Fusions and Frictions in G20 Climate Policy

Abstract

Global climate policy requires constant attention due to shifting interests and alliances between national negotiators. Whether represented at global or national scales, three universal features of fused climate policy conjoin the wealthy and emerging G20 economies that are historically responsible for the most greenhouse gas emissions. The former are represented by G7 Western powers—the United States, Europe, United Kingdom, Japan, and Canada—and the latter are centered on the fast-expanding ‘BRICS’ bloc: Brazil–Russia–India–China–South Africa (2010–2023), new members Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates, and potentially also Saudi Arabia (a member invitee), along with ten new ‘partners’ designated in 2024, many of which have carbon-intensive economies. Although conflicts regularly arise—especially over emissions-related trade policy and climate financing—and although Donald Trump’s exit from United Nations climate politics profoundly disrupted the usually coherent G7 bloc, the consensual principles uniting these diverse Western and BRICS governments at multilateral climate summits include the following: (1) not cutting corporate, state, and household emissions to the extent necessary for avoiding unmanageable planetary disasters, in the process denying effective ways of leaving fossil fuels underground (by reimbursing poor countries); (2) not pricing carbon properly or acknowledging their economies’ ‘climate debt’; and (3) instead promoting carbon trading and offset mechanisms. The implications are important for alliance-formation involving climate-victimized, low-income countries and climate justice activists, alike. In sum, there is an increasingly urgent rationale to transcend ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ dichotomies and instead consider climate (like many other aspects of G7-BRICS relations) with a perspective open to critique of the imperial–subimperial fusions, not only oft-assumed frictions.

1. Introduction

Both the 2024 Baku, Azerbaijan and 2025 Belém, Brazil climate summits—the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP) 29 and 30—confirmed backsliding on three crucial matters: leaving fossil fuels underground, providing adequate finance, and compelling national governments to impose deep changes to the most carbon-addicted economies (Dale 2024; Winkler 2024; Bekele and Bond 2026; Ashley 2025; Bega 2025). Dozens of delegations of the poorest countries and small island countries walked out of Baku in protest at one point due to inadequate funding offered by the West and its allies. The latter included South African environment minister George, who cochaired the emissions mitigation committee and who bragged of staying behind in the Baku negotiations (i.e., not walking out) to promote broader G20 interests. Climate-denialist Donald Trump had just been elected President of the United States, and the Group of 20 (G20) summit of major powers occurred the week before in Rio de Janeiro, resulting in Baku’s watering down of UNFCCC COP28 stated ambitions, especially to begin ‘transitioning away from fossil fuels’ and to provide adequate climate finance.

In 2025, the balance of forces was even more adverse in Belém, and again in Johannesburg where the G20 was held immediately afterwards. Summing up the climate justice movement critique, Cape Town-based organizer Ashley (2025, p. 16) remarked how “COP30 offered no mechanisms for enforcement, no firm deadlines, and no clear pathways to keep warming below 1.5 °C. Nor did it include a fossil-fuel phase-out; oil-producing nations blocked binding language, and the final deal focused on voluntary road-maps instead. What it did offer was an expanded space for corporate actors, carbon traders, and mining interests seeking to greenwash extractivist projects.” Just as in the 2017–2020 period when Trump pulled the U.S. out of the UNFCCC, there was no formal objection, punishment, or accountability system—such as carbon taxation (or even outright sanctions) of U.S. increasingly high carbon exports (an idea endorsed by figures as diverse as Naomi Klein, Joseph Stiglitz, and Nicholas Sarkozy) (Bond 2019). The G20 summit in Johannesburg was held immediately after the COP30 closed (Bond 2025a). Just as in the COP30, Trump called for a U.S. boycott of most G20 meetings including the final summit because—as he repeatedly claimed without evidence—the government was engaged in ‘white genocide’ against Afrikaner farmers. The other G20 members who adopted the Leaders’ Declaration did mention climate change 28 times but claimed the COP30 had ‘successful outcomes’ while failing to acknowledge the UN summit’s inability to enforce sufficient emissions cuts, to keep fossil fuels underground, or to acknowledge liability—Yusually termed ‘polluter pays’—for climate debt. As shown below, these three positions are central to G20 member unity when it comes to climate politics.

More honest was Ebrahim Rasool, South Africa’s former ambassador to Washington, DC, who in the immediate wake of the G20 admitted that host Cyril Ramaphosa (South Africa’s President since 2018) and his team “collapsed the ambitious agenda we had about revitalizing the Global South in this G20.” This was due entirely to Trump’s repeated threats; Rasool continued, meaning “South Africa had to say, ‘listen we’re not going to achieve this, what we want to achieve on climate, go to COP30… let’s stick to the financial economic agenda for this G20.’ So we gave into Trump’s idea that we’ve widened the G20 too much.” Rasool claimed that Ramaphosa had sought “a declaration that is comfortable for them as well”—yet, nevertheless, Trump quickly announced that South Africa would be expelled from the December 2026 G20 that he is due to host in Miami (Bond 2025a).

Regardless of Trump’s disruptions to intra-G20 unity, this article provides an analysis of much deeper dividing lines that are emerging between the G20’s wealthy and industrializing countries on the one hand and everyone else on the other. Prevailing conventional wisdom is that the ‘Global South’ is distinctly different than the ‘Global North,’ and that two distinct blocs have emerged in conflict, especially in relation to the ‘Common but Differentiated Responsibilities’ (CBDR) associated with combatting climate change. This principle is often invoked so as to criticize Western emitters which—especially in the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Canada (collectively known as the G7), and others like Australia and Korea—are collectively responsible for the majority of historic emissions. Such liabilities are even more obvious when corrections are made: per capita measurement, accounting for colonial emissions (as British, European, and Soviet responsibilities), and integrating ‘outsourced’ emissions, i.e., when production is carried out in one place where emissions result, but consumption is enjoyed elsewhere. In these respects, the CBDR became a profound tool of Southern negotiators and advocates of Global South interests (Prashad 2021).

But the Global South is bifurcated, because a few middle-income countries stand out for their very high contributions to climate catastrophe, even after correcting emissions for history, population, and outsourcing. These are mainly members or partners of the original BRICS—Brazil–Russia–India–China–South Africa (2010–2023), plus five new members, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates (2023–2025)—and potentially also Saudi Arabia which, in 2025, was considered an official bloc member by host Brazil after being ‘frozen’ by Russia in late 2024 (TASS 2024, Firstpost 2024, Magid et al. 2025). There are also 10 BRICS ‘partner’ countries named in 2024, including several—Thailand, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Nigeria and Malaysia (plus invitees Türkiye and Algeria)—that are unusually fossil-dependent as consumers or producers. These states have been represented by a ‘BASIC’ (Brazil–South Africa–India–China) negotiating team at UNFCCC COPs, and in 2009 their fusion with the United States began in Copenhagen when Barack Obama joined the BASIC leaders to carve out the first major unifying statement since the Kyoto Protocol (Bond 2012).

In spite of this fusion, the use of CBDR to defend middle-income country emissions (especially those resulting in unbalanced economic development) continued, in a manner that Indian scholar–activist Bidwai (2009) termed as a narrative

“shield that enables India’s elite to hide behind the poor while indulging in profligate consumption and evading its responsibility towards the underprivileged in its own society: an overwhelmingly important imperative, to which it only pays rhetorical obeisance.”

This hiding-behind-the-poor strategy is, as we observe below, especially relevant to nearly all the other BRICS leaders today, as their ‘Global South’ location allows them to avoid opprobrium for, in 2022, having produced 51% of global emissions to generate just 29% of the world’s GDP (not including Saudi Arabia). The world’s most unequal country, South Africa, is probably the worst case, with 27 multinational corporations—members of the Energy Intensive Users Group (EIUG)—mainly to blame for consuming 42% of the national grid’s scarce electricity (providing just 4% of the country’s jobs) at far too low a price, in the process depleting the society’s mineral wealth, polluting prolifically (both through consuming coal-fired energy and through process emissions that include local toxins), and shrinking economic sovereignty (Bond 2012).

This reliance upon dirty energy as the electricity source fueling economic activity means South African and other BRICS-based states and corporations responsible for a rising contribution to the climate crisis now have a parallel self-interest to that of the ‘imperialist’ G7’s historic emitters. The logic of imperialism, as developed in Luxemburg’s (1913) book The Accumulation of Capital, begins with an ‘overproduction’ crisis characteristic of capitalism in the core European economies, which then “spurs capital on to a continual extension of the market” in search of new sources of demand as well as lower-cost inputs from a ‘non-capitalist milieu,’ including nature. In addition to European colonial control of territory and peoples, she considered imperialism’s domination of the non-capitalist world—including natural resources—as “indispensable for [capital] accumulation,” which “proceeds at the cost of this [non-capitalist] medium nevertheless, by eating it up” (Luxemburg 1913).

