By – Siddarth Poola

Abstract:

Global climate governance is frequently framed as a cooperative, forward-looking project aimed at managing a shared planetary crisis. Yet beneath the language of sustainability, innovation, and market efficiency lies a set of arrangements that closely resemble older systems of domination. By tracing how environmental governance inherits colonial patterns of resource control, legal asymmetry, and economic dependency, the article reframes climate change not only as an ecological crisis but as a political one rooted in unequal power.

Introduction

Climate governance is routinely presented as a neutral, cooperative exercise in managing a shared planetary emergency, guided by technical expertise and economic rationality. In practice, however, the institutions and mechanisms through which climate action is pursued reflect long-standing asymmetries in power, wealth, and decision-making authority. Market-based tools such as carbon trading, offsets, and climate finance are defended as pragmatic responses to political and economic constraints, and there are coherent reasons for their adoption. Yet their operation has tended to prioritise flexibility for high-emitting states and corporations while relocating the social and ecological costs of adjustment to regions with less influence over rule-making. The result is a system in which responsibility travels more easily than emissions, environmental protection is mediated through financial instruments, and historical patterns of resource control reappear in modern, carefully technocratic form.

Outsourcing Responsibility: When Emissions Travel Better Than People

One of the quieter achievements of contemporary climate governance is how efficiently responsibility has been made mobile. Greenhouse gases are global, but accountability is not. Industrialised states have perfected a system in which the obligation to reduce emissions is increasingly displaced rather than fulfilled. Carbon markets, offset arrangements, and “flexibility mechanisms” allow emissions-intensive economies to continue production while purchasing reductions elsewhere, usually in regions with lower political leverage and cheaper land.

The historical context matters. The United States and Europe together account for a disproportionate share of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions since the Industrial Revolution. According to data compiled by Our World in Data, the U.S. alone is responsible for roughly a quarter of historical CO₂ emissions, despite representing a small fraction of the global population. This accumulated atmospheric occupation is not erased by recent pledges or accounting innovations. Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries, which means historical emissions are not a moral footnote but a physical reality.

Yet contemporary climate policy often treats emissions as interchangeable units detached from history. A tonne reduced in one location is framed as equivalent to a tonne emitted elsewhere, regardless of who emitted it, why, or under what conditions. This abstraction is convenient. It allows high-income countries to claim progress without materially altering consumption patterns or energy systems. The social and ecological costs of adjustment are relocated to regions already facing climate vulnerability, weak regulatory enforcement, and legacies of land dispossession.

Offset projects illustrate this pattern clearly. Forest conservation initiatives in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia are routinely packaged as mitigation tools for corporations headquartered thousands of kilometres away. Additionally, the idea that emissions reductions would not have occurred without the project remains notoriously difficult to prove. Still, credits are issued, sold, and retired, allowing emissions elsewhere to continue with a clean balance sheet.

The effect is not accidental. These mechanisms align neatly with the interests of states and firms seeking minimal disruption. Structural transformation is expensive and politically risky. Purchasing credits is cheaper and comes with the added benefit of reputational insulation. Climate responsibility, in this framework, becomes something that can be subcontracted.

Green Markets, Old Hierarchies: The Financialisation of the Atmosphere

The rapid expansion of carbon pricing and emissions trading regimes reflects a conscious policy choice rather than an accidental turn toward markets. These mechanisms emerged in response to a recurring constraint in climate governance: the difficulty of imposing uniform emissions limits across economies with vastly different levels of industrialisation, energy dependence, and political tolerance for disruption. By allowing emissions reductions to occur where they are cheapest, carbon markets are intended to reduce overall compliance costs and make climate commitments more politically feasible. In theory, flexibility is not a loophole but a feature.

Measured in financial terms, this approach appears substantial. According to the World Bank, global carbon pricing instruments generated over USD 90 billion in revenue in recent years. This figure is frequently cited as evidence of momentum and scale. Less frequently discussed is what this revenue actually does, who controls its allocation, and which regulatory alternatives are quietly set aside once markets take centre stage.

Carbon markets operate within global financial systems that already reflect uneven access to capital, technical expertise, and bargaining power. Large corporations and financial intermediaries are generally better positioned to navigate these systems, particularly where participation depends on familiarity with complex verification methodologies, registry rules, and contract structures. These arrangements are formally open, but the learning curve is steep and the margins for error are thin. As a result, flexibility, the supposed great equaliser, tends to work more smoothly for actors who can afford teams of consultants to interpret it.

