The polluter elite—challenges and opportunities for transition politics

Seminar with Dario Kenner
Thursday, 27 June 2019, 1–2pm

Environmental issues are now high up on the political agenda and at the forefront of people’s minds. A combination of recent mass protests and UN reports on climate change and biodiversity loss have raised awareness of the urgency to act. What needs to happen next? There are already ideas on how the economy needs to change to achieve prosperity for all. These include the pioneering work on Prosperity Without Growth by Professor Tim Jackson.

But shifting the direction of the economy towards sustainable prosperity will only happen if the vested interests who benefit from business as usual are weakened. Dario Kenner will discuss the role of the polluter elite in the US and the UK in blocking the transition away from fossil fuels over several decades. The polluter elite are the people who run large polluting companies such as oil and gas multinationals headquartered in the US and UK. Kenner has tracked the polluter elite in a forthcoming book and database which quantifies their personal emissions from their shareholdings. At a time of high inequality in the US and the UK it is pertinent to assess the growing power of the polluter elite and the prospects for it to be countered by public pressure.

About

Dario Kenner is a Visiting Fellow at the Global Sustainability Institute, Anglia Ruskin University, UK. He is the author of the forthcoming book Carbon Inequality: The role of the richest in climate change (Routledge, 2019). This book builds on his 2015 working paper Inequality of Overconsumption: the Ecological Footprint of the Richest, published by Anglia Ruskin University.