For Luxemburg (1913), the boundaries of market–state–society–nature relations were perpetually expanding as imperialism proceeded to ‘eat up’ ecosystems, e.g., as capital responded to falling rates of profit by externalizing more costs, e.g., through damaging nature (via resource depletion, worsening local pollution, and global-scale greenhouse gas emissions) and the commodification of everything (even the air today, via emissions trading). Luxemburg’s framing was different from many others of her era (e.g., Lenin, Bukharin, Hilferding, and Hobson) who stressed conjunctural inter-imperial rivalries rather than capitalist/non-capitalist relations. To demonstrate her version’s durability, a ‘new imperialism’ emerged in the 21st century, which was, according to Harvey (2003, p. 186), reliant upon ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and by capitalism against non-capitalism (precisely as Luxemburg had identified), in part because “The opening up of global markets in both commodities and capital created openings for other states to insert themselves into the global economy, first as absorbers but then as producers of surplus capitals. They then became competitors on the world stage. What might be called ‘subimperialisms’ arose.” In one such case, according to Africa’s leading political economist, Amin (2019, p. 178), even after apartheid ended in 1994, “South Africa’s subimperialist role has been reinforced, still dominated as it is by the Anglo-American mining monopolies” (e.g., the EIUG extractive industries and electricity mega-consumers). Endorsing Luxemburg’s approach, Amin (2018, p. 86) had grown concerned about how unequal exchange logically followed from the fact that capital accumulation was “founded on the destruction of the bases of all wealth: human beings and their natural environment” and hence it was wrong to “pass an eraser over the analyses advanced by Marx on … the exploitation of natural resources.”

As one reflection of mutual interests between the wealthy and middle-income states with surplus capitals, the emergence of global climate politics led Obama to the BASIC meeting in 2009 at the COP15. The subimperial character of the middle strata of world economies became obvious there, and in subsequent sites such as the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement’s negotiations over a non-liability clause (as discussed below). Again in 2024, two blocs—the Least Developed Countries and Small Island Developing States—representing the 76 most vulnerable states walked out of the Azerbaijan-hosted United Nations COP29, but aside from Ethiopians, the BRICS-country delegates refused to join them, instead staying with the Western powers. The BRICS thus rejected the efforts of poor countries, in favor of allying with the very G7 powers which have made the concept of ‘climate justice’—especially polluter-pays reparations for their ‘climate debt’ (emissions liabilities)—impossible to achieve, thus far. While there are certainly frictions between the BRICS and G7 within the G20, the pages below show how such fusions of interests are ultimately much more important.

One reason is that, as the study’s main hypothesis suggests, the G20 economies have largely harmonious objectives within global climate policy when it comes to, first, avoiding emissions cuts; second, rejecting liability for climate-related damage; and third, promoting market strategies through emissions trading and carbon offsets. The purposes of the article, then, are to reveal UNFCCC and G20 power relations by questioning Global North and Global South categories, in the process identifying the most relevant aspects of climate policy where instead of representing the interests of the world majority, the BRICS states and corporations have become more self-consciously allied with the G7 historic emitters in pursuing their objectives.

2. Materials and Methods

There are many approaches to interpreting the kinds of global policy alliances and conflicts between wealthy, industrialized states on the one hand, and the leading ‘middle powers’ on the other, that concern us in the pages below, and they exist mainly within the field of International Relations. One recent comparison of these approaches is by Fernandes (2022, p. 9), whose critical methodology finds mainstream considerations of middle—often termed ‘rising’—powers inadequate, e.g., in assuming that in his case study, “Australia is a middle power trying to uphold a rules-based international order. Rejecting these euphemisms, [his book] shows that Australia is a subimperial power upholding a U.S.-led imperial order.” To assess how the BRICS and G7 relate on climate policy within the UNFCCC and G20, a firm theoretical and methodological grounding is required because the prevailing 21st-century imperial global order was weakened by Washington’s adoption of climate-denialist policies during the reigns of Trump from 2017 to 2020 and from 2025 (the year South Africa hosted the G20, leading to further antagonisms). Hence the analysis requires a broader concept of imperialism and subimperialism than is feasible within International Relations.

The field’s leading scholars—e.g., Waltz (1979), Keohane and Nye (1977), Walt (1987), Finnemore and Sikkink (1998), Cohen (1998), Mearsheimer (2001), and Slaughter (2004)—do not provide an adequate language to assess the kinds of power relations associated with collaboration between the forces of (G7) climate imperialism and of (BRICS) subimperialism, even though the latter idea dates to the mid-1960s in Brazilian dependency theory. While an exception is Gilpin’s (1987) The Political Economy of International Relations, given its orientation to the power of multinational corporations in fostering dependency, he does not explore the potential for Newly Industrialized Countries to become subimperial in character, in alliance with Western states. And the seminal study of the regional reach of middle powers, by Buzan and Wæver (2003), is situated within (inadequate) shifting state-centric hierarchies:

“On one end of the spectrum of significant powers the United States was clearly still a superpower by any definition. At the other end were substantial numbers of regional powers such as Israel, Iran, Brazil, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, and Turkey. In between sat a set of second-rank powers that did not come close to measuring up to the USA, but which were significant global players in one way or another, and which clearly transcended regional or middle power status. These included China, Japan, and Russia, and more awkwardly the EU, either as a sui generis entity with some state-like qualities, or as united Germany plus France and Britain (or in some renditions a kind of German-led dominion). Initially, the main direction was to see a unipolar ‘moment’ to be followed inevitably by multipolarity as others caught up with the United States and/or began to balance against it, or as the United States declined, or as it withdrew from global engagement.”

Notwithstanding Buzan and Wæver’s (2003) prescient nod to Trumpism, the very limited extent to which an emergent multipolar ideology is meant—e.g., in the rhetoric of BRICS official documentation—to replace unipolar norms and must still be investigated in this article. But what is most vital to assessing global climate policy is how the material interests of high-emitting imperial and subimperial economies coincide within multilateral institutions (albeit with a few clashes). An appropriate method for the pages below will draw upon the categorizations provided in a branch of dependency and World-Systems theory (Wallerstein 1976) where the notion of subimperial societies (part of a ‘semi-periphery’ between core and periphery) emerged first in the work of Marini (1972, 2022). He criticized how subimperial ruling classes “collaborate actively with imperialist expansion, assuming in this expansion the position of a key nation,” focusing on his native Brazil (Marini 1972). Economically, the subimperial powers generally share the following domestic characteristics: high levels of corporate concentration and financialization, a more rapid tendency to the overaccumulation of capital (the system’s central internal contradiction), an increasing dependence on commodity production and processing for export (‘reprimarization’), and, driven by neo-liberal public policy, the super-exploitation of labor and widespread ecological destruction. This often co-exists with an ossified class structure, high levels of social repression, and rising inequality. For Wallerstein (1976, p. 468), the semi-periphery often suffers an “inefficacious, stunted, irreducibly comprador bourgeoisie, incapable of identifying its interest with those of the nation and, having missed its historical calling.” At the global or regional level, subimperial economies are central to contemporary global value chains, performing much of the extraction and processing of raw materials supplied by poorer countries and also since the 2000s in China, manufacturing most inexpensive goods. In contrast, the imperialist power center continues to benefit from most surplus extraction from both BRICS and poorer economies, via royalties for intellectual property and profits taken in the financial, marketing, and distributional circuits of capital.

In this process, subimperial economies exacerbate ‘unequal ecological exchange’ when their corporations invest in poorer countries, especially in Africa: uncompensated extraction of non-renewable natural resources and associated ecological destruction. Subimperial states also tend to suffer crises of overaccumulation in more intense forms (Harvey 2003), and therefore often seek to export surplus capital via direct investment, loans and trade. Geopolitically, Moyo and Yeros (2011, p. 19) explained in 2011, the BRICS’ relationship to imperialism was uneven: “The degree of participation in the Western military project is also different from one case to the next, although, one might say, there is a ‘schizophrenia’ to all this, typical of ‘subimperialism’.” South Africa’s 2021–2024 military intervention in northern Mozambique in defense of TotalEnergies, ExxonMobil, China National Petroleum Corporation, BP, and ENI is just one example (Bond 2022). The application of Marini’s ideas to climate policy is long overdue; there is only one study, by Böhm et al. (2012, p. 13), aimed at explaining how carbon market financing is “being leveraged by elites from these BRICS countries, to help underwrite these forms of subimperialist expansion.” (See also Bond 2012 for more early analysis in this spirit).

