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Plutocracy as a Problem for Climate Justice

Climate change has been recognized publicly as a problem for several decades. Yet public policy has permitted fossil fuel investment and demand to continue to grow to record levels. Accompanying that growth, however, there has been significant expansion in the much smaller renewable energy sector, and some, albeit woefully inadequate, progress in reducing emissions in some parts of the world. An adequate explanation for why this is the case is important for making more rapid progress in the energy transition. I argue that several explanations on offer fail to explain matters adequately, these include attempts offered by moral philosophers having to do with the inadequacy of traditional moral concepts as well as other attempts that rely on global and intergenerational versions of collective action problems.  In contrast, I argue that the existence of a plutocratic tendency better explains the circumstance. By “plutocratic tendency” I mean a distortion of democratic processes and deliberative rationality that occurs due to the susceptibility of the deliberative bodies to the capacity of wealth to influence the outcomes of deliberation and the deliberate, although not necessarily coordinated, deployment of this capacity to exploit that susceptibility. This is the exercise of plutocratic power. The talk offers evidence of such a tendency and power. Plutocracy is rarely discussed in political theory, but I argue that it is a major obstacle both to effective climate change mitigation and to approximating the ideal of democratic equality. In order adequately to mitigate climate change, the forces of plutocracy will have to be countered. The struggle for climate change mitigation is, then, also in part a struggle for democracy.

About the speaker: Darrell Moellendorf is Professor of International Political Theory, Professor of Philosophy, and a member of the research group Normative Orders at Goethe at Johann Wolfgang University Frankfurt am Main. He is also a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg. And he is a member of the Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft at Goethe University Frankfurt. He is the author of five monographs: Cosmopolitan Justice (2002), Global Inequality Matters (2009), The Moral Challenge of Dangerous Climate Change: Values, Poverty, and Policy (2014), Mobilizing Hope: Climate Change and Global Poverty (2022), and The Examined Illness: A Philosopher Confronts Deadly Disease (2026). He also co-edited six collected volumes. He has been a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), a Senior Fellow at Justitia Amplificata at Goethe University Frankfurt, and a Goethe Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften. From 1996 to 2002 he was a lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. And he has taught at San Diego State University, Cal Poly Pomona, and Riverside Community College.

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