This section builds on analysis first presented in The Geopolitics of Clean Energy Supply Chains, produced ahead of COP27. The argument has only sharpened since.
The International Energy Agency—not a radical publication, not a BRICS-aligned institution, but the West’s own primary energy intelligence body—documented the problem precisely in its 2022 special report on critical minerals. The numbers are not ambiguous.
A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car. An onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired power plant. Since 2010, the average mineral intensity per unit of new power generation capacity has increased by 50% as renewables’ share has risen.[1,2]IEA (2022). The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions, pp. 5–6.
6×More mineral inputs in an EV vs conventional car
9×More minerals in onshore wind vs gas power plant
40×Growth in lithium demand by 2040 under Paris-aligned scenario
In a scenario consistent with Paris Agreement goals, clean energy technologies’ share of total mineral demand rises to over 40% for copper and rare earth elements, 60–70% for nickel and cobalt, and nearly 90% for lithium by 2040.[3]IEA (2022), p. 8. Sustainable Development Scenario figures.
Now look at who controls the supply of those minerals—at extraction, and then at processing. China’s share of global rare earth element processing sits at approximately 90%. Lithium refining: 50–70%. Cobalt refining: 50–70%. Nickel refining: 35%.[4]IEA (2022), p. 12. For the top three producing nations, the combined share exceeds three-quarters in every case.[5]IEA (2022), p. 11. Chinese companies have extended this through overseas investment in Australian, Chilean, Congolese, and Indonesian mining assets—meaning supply chains nominally routed through non-Chinese jurisdictions still pass through Chinese processing.[6]IEA (2022), p. 12.
Extraction is distributed across the Global South. Processing is Chinese. The dependency doesn’t end—it relocates.
Every solar panel, every wind turbine, every battery storage system, every grid inverter in the Western energy transition runs through a supply chain where China is the dominant processor at every non-retail node. Huawei and Sungrow lead inverter markets. CATL and BYD lead battery manufacturing. The rare earth permanent magnets in wind turbines and EV motors are processed in China regardless of where the raw ore originates.
This is not a transitional problem awaiting Western industrial policy solutions. New mining projects take an average of over 16 years from discovery to first production.[7]IEA (2022), p. 12. Ore quality in Chilean copper regions has declined 30% in 15 years.[8]IEA (2022), p. 12. The IEA estimates recycling reduces primary battery mineral requirements by only around 10% by 2040.[9]IEA (2022), p. 15. The West does not control the renewable energy supply chain. It controls retail consumption of its output.
Understanding who built the Net Zero framework—and why—requires looking past the climate science, which is legitimate, to the institutional architecture constructed around it, which serves different interests. The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, launched at COP26 in 2021 under Mark Carney’s stewardship, assembled over $130 trillion in assets under management committed to net zero portfolios.[11]GFANZ Progress Report (2021). The Network for Greening the Financial System—NGFS—links over 130 central banks and financial supervisors.[12]NGFS Membership exceeded 130 as of 2024. The EU’s Emissions Trading System is the world’s largest carbon market.[13]European Commission (2023). EU ETS. The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism—CBAM—extends that pricing architecture to imports, making European carbon pricing a border tax on trading partners.[14]European Commission (2023). CBAM.
The Coalition
Western asset managers who need new asset classes as traditional fixed income yields compress. Multilateral institutions seeking policy relevance as the Washington Consensus exhausts itself. Establishment liberals for whom climate has become the primary legitimating ideology of internationalist governance. The institutional architecture built around that concern creates a pricing layer over the energy transition where Western institutions are the rule-setters, the validators, the arbiters, and the fee-collectors.
The Anglo-American conservative coalition’s alignment with Big Oil is not a recent development. It runs through the Republican Party’s donor base, the UK Conservative Party’s historic ties to North Sea producers, and decades of petro-state relationship management from Riyadh to Caracas. The political consequence has been to make fossil fuel defense a tribal conservative marker and fossil fuel opposition a tribal liberal one. That sorting has been strategically catastrophic for Western liberal institutions in ways they have not fully processed.
By making renewables the ideological terrain of establishment liberalism, the Big Oil–conservative alignment handed China—which has no particular ideological investment in either side of this debate and simply executed an industrial policy—dominant market share over the infrastructure that Western liberals are now politically committed to building at scale. The Inflation Reduction Act, the EU Green Deal, the UK’s net zero legislation: these are all mandatory demand commitments for products whose supply chains China controls.
China didn’t need to lobby for this outcome. The domestic political sorting of the Western fossil fuel debate delivered it.
Here the logic becomes legible. If Western institutions cannot be price makers in oil—OPEC-plus controls that—and cannot be price makers in the renewable energy supply chain—China controls that—there is one remaining play: construct a pricing layer on top of physical reality and make Western institutions the architects of that layer. This is what carbon markets are. Not primarily a climate instrument—the emissions reductions achieved through carbon trading are structurally modest and methodologically contested—but a jurisdiction play.