All of these features provide opportunities for social scientists to develop primary data and establish conceptual approaches to assessing and measuring power relations. In many sites, the data require nuance so as to avoid drawing upon inappropriate units of analysis, e.g., a national state where more nuance is required given the diverse power relations within states. Hence a full range of comparative data need to be considered, so that ‘emissions’ are not considered out of context. The analysis below utilizes a textual close reading and official documentation, as well as drawing upon primary data (including widely accepted statistics and news reports) and secondary analysis, so as to consider five areas where a working hypothesis can be tested: that the West and BRICS are in all major ways tightly aligned on climate policy (with the exception of European and British border tariffs) to the detriment of their most vulnerable citizens and of the world at large. First, the pages below provide documentation of both the G20 regimes’ failure to cut emissions sufficiently and leave fossil fuels underground and, relatedly, their failure to acknowledge climate debt to pay for extreme weather disasters, as well as their responsibility to adequately fund resilience and adaptation expenses of victims of extreme weather events. Second, we review several controversies associated with the pricing of greenhouse gas—especially carbon dioxide (CO₂)—emissions, including leading Western and BRICS economies’ attempts to ‘privatize the air’ through carbon trading and offset strategies. Third, as noted, friction has arisen in trade between the West (especially Europe and Britain) and the BRICS, in the form of inclement border tariffs to account for embedded greenhouse gases that are carbon-taxed far below EU and UK rates. Fourth, the roles of Western and BRICS ruling classes within the G20 network that emerged as the main multipolar vehicle in 2008—especially as hosts of the largest corporate and parastatal fossil-fuel firms—also implicate their leadership in what we will describe as an imperial–subimperial fusion. Fifth, the same is true for G20 members’ appearances in international climate-related court proceedings such as the International Court of Justice’s considerations of climate liability, culminating in a July 2025 advisory opinion that breaks new grounds for reparation advocates. G20 climate policy documents confirm these problems.

This paper’s methodology assesses not only discourses, but also structural relations and self-interests, and delves into particular policy, program, and project sites where the G20, G7, and BRICS are finding obvious fusions. But frictions within the G20 exist, as well, and not only due to Trump’s climate policy disruptions, but also because of the implications of differential carbon pricing and the G7’s and BRICS’ divergent roles in the international division of labor, as witnessed in trade tariff and non-tariff barrier tensions. While the choice of climate policy is of utmost importance to current and future generations, this study’s approach to imperial–subimperial fusions and frictions is replicable within other sectors of apparent contestation between the Global North and Global South. These include diverse features such as financial regulation through the Bretton Woods Institutions; the potential for a US Dollar alternative or replacement; international trade management (especially intellectual property regimes); and global value chains that benefit G7 headquarters and BRICS middle men. The Discussion section and Conclusion address both theoretical and political implications of climate policy but there are similar features that apply to these other sectors.

3. Results

3.1. West-BRICS Avoidance of Emissions Mitigation

To begin with emissions mitigation failure, consider how important it is for the subimperial economies to join the G7 in generating multiple gigatons (Gts) of GHGs. The world’s leading CO₂ annual emitters in 2022 (the last available consistent data) included seven from the BRICS economies: #1 China (10.5 Gt), #3 India (2.3 Gt), #4 Russia (1.5 Gt), #6 Iran (0.73 Gt), #12 Saudi Arabia (0.47 Gt), #13 South Africa (0.44 Gt), and #14 Brazil (0.41 Gt) (EDGAR 2024). The outsourcing factor—‘territorial emissions’ (in contrast to consumption-based emissions)—typically adds 10% (unfairly) for net exporters such as China and India, and subtracts roughly the same from net importers such as the U.S., Japan, and Germany (De Ridder and Rachel 2025, p. 10).

Moreover, additional ‘Scope 3′ emissions come from fossil-fuel exports of coal, gas, and oil burned elsewhere, but that are vital to factor in as ‘national’ interests for at least seven BRICS member economies: Russia (1.7 Gt), Indonesia (1 Gt), invitee Saudi Arabia (0.9 Gt), the United Arab Emirates (UAE) (0.3 Gt), and Brazil, Iran, and South Africa (0.2 Gt each) (Worldometer 2025). (New BRICS partners include other major fossil-fuel exporters, including Kazakhstan, Nigeria, and Algeria, the latter an invitee). But as McKibben (2023) complained, “Oil, gas, and coal exports are not counted when countries tally their greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris Agreement. This allows wealthy nations to report progress on emissions reduction goals, while shipping their fossil fuels—and the pollution they produce—overseas.” The major increase in United States export of methane gas during the 2010s is a good example, taking its Scope 3 emissions to 1.1 Gt, but BRICS countries are responsible for more such exports.

Setting aside outsourcing and the Scope 3 category for the sake of a direct-emissions comparison, the BRICS bloc’s expansion at the Johannesburg summit in mid-2023 meant that—when considering country-level fossil-fuel use as the measure (i.e., not including cement, land use, or forest degradation)—seven of the world’s top direct 16 CO₂ emitters are from the BRICS. In absolute terms, of the seven highest consuming economies of coal, gas, and oil, there are four BRICS members in coal, accounting for two-thirds of world consumption (China, India, Russia, and South Africa); five in oil, accounting for 28% (China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil); and four in gas, accounting for 26% (Russia, China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia).

Whether the measure is of CO₂ or the full range of GHGs—especially methane—and whether or not fossil-fuel exports are included, there are several other potential alternatives to recording only national emissions in an annual snapshot. These include annual average changes, new sources of emissions planned (e.g., coal-fired power plants), per capita emissions, historic emissions, territorial versus trade-related direct emissions (i.e., Northern emissions ‘outsourcing’), Purchasing Power Parity instead of unadjusted GDP in the denominator, ‘Adjusted Net Savings’ (incorporating resource depletion and pollution) instead of GDP, and in-country emissions distributions that reflect deep socio-economic–ecological inequalities. In each, the West and BRICS perform poorly.

The highest increases in annual emissions since 1990 have occurred in two BRICS members—China (4.3% per annum) and Saudi Arabia (3.9%)—with others at very high levels: Iran (3.3%), India (3.2%), and Brazil (2.0%), in comparison to the global 1.5% annual average increase (EDGAR 2024). In coming years, the expansion of emissions from coal-fired power plants and coal mines will continue to be led by China, with an anticipated 421 Gigawatts of new electricity drawn from thermal coal combustion, and 1.28 billion tons of annual new mining capacity (with India about half that and Indonesia next). In the process, China will also emit 70% of methane (which is 85 times more potent than CO₂ over a 20 year period) from the world’s coal mines: 10 Megatons annually (Global Energy Monitor 2024).

On a per person basis, Indian and Chinese emissions are dramatically less than the second main current emitter, the U.S., given that more than 1.43 billion residents live in each of the former countries, compared to 330 million for the latter. In 2023, India and China together could claim more than 35% of the world’s population, and adding the other eight of the bloc’s original and new members brings the total to 3.7 billion, i.e., to 45% of the world’s 8 billion people (EDGAR 2024; Worldometer 2025).

With respect to historic emissions, three BRICS countries are behind only the U.S. in cumulative damage from fossil fuels, cement, forest degradation, and agriculture. The U.S. is by far the highest: more than 509 billion tons of CO₂ from 1850 to 2021, responsible for 20% of the 2.5 trillion tons of CO₂ emitted (Evans 2021). In the next four places are China (285 billion tons), Russia (170 billion), Brazil (115 billion mainly due to Amazon forest degradation), and Indonesia (101 billion). In seventh is India (85 billion), while South Africa (30 billion) and Iran (25 billion) are also within the top 20. New BRICS partner Thailand (30 billion) ranks as the 18th historic emissions-intensive economy, and six other partner invitees—oil exporters Kazakhstan, Nigeria, and Algeria, plus Türkiye and Malaysia—are also major sources of emissions (Evans 2021).

Comparatively, the most CO₂-consuming of these economies, measured as annual emissions per GDP unit per person, are the UAE and South Africa, ranking worst and fourth worst in the world, with Kazakhstan (a BRICS partner) and the Czech Republic in between (EDGAR 2024). Such a measure captures the relative fossil addiction of firms in these countries, providing a means of characterizing the carbon inefficiency of a given economy, a matter of importance when considering the CO₂ embedded in exports subject to border taxation. But in addition to correcting for per capita and economic-efficiency criteria, there are other important nuances when adjudicating responsibility for the damage done by GHG emissions.

The most obvious factor within the World-Systems tradition of political economy is the extent to which emissions can be attributed to insertions within a global economy in which there was—and is—genuine national sovereign agency. Measures of historic emissions by Carbon Brief (2024) provide corrections for the economies that were either colonized by the UK and European powers or located within the orbit of the former United Soviet Socialist Republics from 1922 to 1991. Industrialization’s colonial-era and Soviet-era benefits were partly reflected in trade, in exported profit remittances to corporate headquarters, or in colonial tribute payments to London and Moscow especially. Emissions of a lower magnitude are also attributed to colonial rule from Washington, Berlin, Tokyo, Beijing, Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid, Lisbon, Rome, Istanbul, etc. Earlier, the slave trade epitomized very low levels of control by African polities, from which European, U.S., and Latin American (especially Brazilian) orders—feudal, colonial, and capitalist—benefited, although GHG emissions were then negligible. The economy most affected by such corrections is Ukraine due to (the Soviet Union’s) coal use.

Subsequent neo-colonial relations can be considered in a similar vein and are more relevant to current greenhouse gas emissions counts. The historic insertions into the world economy of many BRICS regimes also reflect powerful externally focused corporate interests, especially in the extractive industries. Today, these industries consume the bulk of electricity or otherwise dominate fossil-fuel combustion. If power relations shift, then ‘demand management’ would be a strategy to address both emissions and the problem some BRICS face of sometimes-acute electricity scarcity.

