The polluter elite is a group of millionaires and billionaires with interests in carbon-intensive industries, especially fossil fuels. They are powerful investors, managers, CEOs, or owners. Oxfam has published several reports mapping their immense carbon footprints and the activities by which they maintain structures of the carbon economy.
For a moral philosopher, it begs the questions: how should we morally assess the activities of the polluter elite? What responsibility do they actually bear? And why does it matter, in practice, whether we blame them or not?
Super-privilege and blame
When ordinary people contribute to climate change, they are usually under significant social constraints. Perhaps one would rather take the train, but the flight is cheaper and faster, or the railway does not exist at all. In moral philosophy, we say that constraints like this provide people with a moral excuse. Consequently, it is not apt to hold someone morally responsible and blame them for a choice they were pushed into by these constraints.
Even people in the wealthier countries of the Global North still live in societies where carbon-intensive options are often the cheapest, the most accessible, socially accepted, and sometimes simply the only reasonable way to achieve necessary aims, such as getting to work. Given that, ordinary people, even those who are relatively privileged, are typically excused from blame for their everyday contributions to climate change. Not because their emissions do not matter, but because the structures around them constrain them to contribute.
The story differs significantly in the case of the polluter elite. The excuses that apply to most of us simply do not hold. When it comes to their specific choices that sustain carbon-intensive structures, namely, investments, career choices, and lavish lifestyles, these cannot be viewed as similarly constrained. If you are a millionaire, you can invest in something other than polluting industries, even without financial losses. If you are a millionaire, you can use different means of transport than a private jet or take up a different hobby than collecting cars. If you are the CEO of a fossil fuel company and greening the business model is not on the table, you have the qualifications and connections to find a different job in a different field. In each case, the constraints are simply not there, and one can change the course of action without losing anything substantial.
To capture this distinctive social position, I coined the concept of super-privilege. Being super-privileged means occupying an extraordinarily advantageous position in society, one that comes with social mobility, security, elite education and services, strong legal protection, powerful networks, and control over time. In practice, it means being minimally constrained by factors that shape everyone else’s choices. This position makes the moral difference. It is reasonable to have different expectations of super-privileged people and to judge their actions differently. When someone in this position chooses to participate in and profit from structures that harm others or perpetuate injustice, they do not have a legitimate excuse. And since there is no excuse, blame is appropriate.
Applying this to the polluter elite, they occupy a super-privileged position, and they actively sustain the carbon economy through their investments, career choices, and lifestyles. They are therefore blameworthy for choosing, freely and knowingly, to sustain and capitalize on unjust structures that drive climate change and harm others.
Why blame the polluter elite?
A fair question at this point: what is the purpose of blaming people who do not seem to care how we morally evaluate their activities? Members of the polluter elite will surely carry on business as usual regardless. My response: blaming them can still do some work, in at least three ways.
First, blame can serve as a communication tool. The message is simple and, I think, important. Climate change is not ordinary people’s fault, but it is somebody’s fault. Naming that “somebody,” with the support of plausible normative arguments, can be a genuine political strategy, giving movements a mobilizing narrative and a shared target around which to organize demands for change.
Second, blame ascription justifies targeted policies. By drawing a clear line between the non-blameworthy contributions of ordinary people and the blameworthy conduct of the polluter elite, one creates normative grounds for treating the two groups differently in law and policy. Ordinary people deserve support given their constraints; the polluter elite deserve the opposite, such as sanctions and restrictions.
Lastly, pointing to the blameworthy conduct of the polluter elite might make us realize just how unequal our positions really are. Many of us are privileged in various ways, and those of us who should be doing more than people who face oppression on the basis of class, race, gender, and other intersecting axes of injustice. Nevertheless, the position of the super-privileged is different in kind, not just degree. Recognizing this distinction gives us a good place to start moving forward. It implies that we should primarily focus on those who are actually blameworthy.
Author: Vojtěch Svěrák is a PhD researcher in moral and political philosophy at the University of Groningen and Charles University, and is affiliated with the Czech Academy of Sciences (CETE-P). He has held visiting positions at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Hamburg, the Centre for Research in Ethics in Montreal, and the University of Oxford.
This commentary is based on my study “Structural Climate Injustice: Liability, Super-Privilege and the Polluter Elite,” published in Ethics, Policy & Environment. There you can find all the citations, references, and more detailed explanations of the thoughts sketched here.