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.