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Reposted by Gregor Semieniuk

Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · 19h

🚨NEW PAPER🚨
We all know the 2022 energy price shock fueled the cost of living crisis. It also caused a profit bonanza for the very rich. We show the US reaped the largest profits ($377bn) of any country. 50% went to the richest 1%, only 1% to the bottom 50%. A🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

River or sankey diagram showing the allocation of profits from global oil and gas companies to quantiles of the US wealth size distribution via financial system intermediaries, such as asset managers, and categories of ultimate beneficiaries, such as business owners, pension funds and shareholders in listed companies. The scale is hundreds of billions of US dollars, and ultimately 50.4% of profits reaching the US personal wealth distribution go to the richest 1% of households.

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Miska Knapek @miskaknapek.bsky.social · 18h

Who benefitted from energy price shocks - thread

Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · 19h

🚨NEW PAPER🚨
We all know the 2022 energy price shock fueled the cost of living crisis. It also caused a profit bonanza for the very rich. We show the US reaped the largest profits ($377bn) of any country. 50% went to the richest 1%, only 1% to the bottom 50%. A🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Alex Barron @alexrbarron.bsky.social · 18h

"The incremental U.S. fossil-fuel profits in 2022 relative to 2021 were enough to increase the disposable income of the wealthiest Americans by several percent and compensate a substantial part of their purchasing power loss from inflation that year, thereby exacerbating inflation inequality. "

Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · 19h

🚨NEW PAPER🚨
We all know the 2022 energy price shock fueled the cost of living crisis. It also caused a profit bonanza for the very rich. We show the US reaped the largest profits ($377bn) of any country. 50% went to the richest 1%, only 1% to the bottom 50%. A🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Reposted by Gregor Semieniuk

Jan Fichtner @janfichtner.bsky.social · 19h

📢 must-read new paper! 👇

Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · 19h

🚨NEW PAPER🚨
We all know the 2022 energy price shock fueled the cost of living crisis. It also caused a profit bonanza for the very rich. We show the US reaped the largest profits ($377bn) of any country. 50% went to the richest 1%, only 1% to the bottom 50%. A🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Nessa Ní Chasaide @nessanichasaide.bsky.social · 19h

Fantastic paper. Data by sector, geography, investor entity & distributional impact (in terms of wealth, race, education).
@gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social's conclusion below: "taxing incremental 2022 US profits as excess could've doubled clean energy investments or paid each US household $1,715".

Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · 19h

🚨NEW PAPER🚨
We all know the 2022 energy price shock fueled the cost of living crisis. It also caused a profit bonanza for the very rich. We show the US reaped the largest profits ($377bn) of any country. 50% went to the richest 1%, only 1% to the bottom 50%. A🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Benjamin Braun @benbraun.bsky.social · 19h

If profits shape the energy transition we need to understand the biggest profit event this century: the 2022 oil and gas price spike.

Very happy our paper is now out in Energy Research & Social Science. Thread by lead-author @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social 👇

Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · 19h

🚨NEW PAPER🚨
We all know the 2022 energy price shock fueled the cost of living crisis. It also caused a profit bonanza for the very rich. We show the US reaped the largest profits ($377bn) of any country. 50% went to the richest 1%, only 1% to the bottom 50%. A🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · 19h

Policy relevance: Excess profit taxes could make fossil fuel profits less volatile in the low-carbon transition. Revenues could finance investments or alleviate inflation impacts: taxing incremental 2022 US profits as excess could've doubled clean energy investments or paid each US household $1,715.

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Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · 19h

Fossil fuel profits also sharply increase inflation inequality.
Incremental 2022 fossil fuel profits over 2021 compensate several percent of 2022 inflation for the richest groups (triangles and squares), dwarfing differences in inflation due to differing consumption baskets (disks). 10/

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Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · 19h

Record fossil fuel profits reinforce existing racial & ethnic inequalities. Whites (64% of households) benefit disproportionately with claims on 87% of all profits. Blacks (14% of hholds) have a claim on only 3% of all profits, & Hispanics (10% of hholds) a mere 1%, mainly through pensions. 9/

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Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · 19h

The distribution of profits worsens existing inequalities: 50% of US profit claims are held by the top 1% of wealth owners, and 84% by the top 10%.
The bottom half (66 million households) get 1% of the profits. The top 0.1%—a mere 131 thousand households—get 25x more than half of all Americans. 8/

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Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · 19h

This results in this central Sankey plot that shows the flow of 2022 fossil fuel profits ‘from the well’ to their ultimate U.S. beneficiaries. 7/