The structural flaw is the same one that has plagued TRIPS—the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights—in the Global South: the legal fiction requires universal or near-universal compliance to function as a pricing mechanism. The moment significant economic actors—China, India, Brazil, the broader Global South—participate selectively on their own terms, the carbon price becomes a tax on compliance with Western institutional rules rather than a genuine market signal.
Carbon credits are not oil. A barrel of Brent crude has intrinsic exchange value because combustion is a physical process that happens regardless of legal frameworks. A carbon credit’s value is entirely contingent on the enforcement architecture—remove the institutional substrate and the credit is worth exactly nothing, because there is no underlying physical scarcity it represents.
The Conference of the Parties was originally designed to translate scientific consensus—developed through the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—into binding policy commitments with enforcement mechanisms. Kyoto had binding targets, differentiated responsibilities, and compliance procedures. What COP has become is a deal-making forum for carbon market architecture and climate finance pledging. The IPCC produces assessments. COP produces financial instruments. The link between them is rhetorical rather than mechanical.
The trajectory is visible in the venue choices. COP28 in the UAE. COP29 in Azerbaijan. COP30 in Brazil.[17]UNFCCC. Conference of the Parties — Sessions. The UAE’s COP28 presidency was held by Sultan Al Jaber, who simultaneously ran ADNOC, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company—confirmed as “the first CEO to ever serve as COP President.”[18]Al Arabiya (2023); leaked documents showing Al Jaber used COP28 bilateral meetings to pursue ADNOC oil deals.
A carbon market architecture that requires Global South participation to function as a global pricing mechanism is being built on the wreckage of a financial commitment framework the Global South has documented as systematically dishonored.
The Miliband formulation from the UK energy secretary is correct as far as it goes: Britain is a price taker in fossil fuel markets and needs to become a price maker through domestic renewable buildout.[27]UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, BBC interview, March 2026. But the analysis stops precisely where it becomes uncomfortable. Domestic renewable buildout requires components sourced through Chinese supply chains at prices set by Chinese manufacturers. The price-taker problem transfers from oil markets to renewable supply chain markets. The dependency doesn’t end—it relocates.
The capital required to reshore rare earth processing, battery manufacturing, and solar panel production from scratch—against Chinese producers who have spent two decades optimizing at scale with state support—is not available within existing fiscal frameworks without either crowding out other spending or monetizing debt in ways that create their own instability. Meanwhile, the electricity demand reductions that would reduce supply chain dependency are political non-starters. Industrial electrification, EV mandates, heat pump requirements—these increase electricity demand, not reduce it. Carbon markets, in this context, are what Western institutions reach for when the real solutions are unavailable within existing political and fiscal constraints.
The pattern running from Venezuela through Cuba to Iran is not, on examination, primarily a democracy promotion or human rights project. It is a systematic attempt to control oil access to China’s economy. Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves and is a major historical supplier to Chinese refiners. Iran, before sanctions, was a significant oil exporter to China and a critical node in Chinese Belt and Road positioning. Targeting these through maximum pressure—sanctions, regime change attempts, military operations—follows the logic of oil access strangulation directed at constraining Chinese economic growth.
On the Record — Iranian FM Araghchi, CBS Face the Nation, 15 March 2026
“We were talking with them when they decided to attack us, and that was for the second time.”[22]CBS News (2026, March 15). Face the Nation transcript. The 440 kilograms of 60%-enriched uranium—the stated casus belli—is now buried under rubble. “There is the possibility to retrieve them, but under the supervision of the agency. For the time being, we have no program, we have no plan to recover them.”[21]Ibid.
The Omani Channel — Compliance as No Defence
Oman had negotiated the specific deal: Iranian enriched uranium downgraded, possibly moved outside Iran, within hours of the attacks beginning. The Omanis are not furious in the abstract. They are furious because they were the mechanism through which the stated casus belli—the 440 kilograms of 60%-enriched uranium—was about to be resolved through the Western rules-based procedure, and the war started anyway.[29]BBC News (2026, March 14). Frank Gardner analysis. youtube.com/watch?v=bS1OKLVpcCI
Araghchi’s statement is precise: “We were talking with them when they decided to attack us, and that was for the second time.” Twice. Iran was in active compliance with the IAEA-mediated framework—the institutional architecture that the West itself designed—and was attacked while complying. The lesson being absorbed across the Global South is not that American foreign policy is unpredictable. It is that compliance with Western institutional frameworks does not protect you from Western coercion.
That lesson is the accelerant. Every government in Lagos, Nairobi, Jakarta, and Brasília evaluating whether to participate in European carbon market architecture, European climate finance frameworks, or any other Western rules-based institutional proposal is now processing the same data point: a state that was complying with the Western-designed procedure was attacked by the West’s leading power while complying. The distinction between “American rules” and “European rules” dissolves when the demonstrated outcome is identical—compliance does not confer protection.
