(out this week in the journal Social Sciences... an
attempt to raise the question: should there be a 'Global North'
and 'Global South' distinction in the context of
imperial+subimperial alliances between the West and the BRICS,
especially when it comes to amplifying the climate catastrophe?)
Fusions
and Frictions in G20 Climate Policy
by Patrick
Bond
Centre for
Social Change, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg P.O. Box
524, South
Africa
Soc. Sci. 2026, 15(2),
92; https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci15020092
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/15/2/92
Submission
received: 29 June 2025 / Revised: 18 January
2026 / Accepted: 20 January 2026 / Published: 3 February
2026
(This
article belongs to the Special Issue Disasters,
Social Movements, Policy Responses and Sociocultural
Evolution)
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.
Keywords:
BRICS; climate
debt; emissions
mitigation; loss
and damage; subimperialism;
UNFCCC
***
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—usually
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.
Funding
This
research received no external funding.
Institutional
Review Board Statement
Not
applicable.
Informed
Consent Statement
Not
applicable.
Data
Availability Statement
Data
supporting the results are in the public realm and are cited.
Acknowledgments
The author
is grateful to three Social Sciences reviewers for helpful
feedback, to Chris
Chase-Dunn for his work on the Brazilian conference where it was
presented
along with this special issue, and to the climate justice
movement and various
currents within the brics-from-below networks—and many other
civil society
opponents of injustices—within both BRICS countries and the
West, which
periodically alert society about the contradictions described
above, and always
engage in forthright debate about the ways forward.
Conflicts
of Interest
The author
declares no conflicts of interest.
Abbreviations
|
BRICS
|
Brazil–Russia–India–China–South
Africa
|
|
CBAM
|
Carbon
Border Adjustment Mechanism
|
|
CO2
|
Carbon
dioxide
|
|
CBDR
|
Common
but Differentiated Responsibilities
|
|
COP
|
Conference
of the Parties
|
|
CRA
|
Contingent
Reserve Arrangement
|
|
DRC
|
Democratic
Republic of the Congo
|
|
ETS
|
Emissions
trading scheme
|
|
EIUG
|
Energy
Intensive Users Group
|
|
EU
|
European
Union
|
|
G20
|
Group
of 20
|
|
GHG
|
Greenhouse
gas
|
|
ICJ
|
International
Court of Justice
|
|
IMF
|
International
Monetary Fund
|
|
JETP
|
Just
Energy Transition Partnership
|
|
SCC
|
Social
Cost of Carbon
|
|
SOEs
|
State-Owned
Entities
|
|
UNFCCC
|
United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
|
|
WTO
|
World
Trade Organization
|
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You
are invited to the UJ Departments of Sociology, Anthropology and
Development Studies, and Centre for Social Change Departmental
Webinar series: Social Ruptures in South Africa 
You are invited
to the UJ Departments of Sociology, Anthropology and Development
Studies, and Centre for Social Change Departmental Webinar
series: Social Ruptures in South Africa 
Join us for a University of Johannesburg
webinar, in person at the Dept of Sociology, 6th
floor, C Ring, UJ Auckland Park campus or online 
Who
wants to default on their climate debt? At least 36 states
which are burdened by ruling elites – and United Nations
delegates – who explicitly represent climate vandals.
The
once iconic Holiday Inn villas in Port
Vila, Vanuatu sit partially sunken after being hit by multiple
cyclones and an
earthquake that caused irreparable damage [Annika
Hammerschlag/AP Photo] 
President
of the International Court of
Justice (ICJ) Yuji Iwasawa (centre) and members issue their
first advisory
opinion on states’ legal obligations to address climate change,
The Hague, the
Netherlands, July 23, 2025 [AFP]
Join us
online at 
Ashish
Kothari studied sociology at the University of Delhi and began
environmental justice activism in his school days, helping to
found 
The
Global Left in a Multipolar World
Waow, there was a fantastic
victory on Friday: a Constitutional Court win for Nonhle
Mbuthuma of the Amadiba Crisis Committee and Sinegugu Zikulu of
Sustain the Wild Coast - grassroots/NGO leaders whose
movements 
The Johannesburg Stock Exchange
is meant to host thick-on-the-ground, sharp-eyed Wolves of Maude
Street. All day Friday at an academic conference, I was perched in
a hotel (Radisson Blu) just above those lads. And yet even at a
late lunch break outside on the 13th floor, I could not discern
any awareness of this case (what did I expect, those guys to be
jumping out of windows nearby?). The 
Copelyn
will have his HCI Annual General Meeting on September 1 and
must report on this defeat - not merely because he was too much of
a cheapskate to translate the Shell/Impact documentation into
isiXhosa and pay for 'consultation' tea and biscuits. He will also
have to tell shareholders about massive damage to anticipated
profits for the 2026-27 year, because as he disclosed in his 2025
Annual Report about a year ago (see chart to the right), from
2024-25, HCI 'earned' nearly R5 billion out of the firm's R7.6
billion in profits merely from reordering oil and gas assets, by
taking more control over a subsidiary. (After a R528 million loss
the year before.) 
