Fossil fuels profits and the low-carbon transition: who stands to lose?
Climate mitigation policies face growing pushback despite overwhelming evidence of costly climate impacts. Who stands to lose from the transition away from fossil fuels?
This talk examines the financial interests opposing decarbonization. It traces both current profits and future profits at risk from stranded assets back to their ultimate shareholders, using asset-level and detailed shareholding data. I categorize these shareholders by geography, sector, and socio-economic group, revealing that wealthy shareholders in the global North—partly mediated through institutional investors—are the main beneficiaries of fossil fuel industry profits. These ownership patterns align capital owners and petrostates in opposing decarbonization. The findings illuminate the connections between the political economy of climate action and global wealth inequality.
The talk concludes with two speculative questions: how do ownership patterns in low-carbon sectors matter for inequality? And why is Europe—highly dependent on fossil fuel imports and thus positioned to benefit substantially from decarbonization—still supporting fossil fuel interests? In other words, who in Europe stands to lose?
Meet our speaker and chair
Gregor Semieniuk is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy and Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research focuses on structural change and economic development in the context of climate change and its mitigation, and he often studies these problems through the lens of economic inequality. Gregor’s work has been published in 24 peer-reviewed articles including multiple times in Nature Climate Change and Nature Energy, and four of them are among the top 1% cited in their field according to Web of Science. Gregor’s work is often mentioned in the media, including the Financial Times, Guardian, Bloomberg and the Economist, and he has advised international organizations and testified before the U.S. Senate’s Committee on the Budget. From 2023 to 2025, Gregor worked as a Senior Climate Change Economist on staff at the World Bank, providing technical leadership on decarbonization strategies and industrial policy for clean tech investments with a focus on Eastern Europe. Before joining UMass Amherst, Gregor was a Lecturer in Economics at SOAS University of London.
Benjamin Braun is Assistant Professor in Political Economy, LSE European Institute
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