Climate Crisis as a Planned Disaster

The global climate regime is experiencing not failure but structural collapse. Despite thirty years of negotiations and repeated commitments to transformative action, fossil fuel emissions reached record highs in 2024 while coal, oil, and gas production simultaneously achieved their highest levels in history. This isn't a puzzle to be solved — it's a predictable outcome.

In November 2024, nearly 200 nations convened in Baku for COP29. The summit concluded with India and Nigeria accusing the Azerbaijani presidency of railroading through a climate finance deal over their explicit objections, while more than 1,700 fossil fuel lobbyists walked the conference halls — outnumbering the delegations of most vulnerable nations. At the same conference where delegates debated language on "transitioning away from fossil fuels," the Global Carbon Project announced that fossil CO₂ emissions had climbed to 37.4 billion tonnes.

The regime produces agreements that describe ambition while carefully avoiding mechanisms that would enforce it. The central question is not why it fails but how it sustains the illusion of progress while systematically reproducing the conditions of its own inefficacy.

Why Nation States Cannot Move Faster

Gregory Unruh's concept of "carbon lock-in", first articulated in 2000, provides the foundation for understanding why decarbonization proceeds so slowly despite apparent economic and technological readiness. Industrial economies have been locked into fossil fuel-based energy systems through technological and institutional co-evolution driven by path-dependent increasing returns to scale. This creates what Unruh termed a "Techno-Institutional Complex" — a mutually reinforcing system of physical infrastructure, regulatory frameworks, and social practices that collectively resist displacement even when superior alternatives exist.

Seto et al. extended this analysis to identify three distinct forms: infrastructural lock-in from long-lived physical capital; institutional lock-in from regulatory frameworks and organizational inertia; and behavioral lock-in from consumer preferences shaped by fossil-based systems. The global energy system represents the largest network of infrastructure ever built, reflecting tens of trillions of dollars of assets and two centuries of technological evolution.

The Indian Case

India illustrates this dynamic with particular clarity. The country has achieved remarkable success by conventional metrics: it reached its Paris Agreement target of 50% non-fossil electricity capacity five years early, ranking fourth globally in cumulative renewable capacity. Solar tariffs have fallen 65% since 2014. Yet these gains are additive rather than substitutive. Coal still generates 75% of India's electricity, and the share has remained essentially constant even as renewable capacity has expanded.

The political economy of India's coal sector explains this paradox. Coal India Limited and its subsidiaries employ approximately 370,000 workers directly while supporting 310,000 pensioners. Beyond direct employment, more than 15 million people in coal mining districts derive earnings from coal or allied activities, with 70% of coal workers belonging to tribal communities working as informal daily wage laborers. The sector contributes over ₹70,000 crore annually to central and state governments.

This embeddedness constrains policy options regardless of stated climate ambitions. As of July 2025, approximately 27 gigawatts of coal capacity is under construction in India, with 92 gigawatts in pre-construction stages — far exceeding the 24 gigawatts contemplated under the National Electricity Plan for the entire 2027-2032 period. India has no national coal exit timeline. This isn't climate denial; it's a rational response to the political costs of transition where premature closure would generate mass unemployment, fiscal stress, and regional devastation.

India's Energy Paradox

Coal shares remain stable while the renewable percentage grows.

Security Over Climate

The second structural constraint is the subordination of environmental concerns to energy security in the strategic calculus of major powers. Climate change presents as a chronic, diffuse threat operating on decadal timescales; energy security presents as an existential, immediate concern with capacity for acute disruption. States systematically discount the future, and when forced to choose, they choose security.

Europe After Ukraine

Russia's invasion of Ukraine catalyzed the most dramatic reorientation of European energy policy since the 1970s oil crises. Prior to the war, Russia supplied over 40% of EU natural gas demand; within three years, the EU reduced the value of its energy imports from Russia by 80%. The REPowerEU plan committed Europe to phase out Russian fossil fuel imports entirely while accelerating the green transition.

Yet the framing is instructive. REPowerEU was articulated as an energy security response, not a climate initiative. The IEA observed that the biggest legacy of the crisis may be that it accelerates the end of the fossil fuel era — but immediately qualified this as security-driven rather than climate-motivated. Europe's scramble for LNG from the United States, Qatar, and elsewhere was not constrained by emissions considerations.

The Inflation Reduction Act: Climate as Permission Structure

The United States provides an even more revealing case. The IRA represents the most significant climate legislation in American history, allocating $369 billion for clean energy with projections suggesting it could reduce U.S. emissions by over 40% below 2005 levels by 2030. Yet the legislation's architecture reveals that climate served as the permission structure for industrial policy, not its primary motivation.

The IRA's domestic content requirements and "foreign entity of concern" provisions are explicitly designed to exclude Chinese products and rebuild American manufacturing capacity. China recognised this immediately, filing a WTO complaint in March 2024 alleging the provisions are discriminatory and threaten to undermine international climate cooperation. U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai responded by characterising the IRA as "a groundbreaking tool for the United States to seriously address the global climate crisis and invest in U.S. economic competitiveness" — notably conjoining climate and competitiveness as co-equal objectives.