A final means of measurement that put the BRICS and West into perspective is their commitment to mitigating GHG emissions. The Climate Change Performance Index (2024) measured emissions at a 40% weighting, renewable energy at 20%, energy use at 20%, and climate policy at 20%. The latter category is based not on climate justice principles but more conservative ‘climate action’ precepts (hence after Denmark and the Netherlands as the top two performers, the United Kingdom ranks third in spite of the Labor Party’s dramatic 2024 policy backsliding). Prior to further backtracking associated with Trump’s election, the four worst performers of the Index’s 67 main emitting economies were four BRICS countries (including three from the 2023 expansion): the governments of Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Russia, followed by Korea (5th), Canada (6th), Japan (10th), the U.S. (11th), and China (13th).

3.2. Mispricing Carbon and Promoting Climate Finance with Strings Attached

The West and BRICS regimes not only avoid making sufficient emissions reductions, but with the exception of the U.S. after January 2025 (when climate denialism became policy), they have also been broadly unified when it comes to climate-related financing, promoting a neo-liberal agenda associated with markets and interest-bearing debt, instead of reparations grants. However, there are features of what Marini (1972, 2022) termed ‘antagonistic cooperation’ within the imperialist–subimperialist dialectic, i.e., the broad rules of the capitalist system are accepted as implicit (e.g., in the G20), yet particular turf wars or sectoral battles generate divergent strategies of capital accumulation and associated state policy. These are typically mediated in multilateral institutions including the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Trade Organization (WTO), and UNFCCC. The two major climate finance controversies are whether ‘polluters should pay’ (as demanded by climate justice advocates but rejected by the G20), and how to manage trade-related taxation due to differentiated embedded CO₂ content and pricing.

Mostly, the West and BRICS operate in tandem, in unifying in relation to the three points discussed earlier, of which the most important for climate financing is G20 denial of liability for greenhouse gas emissions. This was a critical point especially for Western negotiators by the time of the Paris Climate Agreement, which specifies that the deal “does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation” for climate-related ‘Loss and Damage’ (UNFCCC 2015). It is obvious enough why the main economic powers would agree to this: without even incorporating colonial-based additions, the U.S. historic emissions of more than 500 billion tons leads Germany, the UK, Japan, and Canada which have emitted between 60 and 90 billion tons, and these five economies alone have emitted 800 billion tons. Meanwhile, the seven leading BRICS emitters—China, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Indonesia, South Africa, and Iran—have emitted well over 850 billion tons of traceable aggregate greenhouse gases.

Measuring cumulative climate Loss and Damage done to the world by these dozen economies—in the forms of extreme weather events, sea-level rise, and long-term disruptions to agriculture—entails generating a ‘Social Cost of Carbon’ (SCC); this is exceptionally difficult for historical purposes given a rising SCC over time. One SCC estimate, in a National Bureau of Economic Research study (Bilal and Känzig 2025) endorsed by the World Economic Forum (Purton 2024) and Forbes (Kobayashi-Solomon 2024), and updated in September 2025, is 1584 USD per metric tonne. This is ‘marginal’ damage, i.e., climate impacts occurring from the next ton of CO₂, not the historic average. Other SCC estimates of damage emphasizing feedback loops are as high as USD 3000 (University College London 2021; Kikstra et al. 2021).

The 2023 world output of GHG emissions, according to the European Union’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR 2024), was 53 billion tons (not including the category Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry). Using the 1584 USD/tonne SCC measure, the damage done by these emissions was USD 84 trillion, which is 76% of the 2024 world GDP of USD 111 trillion. The 18 leading economies which emit 1% or more of emissions annually (not including outsourced emissions or using per capita measurement) were responsible in aggregate for 81% of the world’s total in 2024 (EDGAR 2024). They include 15 members of the G20, taking the European Union as a bloc. Iran, Pakistan, and Vietnam are not in the G20, although Iran is a BRICS member and Vietnam is a BRICS partner as of mid-2025.

The most obvious way that Western and BRICS rulers have avoided SCC-level polluter-pay penalties of anything like this magnitude, is by instead offering a patchwork of carbon pricing strategies consisting of taxes, emissions trading schemes (ETSs), and offsets. The same year the Kyoto Protocol was ratified, 2005, the European Union (EU) ETS was launched, although it was only from 2019 that it began pricing emissions above 20 EUR/ton, a delay due to Brussels’ generous ‘free allowances.’

These taxes and trading schemes are characterized by at least five problems:

(1)

Low coverage of emitters, both globally (in 2024 reaching just 24% of world emissions, mostly in the EU and China) and within specific jurisdictions, due to wide-ranging exemptions;

(2)

Underpricing (especially compared to the 1584 USD/tonne SCC), thus raising insufficient green-economy investment funds from taxpayers and markets (only USD 104 billion in 2023), and resulting in what is termed a ‘fossil-fuel subsidy’ by the International Monetary Fund (2025), which records this as a USD 7 trillion uncollected tax gift to emitters (although the IMF’s SCC was then only 63 USD/tonne);

(3)

Extreme price volatility (e.g., the EU ETS crashed by nearly 50% over 12 months starting in February 2023, from 105 EUR/tonne to 54 EUR/tonne, similar to other periods of extreme vacillation over the prior two decades);

(4)

Lack of proof that such pricing has directly resulted in genuine emissions curtailment (due to insufficiently high price elasticity and the ability to pass on costs to final consumers);

(5)

What often appear to be systemic levels of fraud and sharp social conflict over specific projects (Bond 2012; Aguirre 2024; Tarim 2024).

As a result of such flaws, even the World Bank (2024) admits that, “Despite record revenues and growth, global carbon price coverage and levels remain too low to meet the Paris Agreement goals. Currently, less than 1% of global greenhouse emissions are covered by a direct carbon price at or above the range recommended by the High-level Commission on Carbon Prices to limit temperature rise to well below 2 °C.” That recommended price—63–127 USD/tonne to be universally applied by 2030 to keep to 2 °C (or USD 226–385 to keep to 1.5 °C)—reflected conservativism by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Lord Nicholas Stern (both formerly World Bank chief economists), e.g., failing to factor in dangers of what Kikstra et al. (2021) model as emissions-catalyzed economic feedback loops.

Trump will curtail U.S. participation in carbon pricing: his first administration’s 2017–20 SCC was just 1 USD/ton, while in any case the highest-priced market—California—did not breach 20 USD/ton. But the other G7 countries and BRICS will continue carbon trading. In the October 2024 BRICS (2024) Kazan Summit statement, the leaders “recognize[d] the important role of carbon markets as one of the drivers of climate action, and encourage enhancing cooperation and sharing experiences in this field,” welcoming a new “BRICS Carbon Markets Partnership as a platform dedicated to sharing knowledge, experiences and case studies of developing carbon markets and discussing the potential intra-BRICS cooperation on carbon markets…” (the same sentiment was repeated in Rio de Janeiro in 2025). Consistent with Böhm et al.’s (2012) critique of the BRICS’ subimperial climate policy, no caveats were offered about what, originally in 1997, was an ecological-modernization strategy imposed upon the Kyoto Protocol by the U.S. negotiating team. Within a decade, the policy had subsequently failed in every international application (Lohmann 2006; Bond 2012). There was no sign of a breakthrough even when European prices rose after 2019, for in the most comprehensive study of carbon markets’ efficacy, covering 20% of all such activity prior to 2025 (representing nearly one billion tonnes of emissions), Probst et al. (2024, p. 11) found that “less than 16% of the carbon credits issued to the investigated projects constitute real emission reductions.”

Regardless of the inadequate pricing, the volatility or the fraud in carbon markets and offsets, there currently appears to be no possibility that historic emitters—whether from the West or the BRICS—will accept liability for past or current emissions, given the power relations and especially the U.S. government’s official climate-debt denialism, not to mention the Trump regime’s outright climate denialism. To illustrate, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had insisted on the Paris Climate Agreement phrasing in 2015, and again played a central role in global policy from 2021 to 2024 as the Biden Administration’s chief climate negotiator. As he confirmed in testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee (2023), in 2023 when the Loss and Damage Fund was being designed, “We specifically put phrases in that negate any possibility of liability… Obviously, the United States remains concerned about not opening up some legal track with respect to liability, and we don’t intend to do that.”

The Baku COP29 witnessed many poor country and civil society demands to reverse elite aversion to legal liability, or put another way, to accept moral responsibility for climate reparations, or even to respect a polluter-pays (environmental-economic) approach entirely consistent with a neo-liberalism open to ‘internalizing externalities’ through a tax-and-compensate mechanism. The main dispute that motivated negotiators was over whether a 250 billion USD/year commitment by wealthy countries in multiple forms of funding (including commercial loans) would be sufficient to cover various climate-related costs by 2035—which a UN team instead put at USD 1.3 trillion. So as to avoid a complete summit breakdown—following a walk-out near the end by dozens of small island and less developed countries, including many delegates from Africa (but not South Africa, Egypt, or Ethiopia)—the wealthy economies’ negotiators agreed to increase to USD 300 billion. However, this was without inflation adjustments that will no doubt reduce the real figure to even less than USD 250 billion. The dissatisfaction was sufficient to suggest future fissures within the BRICS because as South African academic Winkler (2024) observed, “several countries rejected the goal. India, Cuba, Bolivia and Nigeria were particularly vocal” in part, because, “Disappointingly, on just transitions, countries did not even agree to forward text.” Baku mitigation negotiations (co-chaired by George) were considered a failure (Winkler 2024); the South Africans’ self-isolating role was decried by many who sought unity within the African Union (Bekele and Bond 2026).

