While I have consciously left questions of political responsibility out of this thesis, something ought to be said about the political elite in this context. In the most abstract sense, there is not much difference between the political elite and other (economic) elites. Both groups are exclusionary and have significantly more power than others; their positions gives both groups privileges and make luxurious
living possible. People who can individually influence how the most polluting companies operate include CEOs and other senior decision makers such as investors but also powerful politicians and bureaucrats.
How one becomes a member of the political elite can be very different from how one become part of the financial or fossil capitalist elite, although not always.
There are also metaphorical revolving doors between “Wall Street” and
“Washington” (the quotation marks indicate that this phenomenon is not unique to the United States). Bankers become politicians, politicians become industry lobbyists, and so on. There are real networks between different groups within the elites, and these group memberships, friendships, and financial ties will influence what the elite take to be its responsibilities. Whereas a non-elite individual can ideologically take up environmental vices due to imagining themselves sharing a community and interests with fossil fuel investors, the members of the elite share real economic interests and communal connections.52
Politicians have different role responsibilities from investors and CEOs and are answerable to different people, at least in ideal theory. In reality, politics and economics are different yet entangled, and the forms their relationship takes are historically contingent. The Netflix-produced TV series House of Cards dramatizes the relationship between economic and political power by showing how the different interests of politicians and capitalists in Washington are at once antagonistic and mutually dependent. In the Trump administration, the mutual dependencies of political and economic power are shown without shame. On the one hand fossil capitalists such as the aforementioned Tillerson and fossil fuel lobbyists have been appointed into highest political offices. On the other hand some divisions and antagonisms between different fractions of the global capitalist class may be appearing; for example, high-technology companies have been taking explicit political stances against the Trump administration.53
If it is difficult to understand what goes on in the mind of a CEO who calls climate change one of the biggest problems of our times and yet keeps on drilling, it is no less difficult to understand a head of state who, while publicly acknowledging the facts about climate change, keeps on approving permits for new oil pipelines or coal mines. Both are constrained by their social environments,
52 See Sayer (2015, 239–52) and references therein on how the economic elite can influence politicians and the political process.
53 See, e.g., https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/06/silicon-valley-responds-trump-paris-accord- decision (accessed 9 March 2018).
which again are structurally conditioned. Global capitalism affects both environments, but the political environment has certain features that are different from the world of business.
It is uncontroversial that economic power translates into political power, although there can be and is disagreement through which practices and mechanisms this translation happens, whether this is acceptable, and to what degree. Economic power has been used to influence climate policies, as in the financing of opposition to emission regulations. Environmentalists usually have far fewer resources to lobby for more regulation.
Using political power for personal enrichment has been often condemned in most societies, even if such practices have been widespread. But are not these two
“translations” connected in various ways? If Jane bribes Senator Bob to oppose emissions, Jane uses economic power to influence political power, but at the same time Bob uses his political power for personal enrichment. This is a straightforward case, but what about more complex ones like lobbying, campaign donations, or publishing propaganda? It would be a mistake to regard them as isolated transactions or other forms of single, independent actions. They are practices that create, reproduce, enforce, strengthen, shape, and transform relations between individuals, groups, and other practices. Sometimes a single act, such as making a deal or convincing a member of a parliament to vote in a certain way, can make a difference in large-scale social processes, and thus in the ways those social processes are disrupting the climate system and other earth systems.
In terms of personal responsibility, the political elite viewed abstractly is rather similar to the economic elite in terms of backward- and forward-looking responsibility. Both have power and have influenced the way our societies have operated. However, the way their characters are formed may be different in many ways, insofar as they occupy different yet interacting social worlds. A crucial difference is that a CEO and a politician have different role responsibilities and are answerable to different people.
A CEO can argue that their responsibility is to increase shareholder value and that they are answerable to the board of directors, and we could still hold that CEO morally culpable for acts and omissions that contribute to climate change, since moral responsibility cannot be reduced to role responsibility. Politicians, on the other hand, can also be blamed for failing in their role responsibilities and for being mistaken about to whom they are answerable. If politicians follow the instructions of the fossil fuel lobbyists, we can say that they have culpably misunderstood their accountability.