It deserves a moment's reflection, because it helps to understand why the argument has the effect it has in Delhi, Jakarta or Lagos. Britain, Germany and the United States industrialised over nearly 200 years with few limits on emissions, and emerged prosperous.Britain, Germany and the United States industrialised over a period of nearly 200 years, burning their way to prosperity practically without any constraints on emissions.

India, Vietnam, Nigeria, and dozens of other economies are being promised two or three decades to take the first group's entire track to be compressed.India, Vietnam, Nigeria, and dozens of other economies are being told to do that same journey in two or three decades with emissions ceilings that were not established when the first group was constructing steel mills and rail lines. Kant referred to this as the two sides of the same injustice: being exposed differently to the harm climate change inflicts and being burdened differently with the costs of the remedy. They take the brunt of physical damage, primarily in low-lying deltas and small island states as well as in communities dependent on the farming of dry regions, while contributing the least carbon to the atmosphere. Then these same communities have to pay a portion of the transition bill too.

The dollars in that case are backed by facts with a few that aren't pretty. However, OECD data shows that developed countries did, indeed, reach the 100 billion dollar per year target for climate finance in 2023 and 2024, with the total amount of climate finance received in 2024 coming in at approximately 137 billion dollars. Climate change's true annual cost to developing economies is estimated at between 215 billion and 387 billion dollars for mitigation and adaptation without even taking loss and damage into account.

Loss and damage the funding for what can no longer be avoided is a more powerful story. By mid-2025, the dedicated fund agreed in 2023 and opened in 2023 had only collected $768m in pledges, compared with estimates of annual damage expected from disasters for developing countries between $447bn and $894bn by the end of the decade, and the slow onset damage of glacier loss, desert creep and rising seas costing developing countries $124bn a year by the end of the decade. At pledge levels so far, the facility could be emptied by 2027, even before it has finished its first round of payouts, according to fund administrators this year.

But the argument doesn't just address finance ministries anymore, it addresses mine shafts, and that's Kant's second point, with minerals. Copper, lithium, cobalt, the ingredients of the clean energy economy, are highly geographically concentrated. The cobalt found in the DRC makes up nearly 70% of the world's mined cobalt, a key ingredient in most lithium-ion batteries that cannot be stabilised without it. The prices for cobalt have already risen by more than seventy per cent since mid-2025, and by more than 160 per cent since the beginning of the year, thanks to export quotas imposed by the city of Kinshasa, which only allow about 96,600 tonnes of the metal to leave the country this year, half of the amount of 2024.

The vast majority of the price hike goes to the artisanal miners and communities around the pits; it's captured further up the chain, mainly by the refiners. In the end, Chinese companies account for an estimated 80 percent of the industrial cobalt production in the DRC, and about three-quarters of the world's cobalt refining capacity, so the metal extracted from Congolese soil comes back to global carmakers as a finished, high-margin battery chemical, while the extraction economy bears the environmental and social burden: displaced farmland, polluted water tables, child labour scandals that appear occasionally and then disappear.

The DRC's mining industry is already generating nearly 10% of the nation's GDP, and projected to generate 123 billion dollars this year as a result of the copper and cobalt exports real growth, but the growth on the same extractive logic on which colonial economies are founded, with an electric car as the end of the supply chain rather than a steam engine.

This is not a plea against the energy transition even Kant was careful to put urgency and fairness together, not against. But it's also an argument against people thinking of the transition as a tech issue with a tech solution, as it is also a distribution issue over who takes the risk, who gets the value, and who gets the bill twice: once for the damage, and then again for the cure. As Kant said, courts can't construct power grids or negotiate a finance package.

What they can do and what India's environmental jurisprudence, which has tended to read climate protection into the constitutional right to life, has increasingly striven to do, is to not let the question be someone else's problem. The question hanging over every summit statement on the topic is whether that judicial pressure will lead to more equitable apportionment of the bill, at COP forums or in mineral-supply contracts.

The second half of Kant's argument is how the value of the mineral gets captured: Congo mines almost three-quarters of the world's cobalt, but refines almost none of it, and the country with the mine is often not the one pricing the battery.