Also from the BRICS, when it came to emissions mitigation and financing, China played the main blocking role both at the UNFCCC and in a subsequent International Court of Justice climate liability hearing by avoiding responsibility both for polluting and for paying. The South African government wavered on China’s duties, for on 15 November, George was quoted by Bloomberg News (Sguazzin and Zabasajja 2024): “Africa is very heavily indebted to China. Maybe there is an opportunity for them to contribute in that way.” By November 18, he U-turned: “There is a view from the developed countries that more countries should contribute, by which they mean China. SA is very clear on this: China is a developing country and therefore is not obligated or required to contribute in that way” (Paton 2024a).

Such a reversal can be explained, in part, by inexperience, for according to a pre-Baku profile by leading business journalist Paton (2024b), “Refreshingly honest and unfiltered, George openly says he ‘had never heard of COP’ before being appointed Minister of Fisheries, Forestry and the Environment in June. He is on a steep learning curve and now faces an onerous task,” because the UNFCCC leadership had made George co-chair of its committee on mitigation. (The other co-chair was a Norwegian representing an economy just as fossil-addicted as South Africa’s defending state-owned Equinor oil exploration and extraction plans.) No doubt, in spite of his initial lack of familiarity, George quickly attained an awareness that were China to pay its climate debt, South Africa could also be asked to contribute, given its far higher relative historical and current contribution, e.g., measured by emissions per person or per GDP unit.

However, in November 2025, George was suddenly replaced as environment minister on the first day of the Belém COP30, fired by Ramaphosa at the request of the leader of his allied political party within South Africa’s Government of National Unity. This was due to internal party controversies unrelated to climate change, but it left George’s position as environment minister untenable, so he did not play the anticipated role as co-chair of the UNFCCC adaptation committee (alongside a German politician.) The impression left, as the leading climate NGOs argued unsuccessfully in a letter to Ramaphosa, is “that the South African government is not serious about climate change or its leadership in the negotiations, despite this being a crisis that threatens the fundamental social and economic aspirations of all in South Africa” (Bega 2025).

South Africa was especially central to climate finance controversy, in hosting the first Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP), an arrangement that evolved on the sidelines of COPs, providing Western ‘concessional finance’ for decarbonization. The pilot USD 8.5 billion fund was provided by the U.S. (which under Trump, in early 2025, withdrew its funds), UK, German, French, and EU governments, with a few other European governments joining later, bringing it to USD 12.8 billion even after Trump’s withdrawal of USD 1.023 billion in loans and grants. The deal was negotiated in mid-2021 and announced at the Glasgow COP27 climate summit, and in 2022 formally signed by the JETP pilot’s heads of state at the Sharm El-Shaikh COP28 summit. An announcement was made there, that four other JETPs would later commence, between the Western states and (1) Senegal, BRICS members (2) India and (3) Indonesia, and BRICS partner (4) Vietnam. However, the JETP pilot financing contained numerous flaws and was widely understood as a failure (Bond 2024). These reflected several areas of climate finance consensus within both imperialism and subimperialism:

(1)

There was no linkage of these payments to reparations, liability, or any other logic, and no protection from whimsical withdrawal (as anticipated under the Trump government);

(2)

The funding was nearly entirely based on debt (just 3% in grants);

(3)

U.S. and British state subsidies did not lower the interest rate (as did German and French) but instead took the form of loan guarantees exclusively for large banks’ collateral support;

(4)

The loans for various just-transition projects would largely pay for domestic costs such as labor and local materials associated with power plant decommissioning and new infrastructure construction, but JETP debts would accrue in inappropriately denominated foreign currency, requiring greater exports to raise hard currency and also making the loans more expensive to repay given currency depreciation;

(5)

There was no consultation with affected workers and communities in the coal-rich province of Mpumalanga, especially during the initial decommissioning of the Komati coal-fired power station;

(6)

Soon after the deal was signed, in 2023 the South African government announced it would renege on its promise to close three major coal-fired power plants by 2027 (delaying to at least 2030) and in 2024 authorized no new wind power investments (in spite of a tender for 3.2 GW, more than 10% of the current grid’s capacity) because—as the energy minister put it—“the prices we received were a bit exorbitant and pricey” (Ebrahim 2024; Proctor and Grey 2024), yet Pretoria received no JETP punishment from the U.S., UK, and Europe, aside from Trump’s withdrawal of USD 1.06 billion in U.S. funds for climate-denialist reasons.

3.3. European and UK Punishment for CO₂-Intensive Trade and Carbon-Mispricing

Whereas the JETP represented a financial incentive to decarbonize—albeit a ‘rotten carrot’—in these respects (Bond 2024), a second climate finance controversy reflected a punitive ‘stick’ (albeit more of a broken twig) to punish greenhouse gas emissions embedded in production. The main form of antagonistic cooperation within imperial/subimperial climate politics carried a clumsy name: the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). Europe and the UK committed to imposing CBAMs as a tariff (or ‘climate sanctions’ measure) in 2026 and 2027, respectively, to protect their local industries from deindustrialization via artificially cheaper imports of high-CO₂-embedded goods, known as emissions outsourcing (of which Prashad (2021) had bitterly complained). From 2018, a more rapidly rising (albeit highly volatile) carbon price—especially the EU ETS discussed above—contrasted with what was far lower carbon pricing among BRICS governments. The carbon pricing difference for several CBAM sectors—iron and steel, aluminum, cement, fertilizer, and electricity (with others in subsequent years)—will decrease EU and UK imports of BRICS products. Traders will purchase CBAM certificates to identify both direct (‘process emissions’) and indirect (e.g., embedded energy) CO₂, thus raising prices on exports from poorer countries.

How deleterious will CBAM be to these economies? Vast exaggerations are made by those representing high-carbon emerging economies. In a September 2023 meeting of BRICS environment ministers, South Africa’s Creecy (2023) claimed, “Africa stands to lose approximately USD 26 billion each year in direct taxes to the EU in the initial phase of the CBAM alone. Very soon others, including the USA, UK and Canada will follow the EU’s example and the list of taxed commodities will grow.” This is an extreme distortion, for the “USD 26 billion” (small in comparison to Africa’s 2023 GDP of USD 3 trillion) reflected just one biased estimate of an adverse impact, only if agriculture and manufacturing goods are included in the EU CBAM (which they are not in the short term or in any published schedule) (Aggad and Luke 2023). This scare figure was uncritically reported by not only Creecy but a Department of Trade, Industry, and Competition representative in a complaint to the EU as “at least 26 billion USD/annum,” without assessing the research methodology (European Commission 2023).

Methodology is vital, for several countervailing factors are typically not taken into account in such studies. First, export of CBAM-listed goods—especially smelted metals—also entails unequal ecological exchange: raw materials within these products include vast quantities of non-renewable resources which are extracted and processed by multinational corporations (Bond and Basu 2021). In turn, many firms externalize ‘licit’ financial outflows—profits, dividends, debt repayments—as well as illicit financial flows. Such resources could be used by future generations (if they are not extracted for consumption by present generations), including raw materials found within targeted sectors: core ingredients like bauxite and energy sources for aluminum; iron ore, ferroalloys, and metallurgical coal in steel; calcareous materials and argillaceous substances in cement; and fossil fuels for energy combustion (in the process, preventing higher-value hydrocarbon use in lubricants, synthetic materials, and pharmaceutical products).

Second, the CBAM-proscribed products are not only subject to process emissions during production; there is a very high electricity input content in their extraction, manufacture, smelting, and processing. In South Africa and many other countries suffering chronic electricity shortages, if CBAM results in lower EU consumption demand for such goods (which are typically among an economy’s most capital-intensive, not only carbon-intensive), and if the goods are therefore not consumed in other export or domestic markets, then lower output caused by CBAM would allow redistribution of scarce electricity to labor-intensive industries, small businesses, and households. In turn, electricity redistribution would boost economic output (compared to present use), and usually also would occur without the non-renewable resource depletion and extreme levels of pollution and emissions now associated with CBAM-affected sectors’ extraction and production systems.

Without such opportunity-cost correctives, the World Bank’s (2023) ‘Relative CBAM Exposure Index’ identified EU exports and CO₂ emissions intensity. The over-exposure of BRICS exports into the EU which abuse highly carbon-intensive production processes mainly affects the following (in order of vulnerability to CBAM in the five sectors): for aluminum, Kazakhstan, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Africa, China, and India; for iron and steel, India, Kazakhstan, Russia, South Africa, Egypt, Brazil, China, Belarus, Türkiye, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia; for fertilizers, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, South Africa, India, Belarus, Türkiye, and China; for cement, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, China, Malaysia, and India; and for electricity, Russia, Türkiye, and Belarus.

