The solutions from this framing are basically no better than full-on climate change denial.
So, to have a productive conversation, we need to somehow escape these framings. A way I have found of doing this is changing the question from "what should we do about climate change?" to "What should a large organized group do about climate change?" I've managed to get some fairly radical solutions out of liberals using this framing. It also has the added benefit of being a somewhat novel approach, so you probably won't feel like you are talking to a think tank.
So it’s basically “assume we’ve already organized”, and then once they get the right outcome, you show them how to get to the starting line?
I'm not expecting to turn them communist or get them to organize in a single conversation, just to widen the horizon of what they see as possible. I try to have people come to these radical conclusions themselves, and just hope that doing it enough times leads to something.