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Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · 19h

We propagate profits from oil and gas firm to

-direct ultimate beneficiaries (holding shares in their own names) and fund managers (holding shares on behalf of others);

-on to ultimate beneficiaries, e.g. pension funds or business owners;

-and to socioeconomic distributions, e.g., by wealth. 6/

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Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · 19h

We start with global profits, which we then trace to US shareholders. To do this, we used all the data we could get. They’re listed in the first column here, together with what we used them for. 5/

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Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · 19h

The stock market consequences could not have been starker: The MSCI World Energy Index (ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell etc) doubled in 2021-2022, while the Global Alternative Energy index (Vestas, First Solar, Orsted etc) fell by half in 2021-2024. 4/

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Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · 19h

Oil & gas profits were much higher than in previous years: $916 billion for listed firms worldwide.

That was a huge windfall for shareholders: U.S. beneficiaries held claims to $301bn—one third of the listed total.

For comparison, total 2022 U.S. low-carbon energy investment was $266 billion. 3/

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Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · 19h

We calculated 2022 net income from the world's 1,437 listed oil & gas firms, adding all 22,759 US privately held firms. We then assigned these profits via financial system intermediaries to the firms’ ultimate beneficiaries, creating a network of 252,433 nodes. 
Keep reading for what we found. 2/

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Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · 19h

🚨NEW PAPER🚨
We all know the 2022 energy price shock fueled the cost of living crisis. It also caused a profit bonanza for the very rich. We show the US reaped the largest profits ($377bn) of any country. 50% went to the richest 1%, only 1% to the bottom 50%. A🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Reposted by Gregor Semieniuk

Jonas Meckling @jonasmeckling.bsky.social · 13d

🌍 New in @nature.com: The geoeconomic turn in decarbonization, with data from Simon Evenett et al. and @industrialpolicy.bsky.social @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social @natureatcal.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵

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Thea Riofrancos @triofrancos.bsky.social · 23d

In a world riven by inequality and devastated by climate + ecological crisis, what would it take for "green industrial policy" to empower the working class in Global North + South, and be truly green?

New @cplusc.bsky.social report by me and Isabel Estevez (1/3) t.co/78sQQe4d1g

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Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · 26d

Thanks, Kevin, it was a pleasure to work with and learn from you. Yes to continued exchange!

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Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · 26d

After working on climate policy in Eastern Europe at the World Bank, I'm excited to return to academia as associate professor at UMass Amherst.
I'm more committed than ever to studying the political economy of the low-carbon transition & living within planetary boundaries to drive real-world change.

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Sara Hastings-Simon 🇨🇦 @shastingssimon.bsky.social · Aug 28

Interesting new paper from @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social looks very relevant for 🇨🇦 also. They look at US data but I imagine shareholder impact for Canadian companies has a lot of similarities

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

investments of US$267 billion in the low carbon economy that year. In a network of U.S. shareholdings with 252,433 nodes including privately held U.S. companies, 50 % of profits went to the wealthiest 1% of individuals, predominantly through direct shareholdings and private company ownership. In contrast the bottom 50 % only received 1 %. The incremental U.S. fossil-fuel profits in 2022 relative to 2021 were enough to increase the disposable income of the wealthiest Americans by several percent and compensate a substantial part of their purchasing power loss from inflation that year, thereby exacerbating inflation inequality. These profits also reinforced existing racial and ethnic inequalities and inequalities between groups
with different educational attainments. We discuss how an excess profit tax could

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Neil R. Edwards @neil-r-edwards.bsky.social · Aug 21

Important message on effect of record #fossil-fuel profits on #inequality not via cost-of-living but excessively unequal 'redistribution' of profits to shareholders. Thanks @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social and friends at @openuniversity.bsky.social & elsewhere www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Best of times, worst of times: record fossil-fuel profits, inflation and inequality

The 2022 oil and gas crisis resulted in record fossil-fuel profits globally that rehabilitated the oil and gas industry, obstructed the energy transit…

www.sciencedirect.com

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Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · Aug 8

My co-authors wrote two blog posts about the research process:

matthewheun.com/2025-07-11-e...

matthewheun.com/2025-07-24-p...

Part II

My latest article (again with co-authors Gregor Semieniuk and Paul Brockway) is now available at https://doi.org/10.1177/01956574251331966. This is Part II of a two-part paper entitled “Energetic and ...

matthewheun.com

Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · Aug 8

While we think we pushed some frontiers, we couldn't have got there without standing on the shoulders of many researchers developing this analysis previously. Our long lists of references show as much.

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