Compared with the BRICS members and partners, only a few African economies are exposed to declining exports, e.g., for aluminum, South Africa, Mozambique, Egypt, Tunisia, and Cameroon; for iron and steel, South Africa, Mozambique, Egypt, and Tunisia; for fertilizer, South Africa and Egypt; and for cement, Tunisia. In contrast to the USD 26 billion figure bandied about, a local research institute (Trade and Industrial Policy Strategies) estimated Africa’s short-term loss at USD 7.3 billion per annum, or 0.4% of GDP, comprising iron and steel at 48% of the losses, fertilizers at 30%, aluminum at 20%, and cement at 2% (Maimele 2023).

But in objecting to CBAM, the BRICS officials—especially from South Africa—were ‘hiding behind the poor’ (as discussed above), since their CBAM-affected emissions are deeply embedded in global value chains in which some of the hardest-hit victim companies will be Western multinational corporations. (The same boomerang logic applies to the likely cessation of the U.S. African Growth and Opportunity Act under the Trump regime, which will lower exports and profits in the same way, adversely affecting the branch plants of multinational corporations.) To illustrate, nearly all aluminum exported from South Africa is smelted by the world’s largest mining house, Melbourne-based BHP Billiton, whose consumption of 6% of the electricity grid is paid by the firm at a dramatically discounted price (0.02 USD/per kiloWatt hour), just one eighth as high as local households pay. The vast bulk of South African steel is from Luxembourg-based (formerly Indian) ArcelorMittal foundries. Iron ore exports are dominated by an Anglo-American Corporation, headquartered in Johannesburg from 1917 to 1999, then based in London.

If these metal smelters did not squander scarce electricity, more would be available for South African households, small businesses, and labor-intensive industries. That, in turn, would generate a far greater economic multiplier effect for each kilowatt hour consumed—and the economy would suffer less leakage of profits, dividends, and interest to overseas headquarters and tax havens. Reflecting this reality, when in March 2024 the global commodity prices for South Africa’s platinum, iron ore, and manganese exports had fallen dramatically from mid-2022 peaks, the lower international demand led to a cut-back on South African deep mining and smelting, in turn lowering electricity consumption by major firms sufficiently to end power shortages at least through December 2024. As former South African Reserve Bank deputy governor Kuben Naidoo observed in mid-2024, “I think half of the reason we don’t have load shedding is because the mining sector is in a deep recession” (BusinessTech 2024).

Both the vulnerability to trade (in EU and UK markets) and the distorted benefits that flow from using too much electricity in deep mining and metals-export smelting, together affect not only South Africa but also Kazakhstan, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, India, Russia, Egypt, Belarus, Türkiye, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia, i.e., 15 of the 23 existing and invited BRICS members and partners. As a result, it was not surprising that the October 2024 BRICS Kazan Summit Declaration—like several such prior statements and the 2025 Declaration—firmly rejected “unilateral, punitive and discriminatory protectionist measures, that are not in line with international law, under the pretext of environmental concerns, such as unilateral and discriminatory CBAMs” (BRICS 2024).

The BRICS economic agenda is, as revealed in case after case, hostile to either direct regulation or carbon pricing (especially taxation) used to correct for market distortions such as greenhouse gas emissions and local pollution. The BRICS (2024) utilized their successes at the 2023 Sharm El-Shaik COP to remind, in their 2024 Kazan Declaration, of “the call in COP28 related to avoidance of unilateral trade measures based on climate or environment.” Likewise the BRICS (2025) Rio Declaration opposed “unilateral, punitive and discriminatory protectionist measures, that are not in line with international law, under the pretext of environmental concerns, such as unilateral and discriminatory CBAMs, deforestation regulation, due diligence requirements, taxes and other measures.”

The EU typically denies that CBAM is in violation of trade law, instead claiming it is using environmental policy to establish a rational carbon price applicable across economic activities within both its 27 members and their import trade partners. It does so by citing the WTO Article XX’s exemption’s clauses, i.e., that “WTO members may adopt policy measures that are inconsistent with GATT disciplines, but necessary to protect human, animal or plant life or health or relating to the conservation of exhaustible natural resources.”

Without question, EU and UK CBAM designs have flaws needing correction. CBAM should not be applied in a manner that entails, as the WTO insists, “arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination between countries where the same conditions prevail,” and that it is not “a disguised restriction on international trade.” To be convincing about its ‘non-discriminatory agenda’ in the event the WTO entertains a claim against CBAM, will require the EU’s rapid phase-out of its own massive subsidies to polluters (including free EU ETS allowances), and much more relief to the poorest victim countries, such as Mozambique where a huge aluminum smelter (Mozal) run by BHP Billiton will be penalized since it utilizes coal-fired power imported from South Africa. Early 2025 witnessed very sharp aid cuts to countries like Mozambique, especially by the U.S. which was gutting climate, health, emergency food, and many other programs, but also by UK and European governments, who were instead utilizing surpluses for major military expansions, to rise from below 2% to 5% of GDP.

There are also CBAM design failures in a surreal EU ‘taxonomy’ that allows the definition of ‘green’ energy to contain nuclear or gas. Other needed reforms are for the EU to commit CBAM tariff revenues to compensate countries to which Europeans owe a climate debt, and to utilize a more coherent carbon price than that provided by the EU ETS.

Regardless of whether such reforms are won, the temptation for BRICS leaders who are opposed to CBAM is to hide behind the poor, claiming that high-carbon production is developmental, notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary. The most obvious case is South Africa’s extractive-industry energy-use bias which provides two dozen multinational corporations in the EIUG extremely inexpensive electricity, in spite of the low share of the workforce they hire. On the one hand, South Africa’s Presidential Climate Commission director Crispian Olver argued in October 2024 that the CBAM is indeed “a unilateral trade measure. We do not think it is WTO compliant, but we know that the EU will argue differently” (Ebrahim 2024). On the other hand, Olver ignores the EIUG elephant in the room.

3.4. The G20, Corporate Power, and Climate Liability

The 2024 G20 would have been the place to address such concerns, but its hosting by Lula did not ultimately address this profound conflict, between imperial and subimperial powers, due to the overall confluence of interests between the G7 and BRICS, just as Trump was elected. Indeed, the G20’s 2024 Rio de Janeiro Declaration focused rhetorically on two new initiatives (likely to die in Johannesburg): taxing billionaires and increasing food security. The G20 Declaration, signed on 19 November 2024, failed to instruct Western or BRICS negotiators—then in a heated debate in Baku—to target a specific ‘New Collective Quantified Goal’ target for climate finance to support poor countries. Hence the inadequate USD 250 billion offer from the West caused a walk-out, led by African Least Developed Countries (but ignored by the South Africans). Moreover, the Declaration failed to restate or add ambition to COP28’s promise to ‘transition away’ from fossil fuels—a shallow commitment witnessed by how many countries subsequently instead expanded exploration, refining, production, transport, and combustion infrastructure, even before Trump’s return to power (Schonhardt et al. 2024; Hiar et al. 2025).

On a crucial point related to pricing, the G20 Declaration only vaguely committed “to phase-out and rationalize, over the medium term, inefficient fossil-fuel subsidies,” but failed to include in this the vast implicit subsidies that G20 governments give polluters due to their uniformly low carbon taxes. The latter are estimated by even IMF staff to exceed USD 7 trillion annually: “China contributes by far the most to total subsidies (USD 2.2 trillion) in 2022, followed by the United States (USD 760 billion), Russia (USD 420 billion), India (USD 350 billion), and the European Union (USD 310 billion)” (Black et al. 2023). As noted above, the Social Cost of Carbon used in IMF calculations is only 63 USD/ton of emissions, which is 1/25th as high as it should be (Bilal and Känzig 2025). So the West and BRICS alike have an interest in downplaying such subsidies, and indeed never acknowledging them (in one of the most extreme cases, South Africa, its economy’s USD 56 billion in annual subsidies, if multiplied by 25, amounts to 2.7 times the economy’s annual GDP).

As for the transition to clean energy, the G20 Declaration did rhetorically “support reliable, diversified, sustainable and responsible supply chains for energy transitions, including for critical minerals and materials beneficiated at source, semiconductors and technologies” (G20 2024). But it ignored the specific problem linking imperialist corporate power to extreme subimperialist subjugation of peripheral economies. This is especially vital in Africa where the most aggressive Western and BRICS firms were in the extractive industries; these were also primary beneficiaries of vast infrastructure investments being made to assure improved—albeit still neo-colonial—road, rail, and port access. These were highlighted to the world in December 2024 by outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden’s visit to the Lobito Corridor, stretching from the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) via Zambia to Angola, in competition for new-economy mineral extraction with Chinese mines. By mid-2025, Trump had (incorrectly) declared an end to the DRC war with Rwanda-backed M23 in exchange for USD 4 trillion in estimated mineral concessions that the DRC state was anticipated to grant U.S. mining houses.

At that very time, the world’s largest company—U.S.-based Apple (with USD 3.85 trillion in market capitalization by late 2024)—was being charged in French and Belgian courts by the DRC’s Kinshasa government for subcontracting from Chinese mining houses which engaged in unethical practices (Fischer 2024). The critiques of Apple’s subcontractors included their undeclared (hence untaxed) export of non-renewable resources (via Rwandese smuggling networks), ecological damage, systematic use of child labor, and low wages, especially for coltan extracted from the eastern DRC, exported from next-door Rwanda, and processed on the east coast of China, before reentering the global value chains (Rever 2024).

