It may seem implausible to argue that liberals who are working hard to enable capital investments in clean energy could be the allies of the petroauthoritarian right. But they are exactly that if they support expanding fossil fuels—or even if they advocate for an “all of the above” energy approach, which means expanding both clean energy and fossil fuels like “natural gas” (which, let’s be real, should accurately be called “methane gas”). We could blanket the entire planet in solar panels, and power every last data center with nuclear power, but if we continued to use coal, oil, and gas, the temperature would continue to climb with no end in sight. Dismissing that physics as irrelevant, even if you purport to agree that “climate change is real,” is obviously a form of disavowal that borders on denial.

What allies the authoritarian right and the center-left is their commitment to protecting capital above all. Decarbonizing will likely create millions of new jobs in the U.S. and establish new industries and services worldwide. Economic studies show that phasing out fossil fuels and creating a net-zero economy inside ecological boundaries will lead to better economic outcomes than doing nothing. Climate impacts are already contributing to inflation, costing U.S. households between $400 and $900 per year, on average. And continued climate change will likely curtail economic growth. By one estimate it could make growth roughly 23 percent smaller than it would have been otherwise; by another it could worst-case contract the global economy 50 percent over the next 40-50 years. And these economic effects are already starting to occur. The costs of this summer’s heat waves and fires in Europe are projected actually to zero out the continent’s entire projected growth for 2026. But none of that poses much of a current financial threat to members of the global capital faction, which is to say ruling-class asset holders and rentiers, who can afford the current costs of climate change while watching their stock portfolios grow to record highs from the AI boom / bubble. However, asset holders and rentiers do face an economic threat from the phaseout of fossil fuels, and for the fossil fuel industry itself, that threat is existential.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20261014132200/https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/liberals-cant-address-the-climate-crisis-because-it-means-confronting-capitalism

Additional reading, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/liberalism-and-climate-change (arc)

Liberalism, a political philosophy that emerged during the Enlightenment, emphasizes individual rights, reason, and the importance of civil society. It promotes the idea that individuals should have autonomy and be free from coercion, with a significant focus on private property as a means to self-preservation and social progress. This framework influences contemporary debates on climate change, as liberal perspectives vary widely.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/global-constitutionalism/article/climate-change-and-the-challenge-to-liberalism/C32914822B2B7326ACCFEE4B0C5AA519 (arc)

Particularly in light of their global reach, their specific behavioural implications and interpretations and the related obligations to act remain debatable and the overwhelming institutionalization of the neoliberal market economy makes clear and effective responses to climate change virtually impossible within liberal societies.

It may seem implausible to argue that liberals who are working hard to enable capital investments in clean energy could be the allies of the petroauthoritarian right. But they are exactly that if they support expanding fossil fuels—or even if they advocate for an “all of the above” energy approach, which means expanding both clean energy and fossil fuels like “natural gas” (which, let’s be real, should accurately be called “methane gas”). We could blanket the entire planet in solar panels, and power every last data center with nuclear power, but if we continued to use coal, oil, and gas, the temperature would continue to climb with no end in sight. Dismissing that physics as irrelevant, even if you purport to agree that “climate change is real,” is obviously a form of disavowal that borders on denial.

What allies the authoritarian right and the center-left is their commitment to protecting capital above all. Decarbonizing will likely create millions of new jobs in the U.S. and establish new industries and services worldwide. Economic studies show that phasing out fossil fuels and creating a net-zero economy inside ecological boundaries will lead to better economic outcomes than doing nothing. Climate impacts are already contributing to inflation, costing U.S. households between $400 and $900 per year, on average. And continued climate change will likely curtail economic growth. By one estimate it could make growth roughly 23 percent smaller than it would have been otherwise; by another it could worst-case contract the global economy 50 percent over the next 40-50 years. And these economic effects are already starting to occur. The costs of this summer’s heat waves and fires in Europe are projected actually to zero out the continent’s entire projected growth for 2026. But none of that poses much of a current financial threat to members of the global capital faction, which is to say ruling-class asset holders and rentiers, who can afford the current costs of climate change while watching their stock portfolios grow to record highs from the AI boom / bubble. However, asset holders and rentiers do face an economic threat from the phaseout of fossil fuels, and for the fossil fuel industry itself, that threat is existential.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20261014132200/https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/liberals-cant-address-the-climate-crisis-because-it-means-confronting-capitalism

Additional reading, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/liberalism-and-climate-change (arc)

Liberalism, a political philosophy that emerged during the Enlightenment, emphasizes individual rights, reason, and the importance of civil society. It promotes the idea that individuals should have autonomy and be free from coercion, with a significant focus on private property as a means to self-preservation and social progress. This framework influences contemporary debates on climate change, as liberal perspectives vary widely.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/global-constitutionalism/article/climate-change-and-the-challenge-to-liberalism/C32914822B2B7326ACCFEE4B0C5AA519 (arc)

Particularly in light of their global reach, their specific behavioural implications and interpretations and the related obligations to act remain debatable and the overwhelming institutionalization of the neoliberal market economy makes clear and effective responses to climate change virtually impossible within liberal societies.

It is important to ask who is at risk from the transition. Who faces these “losses”? According to one of the most comprehensive studies of asset stranding to date, halting global heating would concentrate fossil-capital devaluation in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and, within the United States, the pain would be further concentrated among the very rich. In the U.S., 82 percent of the devaluation would hit the wealthiest 10 percent of households, and that loss, hardly affecting our wealth distribution, would amount to only 0.4 percent of the wealthiest households’ net worth. This is all the more true today, since the wealth of the top 1 percent surged to a combined $52 trillion in 2025, and the top 0.1 percent—about 260,000 people—have, in the past two years alone, accumulated more than 8,000 times as much money per household as the roughly 169 million people living in the economic bottom half of the country.

We need to apply a class analysis to the problem of stranded assets. Using such a lens, we see that the vast majority of Americans would be better off if we phased out fossil fuels and halted global heating. This is especially true if we also account for recent studies highlighting the risk that continued climate change is a much bigger threat to the economy than asset-stranding itself. I will just point again to the study by the U.K. Institute and Faculty of Actuaries which warned that, worst-case, the global economy could contract by half in 40 to 50 years on our current emissions trajectory. I will note too that their projection of course leaves out all the misery and death that isn’t measured by GDP.

In 2023, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that the world already had too much coal, oil, and “natural gas” to halt global heating at 2° Celsius. The report also said that over 2° Celsius, the risk of global “food insecurity” becomes “very high,” and we face a high risk of “limited adaptation” to “heat-related morbidity and mortality.” (Food shortages and fatal heat waves are, of course, only two of the impacts of climate change, all of which interact with and compound each other.) Yet in the past three years the world’s banks, governments, and private fossil-energy companies have poured an estimated $2 trillion into expanding coal, oil, and “natural gas” supply. Global newspaper coverage of climate change, never great to begin with, has fallen by half. The voices of the statusquo will sneer that this is happening because “people don’t care about climate change,” but polling consistently shows that, even if climate is no longer the second-most salient issue in American politics (as it was in 2020), 66 percent of Americans are worried about the climate future. Swing voters reject Republican climate denial, moreover, and a supermajority supports the U.S. economy transitioning from fossil fuels to 100 percent clean energy by 2050.

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