The IRA passed not because American legislators suddenly embraced climate urgency, but because it could be framed as creating jobs, reshoring, and competition with China. This reveals an important truth: climate legislation at scale becomes possible when it aligns with security and industrial imperatives. The corollary is equally important: when climate objectives conflict with security priorities, security wins.

China's Dual Game

China occupies a unique position as simultaneously the world's largest emitter, largest clean energy investor, and largest exporter of coal infrastructure. In 2024, China accounted for 32% of global fossil CO₂ emissions—approximately 12 gigatonnes—while also dominating global production of solar cells (85%), lithium-ion batteries (75%), and critical minerals processing. This dual positioning isn't contradictory; it reflects a strategic approach that decarbonises domestically while exporting carbon-intensive development pathways via the Belt and Road Initiative.

Screenshot 2026-01-10 at 5.41.09 PM

Despite installing more renewable capacity than the rest of the world combined in recent years, China's emissions were projected to increase by 0.2% in 2024. The Chinese Communist Party's legitimacy rests substantially on economic growth delivery; constraining energy availability in pursuit of climate objectives presents political risks no leadership is willing to assume voluntarily.

Why the Paris Framework Cannot Work

The Paris Agreement's architecture embodies a fundamental contradiction: it demands symmetrical commitments from fundamentally asymmetrical economies. The "nationally determined contribution" structure was designed to avoid the collapse of prior approaches by allowing each nation to set its own targets. But this flexibility has produced a regime of voluntary pledges that no one enforces because no one can afford the political costs of enforcement.

The Historical Emissions Burden

As of 2023, the United States had emitted approximately 430 billion tonnes of cumulative CO₂ since industrialisation — roughly a quarter of all historical emissions and more than twice China's total. The European Union accounts for an additional 22%. By contrast, India — home to one-sixth of humanity — has contributed approximately 4% of cumulative emissions despite its current status as the third-largest annual emitter.

This historical imbalance creates a legitimate grievance. If the remaining carbon budget before breaching 1.5°C warming is distributed on a per-capita basis, the Global North has already consumed more than its fair share and is now asking developing nations to constrain their development to compensate for Northern excess.

The Finance Gap

COP29 concluded with a pledge of $300 billion per year in climate finance by 2035 — triple the previous $100 billion commitment but far short of the $1.3 trillion annually that developing nations argued they require. India alone estimates it needs $2.5 trillion to meet its existing NDC targets through 2030 and $673 billion in adaptation financing.

TERI characterized the COP29 outcome as "too little, and too long a duration," noting that "the planet needs solutions and not semantics, results and not rhetoric and above all trust rather than manipulation." India's environment ministry declared that the outcome "fails to address the urgency of the climate crisis and disregards the principles of fairness and inclusivity."

The combination of historical burden and finance failure produces a legitimacy crisis. Developing nations are asked to constrain their development pathways — accepting higher energy costs, forgoing industrialization strategies that proved effective for current advanced economies — in exchange for financial transfers that never materialize at promised scale.

Historical CO2 emissions by region

Historical CO2 emissions by region

Alternative Architectures

If the preceding analysis is correct, the question is not how to strengthen the existing regime but whether alternative governance architectures might prove more effective.

Plurilateral Climate Clubs abandon universalism for coalitions organized around shared economic interests. William Nordhaus proposed that small groups of committed nations could implement carbon pricing with border adjustment mechanisms creating incentives for others to join. The EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism represents an initial step — though it has generated controversy as potential green protectionism.

Sectoral Compacts focus on specific high-emitting sectors rather than economy-wide targets. Steel, cement, shipping, and aviation involve relatively concentrated sets of producers and face fewer coordination challenges than economy-wide decarbonization. The advantage is tractability: it's easier to monitor emissions from a thousand cement plants than from an entire economy.

Technology Transfer Mechanisms prioritize technology over targets. The International Solar Alliance, launched by India and France in 2015, provides a model for South-South technology cooperation. China's dominance in solar manufacturing and batteries creates an alternative supply chain that developing nations can access without Western intermediation.

Energy Security Integration accepts that security will always trump climate in state priorities and designs climate policy through the security logic rather than against it. The Wilson Center observed that the emerging energy security concept emphasizes "technology-based fixed assets" over physical resource control. Framing decarbonization as security enhancement rather than climate sacrifice may prove more politically viable than moral appeals.

So .. what?

The global climate regime is not failing; it's succeeding at what it was designed to do: manage expectations while preserving the fossil-based growth model. The regime processes demands for climate action, converts them into non-binding declarations and inadequate financial pledges, and provides a venue for repeated expressions of ambition that substitute for transformative change.

Real progress would require either structural transformation of the domestic political economies that lock in fossil dependence, or regime reconstitution around more realistic assumptions about state behavior. The former requires confronting powerful constituencies and accepting transition costs that no major government has proven willing to absorb. The latter requires abandoning the universalist pretensions of the UNFCCC framework for more targeted, enforceable arrangements among willing parties.

Neither path is easy. But continuing to pretend that the current regime can deliver transformative outcomes — that the gap between rhetoric and reality will close through incremental improvements in ambition language — serves no one's interests except those who benefit from delay. The climate crisis will not be solved by the conferences that invoke it. Acknowledging this is the first step toward governance that might actually work.