What this suggests, more generally, is that such global value chain connectivities should focus our attention not only on national state policy, but on the corporations that shape climate policy. Among BRICS oil, gas, and coal corporations and SOEs, seven rank within the world’s top 20 in the 1965–2017 period, with nearly 200 billion tons of emissions attributable to their products in that period. A list of the top 20 corporates that—from 1965 to 2017—contributed to 480 billion tons of CO₂-equivalent emissions, include the following BRICS SOEs (in italics): Saudi Aramco 59.26 tons; Chevron 43.35; Gazprom 43.23; ExxonMobil 41.90; National Iranian Oil Co 35.66; BP 34.02; Royal Dutch Shell 31.95; Coal India 23.12; Pemex 22.65; Petróleos de Venezuela 15.75; PetroChina 15.63; Peabody Energy 15.39; ConocoPhillips 15.23; Abu Dhabi National Oil Co 13.84; Kuwait Petroleum Corp 13.48; Iraq National Oil Co 12.60; Total SA 12.35; Sonatrach 12.30; BHP Billiton 9.80; and Petrobras 8.68 (Taylor and Watts 2019).

Taking a different emissions periodization (starting when scientific and legislator awareness of the climate crisis reached a critical mass), Grasso and Heede (2023) divide these firms’ 1988–2022 liabilities into three categories—“high requirement’, ‘low requirement’, and ‘exempted’—that are “based on companies’ violation of the no-harm principle, which entails disgorgements proportional to their historical emissions understood as the measure of their contribution for climate harm and by the application of the moral principle of need, which requires that people with greater need should receive more benefits.” Of the 21 fossil-fuel firms in this survey, collectively responsible for 36% of global emissions in the past quarter-century, nine (including from Saudi Arabia and Algeria) were primarily State-Owned Entities (SOEs), as opposed to the investor-owned companies that dominate the oil firms of wealthier countries. Hence, there is a logic to treating BRICS SOEs (with the exception of wealthy Saudi and UAE oil companies) differently when it comes to reparations, than ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron, Peabody, TotalEnergies, ConocoPhillips, and BHP. Likewise, poorer countries whose SOEs are responsible for major contributions to the climate crisis—especially (BRICS members) India and Iran as well as Algeria—pay profits back into the national fiscus, as obviating their reparations obligations.

3.5. Courtroom Battlegrounds

All these statistics represent indicators of a common interest between G7 and BRICS states and firms, when it comes to some of the most crucial for climate policy, and since the 2009 Copenhagen Accord fusion of the U.S. and BASIC, the fusions have outweighed frictions. Nevertheless, in various jurisdictions’ legislative and regulatory processes and in courts of law, states and fossil-fuel corporations are increasingly under pressure to assume a degree of liability. In part, this would help to link Loss and Damage reparations obligations to the simultaneous need for more adaptation funding that can climate-proof sites that are especially vulnerable. (The logic is also partly based upon ExxonMobil and Shell having had prior awareness of the catastrophic impacts of fossil-fuel combustion—followed by cover-ups—dating to the 1970s). Most such claims are dismissed by conservative judges, so the vast majority of more than 2500 climate lawsuits have been disappointments.

However, sometimes new laws facilitate judicial action. As an example of sub-national jurisdictional punishment, in late 2024 New York State Governor Hochul (2024) approved a legislative initiative thanks to wide popular support (from 70 to 90% approval in polls). One outcome was the creation of a USD 75 billion ‘Climate Superfund’ aimed at improving “resiliency to dangerous climate impacts like flooding and extreme heat” between 2025 and 2050. Her objective was to “shift the cost of climate adaptation from everyday New Yorkers to the fossil-fuel companies most responsible for the pollution.” In comparison to such preliminary assessment of liability, profits earned by Big Oil companies in the first half of 2024 were nearly USD 1 trillion.

In 2024, there were other courtroom sites of debate about national state liability for the climate catastrophe. Most encouragingly, the European Court of Human Rights found—in a case initiated by 2000 elderly women—that Switzerland was not cutting emissions sufficiently. In the Netherlands, Greenpeace and residents of the Caribbean island of Bonaire sued for rising sea-level damage. At the scale of multilateral justice, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights began consideration of a request from Colombia and Chile to determine legal responsibilities for states to link climate and human rights. Transboundary harm associated with greenhouse gas emissions is alleged by the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law, in requesting intervention by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.

Finally, just after the COP29 concluded, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) began what are the highest-profile hearings in multilateral law to date, catalyzed by a United Nations General Assembly request for an advisory opinion promoted most vocally by a sinking Pacific island nation, Vanuatu, catalyzed by 27 school children. Since the two most famous ICJ and International Criminal Court cases from 2022 to 2024, in which war crimes and genocide were alleged against, respectively, Russia and Israel, the belligerent governments have ignored the rulings.

Nevertheless, the ICJ courtroom rhetoric certainly provides clues as to not only Vanuatu’s allies (nearby islands Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and New Caledonia) but where other regimes stand, e.g., as the Center for International Environmental Law charged: “Major polluters, including the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, China, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Australia, Norway, and Kuwait, found themselves isolated in their attempts to play the legal system to serve their self-interests and insulate themselves from accountability” (Rowlands 2024). Riyadh’s representative, Prince Jalawi Turki al Saud, began the counterattack against Vanuatu: “To impose any obligations or consequences that go beyond or conflict with those contained in the specialized treaty regime on climate change would risk undermining the integrity of this regime”—a position adopted by the other major polluters (Capacci 2025).

Such alignment is embarrassing, but in spite of many BRICS representatives to the ICJ testifying on behalf of CBDR, the input by the People’s Republic of China (2024) offered confirmation of the negligible difference between the Western and BRICS emitters in such settings, refusing to cut emissions and to acknowledge liability yet still bragging of charitable intent:

“China Widely Engages in International Cooperation to Jointly Address Climate Change and Build a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind: China has maintained close coordination and communication with fellow developing countries, including the BASIC Countries and Like-Minded Developing Countries, and held the BRICS High-level Meeting on Climate Change. China has firmly upheld the objectives, principles and institutional arrangements established by the UNFCCC and its Paris Agreement, and resolutely safeguarded the rights and interests of developing countries. In particular, China fully understands the climate challenges faced by Small Island Developing States and Least Developed Countries, and supports their reasonable demands. Through international cooperation on climate change, China has provided support to developing countries to the best of its ability, thereby jointly enhancing the ability to tackle climate change.”

(People’s Republic of China 2024, p. 64)

Most telling, however, about such ‘support to developing countries’ is the line-up of 103 country sponsors for UN General Assembly Resolution A77/L.58, which was the March 2023 request for the ICJ’s advisory opinion. The Western backers of Vanuatu school children included several with G20 seats: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the UK (at the time all having centrist governments). There were no BRICS members, either from the original five or from the next six which attended the bloc’s meetings in 2024–2025. When the ICJ ruled in favor of Vanuatu in its July 2025 Advisory Opinion on the Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change, the implications for both G7 and BRICS states were ominous. The judgment made the following clear:

“The legal consequences resulting from the commission of an internationally wrongful act may include the obligations of… full reparation to injured States in the form of restitution, compensation and satisfaction, provided that the general conditions of the law of State responsibility are met, including that a sufficiently direct and certain causal nexus can be shown between the wrongful act and injury.”

(ICJ 2025)

The court recorded UN member states’ “obligations of cessation and non-repetition… as well as the consequences requiring full reparation, including restitution, compensation and/or satisfaction.” Of BRICS members, only the Chinese state officially replied, arguing from the China Department of Foreign Affairs (2025), that the advisory opinion was “of positive significance” because it “pointed out that the UNFCCC system is the principal legal instruments regulating the international response to the global problem of climate change…” Beijing also commended the judgment for confirming CBDR and observed, “China has also provided as much assistance as we can to fellow developing countries through the channel of South-South cooperation.” Other countries in the BRICS and G7 simply promised to study the Advisory Opinion’s implications, with none endorsing it as the basis for policy change.

4. Discussion

The information considered above provides an indictment of both the G20’s Western and BRICS state leaderships and corporate practices, which contribute in various ways to climate-catastrophic amplification, not mitigation. The imperialist and subimperialist climate policy managers are failing their societies and environments by refusing to (1) cut greenhouse gas emissions to the extent necessary; (2) acknowledge climate debt and make reparations payments commensurate with present and future Loss and Damage and related liabilities notwithstanding the ICJ advisory opinion; and (3) price carbon properly without recourse to dysfunctional carbon market and offset gimmicks. In the main area of climate policy conflict discussed above, namely carbon border taxation, the BRICS countries’ climate managers are often guilty of hiding behind the poor: protecting major multinational corporate emitters while claiming CBDR, implicitly assuming that high CO₂-intensive production processes are ‘developmental.’ As a result of these failures, the imperial/subimperial nexus in climate policy from global to national to local scales also means societies are unprepared for systemic climate disasters.

