Fusions and Frictions in G20 Climate Policy

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.