The BBC’s Frank Gardner—the corporation’s security correspondent—has named the category error on mainstream broadcast: “Wrong to see this in terms of number of targets hit, number of commanders eliminated—that’s the same mistake the US made in Vietnam.”[29]Ibid. The metric is survivability. Iran wins by still existing. Every Pentagon briefing that leads with strikes conducted and commanders eliminated is performing the same error that produced a decade of optimistic Vietnam progress reports.
The operational consequences are already materializing. Britain sent home HMS Middleton—its last mine countermeasure vessel in the region—days before the conflict escalated. Trump asked Britain not to send ships, declared victory, then within 24 hours asked Britain to send ships to deal with the mine threat Iran had deployed across the Strait. Britain has nothing to send.[29]Ibid. The allies who were told to stand down don’t have the specific assets needed for the specific problem that emerged.
Europe’s response is already visible: bilateral trade agreements with Global South partners designed to route around US-imposed conditions, accelerated engagement with Gulf states, and public diplomatic positioning that explicitly distances European foreign policy from American military action. But the European assumption—that this distancing buys credibility for European-led institutional frameworks—is wrong, because the distancing is performative. Europe remains structurally embedded in the very framework attacking Iran: through NATO membership, through bilateral defence agreements with Israel, through providing Israel diplomatic cover in international venues including the UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice. European governments are simultaneously claiming distance from American military action and participating in the institutional architecture that enables it. The Global South can see both things at the same time.
From the Global South’s perspective, the distinction between American and European Western institutions is far less meaningful than Europeans think. It was European-led institutions that made and failed to deliver the $100 billion climate finance pledge at Copenhagen. It is European-hosted COP processes that have produced the outcomes Global South negotiators called “insulting.” The EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism is experienced in Lagos, Nairobi, and Jakarta not as climate policy but as a European border tax on developing-country exports. And now the Iran precedent demonstrates that compliance with Western rules-based procedures—the IAEA framework is a European-American co-production—does not prevent Western military action against compliant states. The Global South’s documented distrust is of Western institutional frameworks as a category.
This is the structural vulnerability of the carbon market pricing play: the legal fiction of global carbon pricing requires buy-in from precisely the actors who have now watched compliance with one Western rules-based framework offer no protection from coercion under another. The Iran war doesn’t create the credibility deficit. It makes it undeniable.
The G20 that convened in South Africa in 2025—without the United States present at the critical sessions—was not an anomaly. It was a data point in a trajectory.[28]G20 South Africa (2025). g20.org The organizational logic of BRICS+—the expanded bloc incorporating Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and a growing cohort of aligned economies—is precisely the construction of a parallel institutional infrastructure for trade, finance, and pricing that doesn’t require Western institutional participation to function.
The leverage is structural and immediate. BRICS members collectively hold dominant positions in the mineral supply chains the Western energy transition requires. China processes the inputs. Russia supplies energy to European and Asian markets that cannot be replaced on short notice. Brazil holds agricultural and mineral resources that global supply chains depend on. South Africa sits at the center of the African critical minerals geography that every Western green industrial policy identifies as essential for supply chain diversification. The leverage differential is not ambiguous.
For southern Africa specifically, the moment represents a rare structural opportunity. The continent holds critical mineral deposits that both Western and Chinese industrial strategies require. It sits outside the direct military theater of the Iran conflict. The AGOA framework—the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which has structured US-Africa trade preferences for over two decades—is under stress. The energy infrastructure deficit is simultaneously the problem and the optionality: distributed renewable buildout, anchored in African institutional frameworks rather than Western carbon market compliance architectures, is precisely the kind of sovereign positioning that the current moment makes legible.
The actors who will set the terms of the next energy order are those who control the physical asset layer. That is not the West.
The carbon market architecture being constructed in Brussels and Washington is an attempt to solve a pricing power problem that Western institutions created for themselves by losing the supply chain competition before most policymakers realized it was happening. It is a sophisticated instrument built on a legal fiction that requires global institutional buy-in. That buy-in is not being withheld because the Global South doubts the climate science. It is being withheld because the Global South has a documented, empirical record of Western institutional promises—European and American alike—that were made and not honored, made and delivered late, made and delivered with conditions that served the creditors rather than the recipients. Carbon markets are the latest entry in that ledger, and they arrive at a moment when the credibility deficit has become the organizing framework through which every subsequent Western institutional proposal is evaluated.
The question for every other actor is whether to integrate into the Western legal fiction on Western terms, integrate into the Chinese physical supply chain on Chinese terms, or build sufficient institutional autonomy to negotiate both from a position that is neither captive. That third position is harder to build and easier to lose. But it is the only one that constitutes genuine sovereignty in the emerging order.
