COP30 will produce nothing realistic to address a development, climate Ponzi scheme forced on the weak by the strong.
This chart reveals some stark realities about the link between development and carbon. It plots excess CO₂ consumption against GDP per capita, measuring each nation against a fair per-capita carbon allocation. Consumption-based accounting attributes the carbon from manufacturing to the country that buys the goods, not where they’re produced—revealing the true carbon costs of wealthy nations’ consumption patterns. The “fair” CO₂ allocation is based on a distribution of the global carbon sink—the biosphere’s capacity to absorb CO₂ annually. It has a finite budget, and the red lines show what a fair per-capita share of that budget would be for each country.
Every wealthy country is in the upper right quadrant. They are well above the red-line, consuming well beyond their climate share. The relationship is stark: a consequence of the current development strategies rely on generating CO₂. The highest GDP per capita achieved by any country without exceeding the fair CO₂ allocation is $16,000 by Costa Rica.
China, for its modest GDP per capita of $19,000 sits above the 75th percentile. That is, it is an inefficient producer of wealth for every tonne of carbon burnt—and this is after the carbon from exports is removed from the books. India under-consumes relative to its wealth as do Brazil and Colombia.
Norway achieves high GDP per capita whilst remaining near zero and Qatar achieves an enormous GDP per capita while sitting on the 25th percentile. These apparent climate successes hide structural problems: as energy exporters, they offload carbon costs to importing nations through consumption-based accounting. This isn’t a weakness of consumption-based accounting but it shows the fragility of the carbon exporting economies in the face of real commitments to reduce carbon emissions.
City-states like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malta sit well above the 75th percentiles relative to their GDPs per capita, their high consumption reflecting imported goods produced elsewhere.
The difficulty deepens when we examine the geopolitics of the energy transition. We have a global development strategy that is almost entirely tied to carbon. Wealthy nations continue to burn carbon whilst promising to “decouple” growth from emissions. The promise is that green energy will save us, without us ever having to compromise on our expectations of wealth. The levels of solar-panel and wind-turbine manufacturing required to reduce emissions (not just growth in emissions) are staggering. Every one is looking to China—a single point of failure and an aggressive geopolitical force that (like all powers) will exploit it’s advantage—without credible alternatives. The world’s decarbonisation strategy implicitly assumes that China will continue to expand manufacturing of clean-tech materials at stable prices, and it will do this without entangling its dominance in geopolitical leverage. This is implausible. It is also historically unprecedented to have the world’s future energy system hinge on one state’s industrial capacity and beneficence. That single point of failure will endanger the entire project.
Addressing climate change requires “giving up”. It requires wealthy countries give up on their expectations of continued privilege and comfort at the expense of poorer nations. Poorer nations need to give up their expectations of ever achieving current wealthy nations’ standards of living. Finally, powerful countries need to give up on using climate as a geopolitical pawn in the search for national, strategic advantage.
My argument is, empirically, in the right direction and politically unpalatable. No political system—authoritarian, democratic, or otherwise—has shown willingness to articulate a program of “giving up”. As a consequence, we are sold a vision of techno-optimism that preserves the narrative of growth without sacrifice.
As soon as the bubble of that narrative if burst and becomes a more realistic narrative of growth versus sacrifice, it becomes abundantly clear that the powerful intend to sacrifice the weak.
The logic of the present system leaves no room for a fair transition. The global economy is built on the extraction of ecological capacity from the many to sustain the consumption of the few. The COP process, for all its technical ambition, is designed to protect that hierarchy, not dismantle it. It offers the appearance of collective action while ensuring that no high-income state is required to reduce consumption to anything approaching its fair share, and no low-income state is allowed to question the model it is expected to follow.
Once the comforting fiction of green, painless growth gives way, the reality becomes clear. The world is not preparing for shared sacrifice but for selective survival. The strong will preserve their position by externalising the costs of climate stabilisation onto the weak, whether through border adjustments, constrained development pathways, or the quiet abandonment of nations deemed geopolitically expendable. Under current structures, the future is not collective sacrifice but a brutal form of triage in which the most vulnerable are forced into destructive competition, fighting for space in a system designed to abandon them.
The data for the graph were from the Our World in Data (OWD) CO2 dataset. The graph and the analytic approach is not OWD’s nor endorsed by them. The arguments and conclusion are mine.