4 THE IRRESPONSIBLE ELITE
environment may be destroyed, yet no-one will be responsible” (Jamieson 1992, 149). In 2008, the celebrated climate scientist James Hansen wrote:
CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature. If their
campaigns continue and “succeed” in confusing the public, I anticipate testifying against relevant CEOs in future public trials.38
The contrast is juicy. The moral philosopher absolves all individuals from blame, while the natural scientist wants heads to roll, but which one is right? From the structural point of view Jamieson's view might initially see more plausible.
Even if climate change is a structural problem, this does not absolve us from the responsibility of changing structures that cause the problem. But with social structures, it is often said that no one individual qua individual matters in the causal sense (see, e.g., Kincaid 2008). If the structures of global capitalism are to blame, no one individual can be considered culpable for the whole structure, even if individuals can take responsibility and try to promote collective action and even if blame can be pointed at actions, vices, or ways of life that perpetuate unjust structures (cf. Young 2006, 102–03).
But things are not so simple. In the case of social structures we can ask which individual and in which position. In the most abstract terms, in the structural view, for the purposes of this dissertation, the elite refers to people in structural positions with the most power and influence over others. If a structure produces hierarchical positions with unequal amounts of influence and power, some individuals are more responsible than others. In an absolute monarchy, the monarch is responsible for a great deal. This is fairly straightforward in the case of prospective responsibility. More power means more possibilities for influencing how things go. However, having had more power may also mean that one is retrospectively responsible for some bad event due to omissions. One could have done something to prevent or mitigate a catastrophe but did nothing. Besides omissions, there can be acts that make one responsible. Since climate change is due
38 See: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2008/06/24/twenty-years-later-tipping-points-near- global-warming (accessed 9 March 2018).
to human action, it makes sense to ask whether some people have acted in ways that have directly contributed to the overall problem in a way that makes a substantial difference. The structural view means that this is conceivable and perhaps plausible. It is an empirical question whether it is the case.
Even if we give structural explanations for Nazi Germany and refer to geopolitical, social, and economic facts, no one would think that Hitler was not guilty, but is climate change analogous? Does it make sense to compare CEOs to absolute monarchs or Hitler, or would this be an absurd and tasteless exaggeration?
This may be an empirical question, but it is a question that only becomes possible if we first assume that the social world is, or at least can be, hierarchically structured. If we take a strictly individualist, collective action problem view as our starting point, we cannot start investigating the causal role of agents in different structural positions. The model would not recognize such positions and the particular causal powers resulting from occupying a social position.
Are there empirical grounds for assuming that the social world is hierarchically structured in ways that are relevant to climate change and responsibility? According to a study by Richard Heede (2014), two thirds of greenhouse gas emissions can be traced to only 90 companies, some private, some state-owned. Considering that all these companies operate hierarchically, that many of their senior decision makers know one another, and that one person may serve on the boards of more than one firm, there are people who could be held much more responsible than others.
These people, through their connections and financial resources, can also influence the policies of nation states. Some of them have made decisions to fund think tanks that produce climate denialist propaganda.39 Their capacity to influence the world is structural. Their power is due to their social position, which is such as it is because our world is so structured that global corporations and thus their leaders are very powerful actors.
However, when speaking of the elites, I do not want to limit myself to those who have formal institutional positions as senior decision makers in either the fossil business or politics. It is important to pay attention to these positions since their occupants have recognizable influence on how things go with climate change mitigation and moving toward post-fossil societies, but I also want to discuss the elite as a larger, less easily defined global social group, a group that due to its social power, wealth, prestige, and connections is able to benefit from and influence the processes of global capitalism much more than the rest of us. Does the global elite constitute a social group in the sense of a “collective of persons differentiated from
39 See Oreskes and Conway (2010) for documentation.
at least one other group by cultural forms, practices or way of life” (Young 2000, 37)? Whether it does or not is again an empirical matter. If it does, this has implications for discussing many aspects of responsibility and other moral issues.
For example, how does its way of life shape their capacity for moral and epistemic responsibility? Or what does it mean for the rest of us, if the way of life of the elite is celebrated as something for which to strive in our cultural imaginaries?
One reason to think that the global elite may constitute a social group is the well-documented economic and social polarization between the richest members of humanity and the rest. The Occupy Movement, which began in August 2011 with protests on Wall Street against financial capitalism, brought a new simple and effective vocabulary of social class into the political discourse. They named themselves the 99% and the class enemy, the global elite, the 1%. It turns out that this estimate was fairly accurate. According to Credit Suisse, the 1% have more wealth than the rest of the world put together.40 However, there are differences even within the 1%. The economist Paul Krugman argued in a column that even 1% is too low a figure and that “a large fraction of the top 1 percent’s gains have actually gone to an even smaller group, the top 0.1 percent — the richest one- thousandth of the population.”41 There are enormous differences of wealth even within the 0.1%. Perhaps a university professor at an elite university could be part of the 1%, but not the 0.1%. What I mean by the global elite here is more akin to the 0.1%, but wealth is not the only indicator. Social connections matter too, and both are important only so far as they can translate to social power. Someone with less wealth may still have access to people in the elite and be able to influence their actions or perhaps make business decisions on their behalf. Besides the economic elite, there is also the political elite that, while not precisely equivalent to the economic elite, is in many ways connected and entangled with it. In this chapter I use the economic elite as the prime example, but the argument also applies partly to the political elite. The crucial thing is not to which institutional arrangement or sphere of society a member of an elite belongs, but how much influence they have on how society is structured.
The elite position is a structural position. It is not that some individuals have just been extremely lucky or productive on a level playing field, but that the background conditions and social mechanisms of our world allow such positions to exist. These structures are not automatic or natural, but historically specific and
40 See https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/economy-1 (accessed 9 March 2018).
41 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/opinion/we-are-the-99-9.html (accessed 9 March 2018).
produced and reproduced by social action. These structures are perpetuated not only by the activities and practices of everyday life, but also by the shape of technology and material resources, by political action and by laws. (Sayer 2015).
There are different roles in the 0.1%. Some are CEOs or other senior decision makers in powerful corporations, often in the financial sector. Some are investors or rentiers, people whose income consists of rents and interests from the assets they own, rather than any productive activities that they engage in (Sayer 2015, 83–
96). Of course these roles often intersect; a CEO can be an investor, and investors play leading roles in many firms. The elite position brings both wealth and social power. Wealth is in itself social power in capitalism, since by making investment decisions, hiring and firing, and owning media assets, the elite can control and influence what other people can or will do. One important concept is that of “the senior decision maker,” those in high places in business and government with the power to make decisions that may affect macro-scale social processes, those who have “influence they could potentially exert in cohort over the trajectory of socioeconomic, political, and thus environmental change” (Rickards et al. 2014, 754).
An important sub-group of the elite is what I will call, following Elmar Altvater (2009), fossil capitalists. Fossil capitalists are those whose wealth is generated by control in one form or another over the extraction or burning of fossil fuels.
Considering the important role fossil fuels still play in all production in capitalism, the contours of the fossil capitalist group are fuzzy; ultimately, all members of the elite are implicated in fossil capitalism in one way or another. In terms of responsibility for climate change, there is clearly a difference whether one is a CEO who makes decisions about oil drilling or an owner of a restaurant chain—but the restaurateur could also significantly affect their carbon footprint by, for example, making vegetarian options available and attractive. A member of the elite can move from one institutional position to another and retain the social connections acquired in the previous position—and thus accumulate what sociologists call
“social capital.”