The framing above is similar to Marini’s (1972, 2022) concept of imperialist–subimperialist alliances in the interests of maximizing capital accumulation within the broader global economy, in the expansion of imperialism. However, in the prime of his working life (the 1960s–70s), Marini’s analysis did not incorporate multilateral institutions’ evolution. U.S.-government coups were far more common as means of coercion (e.g., Brazil in 1964), prior to more sophisticated mechanisms of consent, via a notional ‘international community’. But even in the Trump era when the ‘rules-based system’ is utterly frayed and soft-power is considered increasingly unimportant, multilateral–institutional forms of imperialism remain vital to the way subimperialism is assimilated, not only within the UNFCCC.

To illustrate, as early as 1944, the World Bank and IMF were founded with loan and investment powers based upon a quasi-gold standard—thanks to South African collaboration with the U.S., as the two main holders of gold reserves—but they only rose to prominence in ‘Washington Consensus’ economic-policy ideology after the Third World Debt Crisis began in the early 1980s, e.g., with the Berg Report on Africa (World Bank 1981). Catastrophic foreign debt crises led to defaults by not only impoverished states but also numerous subimperial economies during the 1980s–1990s (including BRICS members South Africa in 1985, Brazil in 1987 and Russia in 1998), which alerted subimperial elites to the extent of the Bretton Woods twins’ power (but ironically, led to a desire by most BRICS to take greater ownership by the 2010s, along with a vain rhetorical commitment to ‘international financial reform’). The WTO was formally established in 1994, taking the place of the far less onerous General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and this soon boosted the role of Chinese corporations in world commerce and foreign direct investment. Three years later, the UNFCCC’s first treaty was the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and its neo-liberal origins are reflected in the centrality of carbon markets to Western emissions mitigation strategies. From the 2000s, the United Nations Security Council—where permanent membership and veto power are enjoyed by three Western and two BRICS states—became increasingly important as a site of contestation, yet ultimately the Council was impotent to halt egregious wars such as nearly all those waged in the 21st century.

The overarching thesis of Marini (1972)—especially the ‘key nation’ function that subimperial states play within imperialism’s expansion—revolves around a broader critique of semi-peripheral elites and their capital accumulation strategies. Marini was not conscious of the extent of ecosystem crises during his most productive years (from 1965 through the early 1980s), and nor did he apply his approach to what at the time were somewhat ossified multilateral institutions. Only later were the broadly like-minded semi-peripheral rulers welcomed to the latter, e.g., to the G20 in 2008, to the Bretton Woods Institutions through greater roles in the 1990s and to the WTO and UNFCCC when the BRICS were more prominent since the early 2000s. Still, the findings above confirm that Marini’s category of subimperialism should therefore be explored, especially for future research agendas, when key nations in imperialism’s expansion are better able to expand their own major capitalists’ interests, through assimilation within neo-liberal multilateral institutions as well as fast-expanding global value chains (at least through the 2010s). It is this World-Systems framing that allows for the depth of critical analysis required, as opposed to most others in the discipline of International Relations which treat subimperial states and capitalists as merely ‘middle’ or ‘rising’ powers (which is also considered inadequate, compared to the subimperial location by Fernandes (2022)). Notwithstanding spasms of power politics and resistance to reform, multilateral political–economic and climate institutions have become integral to the way imperialism operates, especially in a division of labor situating BRICS corporations as extractors of raw materials and of manufacturing production. The multilateral institutions, including the UNFCCC, codify multinational corporate rights (which are enormous) and responsibilities (which are minimal) in relation to finance, mercantilism, direct investment, greenhouse gas emissions, and related matters. Imperialist conflicts with subimperial powers mainly take the form of antagonistic cooperation, and occur often on geopolitical turf-war terrain. But when it comes to such institutions protecting vulnerable peoples and environments at the global scale, this has occurred only in two cases: the 1987 Montreal Protocol to ban ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons and the 2001 Doha WTO summit concession that permitted Intellectual Property waivers for anti-retroviral AIDS medicines to strengthen immune systems. All other multilateral decision-making processes have reflected adverse power relations that favor the West and BRICS against smaller powers, that favor corporate property rights, and that favor capital over people and planet in public policy.

5. Conclusions

Fusions and frictions relating to global climate policy within the G20 have been identified in the pages above, and the concepts of Global North, Global South, and CBDR have been questioned in the process. The contribution to debate is critique of the Global North versus Global South binary perspective—and in the process to offer analysis suggesting the damage done by the subimperial alliance of large semi-peripheral countries’ rulers with the main imperial bloc within the UNFCCC. The U.S. withdrawal requires an explanation of the differences between ideological orientations. What has become evident is that the crucial relationships involve fossil-fuel-intensive production and consumption systems within the Western and BRICS economies which in turn mean G20 states’ approaches to climate policy will be compromised by converging elite self-interests, against the rest of the world’s societal and environmental interests. To that end, the fractions of national capital in the West and BRICS that are most externally oriented—in the mining and fossil-fuel-extractive industries, Big Pharma, finance, commerce, agriculture, and Big Tech circuitries—have generally found the multilateral institutions to be vital sites to advance their interests, with occasional exceptions such as the ICJ mid-2025 advisory opinion on climate liabilities (which in any case will likely be ignored by G20 states, in practice).

While the choice of climate policy is of utmost importance to current and future generations, this study’s approach to imperial–subimperial fusions and frictions is replicable within other sectors of apparent contestation between the Global North and Global South. These include diverse features such as financial regulation through the Bretton Woods Institutions; the potential for a US Dollar alternative or replacement; international trade management (especially intellectual property regimes); and global value chains that benefit G7 headquarters and BRICS middle men.

The interpenetration of capitals between and within the West and BRICS means that when Trump and other rightwing-populist, ‘paleo-conservative’ state leaders react against the neo-liberal dominance of multilateral imperialism (or against flows of migrant labor), not only will affected fractions of capitals respond with hostility (e.g., in late 2024, Elon Musk desiring better relations with China and recruitment of more international tech workers to the U.S., against Make America Great Again xenophobes, and in mid-2025 he had what appears to be a temporary albeit insult-riddled break with Trump over a fast-rising fiscal deficit). In addition, as witnessed in the BRICS 2024 Kazan and 2025 Rio Declarations and the bloc’s critiques of financial boycotts (of Russia and Iran) and other Western political sanctions, as well as Trump’s irrational tariffs, the BRICS will do even more to promote neo-liberal ‘free trade,’ investment protections, financial deregulation, and property rights. This friction was initially signaled by Xi Jinping at the World Economic Forum on the eve of Trump’s first inauguration, when China promoted a much stronger version of corporate globalization and free trade than the incoming U.S. president (Parker 2017).

When it comes to climate policy, antagonistic cooperation is being experienced most in relation to trade: BRICS leaders insist that the CBAM threat be prohibited in the WTO. As a most poignant example of rhetorical friction but practical fusion of interests, with the exception of Iran, all other BRICS members (and many new partner countries) engage in prolific trade and investment with Israel—including military hardware (especially Chinese drones) and coal, oil, and gas—that facilitate both ongoing attacks on the Palestinian people and climate crisis. In South Africa, the leading role of Glencore in supplying coal to the Israel Electricity Corporation was the basis for protests at the firm’s Johannesburg headquarters, combining Palestine solidarity, local anti-pollution community movements, and climate justice activists (Bond 2025b).

Indeed, a sane policy towards climate and energy will only come from below, given the confluence of interests that support status quo policies from above. And a much larger set of forces will be required than simply environmentalists. Pressure will need to link the grievances of many more Western and BRICS civil society critics to make a breakthrough. Such opposition does exist, against G20 states’ often catalytic involvement in unjust wars and violations of sovereignty; their higher and worsening inequality; sometimes extreme levels of poverty and unemployment; often-unchecked worker exploitation and violations of labor rights; their COVID-19 pandemic mismanagement (and failure to support vaccines as global public goods in the WTO); their firms’ looting of poor countries’ resources; their economies’ extreme contributions to climate change and ecocide; the high levels of violence against women; abusive high technology, censorship, and sometimes extreme surveillance; austerity and neo-liberalism; fake-news ‘de-dollarization’ by the BRICS; human rights abuses; LGBTQI+ repression; tyrannical rule; and venal corruption.

The U.S. is the most rapidly degenerating case. But support given to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and attacks on neighboring countries in 2023–2025 by the rest of the G7 and ten out of eleven BRICS members, also signals a breakdown in liberal values among the G20’s ruling networks. On the other hand, on 14 June and 18 October 2025, nearly 4500 protests—with at least twelve million ‘No Kings!’ demonstrators—represented major steps towards general movement-building there. Linking issues is a vital part of a ‘rainbow’ strategy (Rubin and Falconer 2025). It is through gathering this kind of multi-issue strength—not aimed at endorsing either more Western-dominated ‘uni-polar’ or the supposedly ‘alternative’ BRICS-proclaimed ‘multi-polar’ versions of global governance, which are resulting in ongoing high-emissions and climate-debt-denialist and carbon-marketeering policies—that antipolar struggles against G7 and BRICS elites can proceed in the period ahead.