For corporations, carbon markets also function as instruments of strategic positioning. Rather than committing to near-term reductions in production or fossil fuel use, firms can outline net-zero trajectories built around future offset purchases, anticipated technological advances, or nature-based mitigation projects. Assessments of corporate climate commitments by independent research organisations and financial regulators, comparing stated targets against disclosed emissions inventories and capital expenditure patterns, consistently show that many net-zero pledges rely heavily on offsets rather than absolute emissions cuts. Ambition, at least on paper, remains intact. Day-to-day production patterns, less so.

This pattern is not best understood as a collection of individual corporate failures, even if it does occasionally test one’s patience. It reflects a regulatory environment that prioritises market compatibility over enforceable limits on extraction and production. Fossil fuel subsidies continue at scale, amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars annually when both direct and indirect support is included. At the same time, firms are encouraged to participate in voluntary carbon markets and disclosure initiatives that allow them to signal climate leadership. These two policy tracks coexist with surprisingly little discomfort, suggesting that the preference for continuity is doing a lot of quiet work.

Meanwhile, the communities hosting offset and mitigation projects absorb a disproportionate share of the risk. When carbon prices fluctuate, methodologies are revised, or projects are deemed non-compliant, local livelihoods are often the first to feel the effects. Environmental benefits may be abstracted into tradable units, but land, water, and social relations remain firmly local. The atmosphere may travel well across markets and borders. The consequences, less so.

Who Pays for Repair: Climate Finance, Loss, and the Politics of Delay

Climate finance is frequently presented as the corrective mechanism that balances historical inequities. Wealthy countries pledge funds to support mitigation and adaptation in lower-income regions, ostensibly recognising differentiated responsibility. In practice, this promise has been unevenly fulfilled. The long-standing commitment by developed countries to mobilise USD 100 billion annually was met only after significant delay and creative accounting.

The creativity turns the funds into loans rather than grants, which turns climate finance into a revenue stream and also increases the financial burden on fiscally strained economies.

 Adaptation and damage funding, which address climate impacts that cannot be avoided, receive far less attention than mitigation projects that can attract private investment. From a financial perspective? this makes sense. From a climate security perspective? It doesn’t do much.

The emerging architecture around loss and damage illustrates the tension. Acknowledging irreversible harm implies responsibility. Responsibility raises uncomfortable questions about compensation, liability, and reparations. Unsurprisingly, progress in this area has been slow, cautious, and heavily qualified. Wealthy states express concern about “liability exposure,” as though the climate crisis were an unforeseen inconvenience rather than the predictable outcome of centuries of industrial expansion.

Corporations occupy a similar position. Research has shown that a small number of fossil fuel producers are linked to a large share of historical emissions. Yet regulatory responses continue to focus on consumer behaviour, lifestyle adjustments, and voluntary corporate disclosure. Structural accountability remains elusive. It is easier to ask individuals to recycle than to regulate extraction.

The result is a climate response that manages symptoms while preserving underlying hierarchies. Those with the least responsibility are asked to adapt fastest. Those with the greatest capacity to pay negotiate timelines, offsets, and exemptions. The language of partnership masks a persistent imbalance in who decides, who benefits, and who absorbs loss.

Conclusion

What emerges from this landscape is not a failure of climate policy, but a particular kind of success. Emissions reductions are discussed, traded, and reported. Markets expand. Pledges proliferate. Meanwhile, atmospheric concentrations continue to rise, and climate impacts intensify in regions least equipped to absorb them.

The problem is not that climate governance lacks sophistication. It has plenty. The problem is that sophistication has been deployed to manage responsibility rather than confront it. By translating ecological harm into financial instruments, the system allows those who benefited most from fossil-driven growth to delay transformation while appearing engaged.

Addressing climate change under these conditions requires more than better metrics or larger markets. It requires political decisions that disrupt comfort: binding limits on extraction, redistribution of resources without debt, and genuine recognition of historical responsibility. Without this shift, climate policy risks becoming a refined mechanism for preserving inequality under environmental cover.

The crisis is planetary, but the escape routes remain carefully reserved.

About the Author:
I’m Siddarth Poola, an undergraduate student doing law in Jindal Global Law School, with a deep interest in Water Sports and Sports Law.

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