Who’s the Protectionist? BRICS, Washington, and the EU’s Carbon Border Tax

Executive Summary. At the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi on 12–21 September 2026, the bloc’s New Delhi Declaration explicitly named the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) as an example of “unilateral, punitive, discriminatory and protectionist” trade measures — the first time a BRICS leaders’ declaration had targeted CBAM by implication this directly. The language echoed, almost verbatim, a BRICS environment ministers’ statement issued a month earlier. What complicates the Global South-solidarity framing of this moment is that the United States’ own ambassador to the EU had made a strikingly similar “protectionism” accusation against CBAM one month before that, for reasons that have nothing to do with developing-country equity. This brief treats the resulting three-way dispute — BRICS, Washington, and Brussels — as a test of how far rhetorical convergence travels before the underlying interests diverge.

Key Findings

• The New Delhi Declaration, adopted at the 18th BRICS Summit (12–13 September 2026), states that members “oppose unilateral, punitive, discriminatory and protectionist measures that are not in line with international law” and raises concern that such measures “undermine efforts by countries, specifically the developing countries,” on climate adaptation and resilience — language multiple outlets read as targeting the EU’s CBAM, though the declaration itself does not name the EU directly.¹
• This builds on an 18 August 2026 statement by BRICS environment ministers (India, China, Russia, South Africa, Brazil among them) that used nearly identical wording — “unilateral, punitive, discriminatory and protectionist” — to describe the EU carbon levy by name, a month before the leaders’ declaration.²
• Separately, and for different reasons, US Ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder wrote in the Financial Times on 12 August 2026 that CBAM “differs in form but not in substance” from protectionism, comparing it to US Section 232 tariffs and accusing Brussels of a “striking double standard” — a critique issued six days before the BRICS ministers’ statement and from a government simultaneously defending its own tariff regime.³
• The European Commission rejected both lines of criticism on 13 August 2026, stating CBAM is not a tariff but a climate tool applied equally to all third countries based on verified embedded emissions, WTO-compatible, and structured so that carbon prices already paid abroad are deducted to avoid double payment.³
• No source reviewed for this brief quantifies the actual cost of CBAM to Global South exporters; the only hard figure available is the EU’s own projected CBAM revenue of roughly €10 billion per year once fully phased in by 2030, which measures EU budget income, not exporter cost, while claims from India, South Africa, and China about higher steel and aluminum costs remain unquantified in the reporting located.&sup4;

Problem Statement

GDCI’s governance pillar asks whether claims of Global South coordination reflect a genuinely shared civilizational-economic position or a convergence of separately motivated grievances that happen to use the same vocabulary. The BRICS-CBAM episode is a clean test case: BRICS frames its objection in terms of developing-country climate equity and policy space, while the US ambassador’s objection is explicitly about defending Washington’s own tariff measures from the charge of protectionism by relabeling CBAM as equivalent. Treating these as one unified “anti-CBAM coalition” would overstate the coherence of the opposition; treating them as wholly unrelated would miss that both now supply rhetorical cover for the other, regardless of intent.

Evidence & Analysis

The textual overlap between the BRICS environment ministers’ 18 August statement and the New Delhi Declaration issued a month later is close enough to read as a deliberate, sustained position rather than one-off language: both describe the measure as “unilateral, punitive, discriminatory and protectionist,” and the declaration’s additional clause about undermining developing countries’ climate adaptation capacity extends rather than revises the ministerial framing.¹² This is consistent with a coordinated BRICS negotiating position built over the northern-hemisphere summer of 2026, not an improvised leaders’-summit talking point.

The US ambassador’s intervention sits in a different register entirely. Puzder’s op-ed was not concerned with developing-country equity; it was a direct rebuttal to EU criticism of US Section 232 tariffs, built on the claim that CBAM is functionally the same instrument Brussels condemns when Washington uses it.³ The European Commission’s rebuttal to both critiques rests on the same distinction in both directions: CBAM, it says, applies a carbon price “equally to all third countries based on verified embedded emissions” rather than discriminating by origin or using tariff-style discretion, and it is structured to credit carbon prices already paid elsewhere — a design feature neither the BRICS declaration nor the US ambassador’s op-ed directly disputes on the record reviewed for this brief.³ Whether that design in practice protects developing exporters as intended, given that EU carbon allowance prices (assessed at roughly €81.91 per tonne for December 2026 contracts) run close to triple the roughly $33.42 per tonne assessed for California’s comparable December 2026 allowances, is a quantitative question this brief’s sourcing cannot resolve; a large compliance-cost gap between carbon-pricing jurisdictions is evidence of a real asymmetry, not by itself evidence that the mechanism is discriminatory in the WTO-law sense BRICS and the US ambassador both invoke.³

A further tension sits inside the BRICS position itself rather than between BRICS and its critics. The New Delhi Declaration calls for restoring the WTO’s two-tier dispute settlement system and filling vacancies on the Appellate Body as the legitimate venue for resolving exactly this kind of trade dispute — yet the Appellate Body has been non-functional since 2019, when the United States blocked new appointments, and the declaration’s own sourcing does not indicate that blockage has been resolved.&sup5; Russia separately filed a WTO dispute against CBAM and the EU’s Emissions Trading System in 2025, calling them discriminatory, but with the Appellate Body unable to hear appeals, that complaint has no functioning adjudicative endpoint as things currently stand — a structural gap this brief flags rather than assumes will be resolved by the declaration’s own restoration request.&sup5;

Policy Implications

Coverage that treats “BRICS and the US both call CBAM protectionist” as evidence of an emerging anti-CBAM consensus risks collapsing two arguments with incompatible premises into one. For monitoring purposes, GDCI should track the BRICS and US positions as separate claims that currently share a label, not a converging coalition, until and unless a concrete joint action (a coordinated WTO filing, a negotiating bloc, a specific carve-out proposal) demonstrates otherwise.

Recommendations

1. GDCI’s Source Monitoring List should track the BRICS Carbon Markets Partnership and any further BRICS environment-ministerial statements on CBAM as a distinct, evolving institutional position, separate from the US ambassador’s criticism, given their documented difference in motivation and audience.
2. Future GDCI coverage of CBAM’s distributional impact should seek a quantified, independent estimate of the cost to Global South exporters specifically, since no source reviewed for this brief supplied one; the EU’s own €10 billion revenue projection measures EU budget income and should not be cited as a proxy for exporter cost.
3. GDCI should monitor whether the WTO Appellate Body vacancy crisis is resolved, since BRICS’s own proposed remedy for CBAM-style disputes depends on a dispute-settlement mechanism that has been non-functional since 2019.

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Sources

1. 18th BRICS Summit, New Delhi Declaration, 12–13 September 2026, as reported in Business Standard, “Brics’ Delhi Declaration opposes unilateral trade measures, flags CBAM,” 12 September 2026, https://www.business-standard.com/industry/news/brics-delhi-declaration-opposes-unilateral-trade-measures-flags-cbam-126091200829_1.html; and Onmanorama, “Tariffs, CBAM, WTO reform: The big takeaways from BRICS summit,” 12 September 2026, https://www.onmanorama.com/news/india/2026/09/12/tariffs-cbam-wto-reform-big-takeaways-from-brics-summit.html.
2. EUobserver, “BRICS countries condemn EU carbon tax as punitive and protectionist,” 19 August 2026, reporting on the BRICS environment ministers’ statement of 18 August 2026. https://euobserver.com/232793/brics-countries-condemn-eu-carbon-tax-as-punitive-and-protectionist/
3. S&P Global, “Brussels defends CBAM after US ambassador’s protectionism claim,” 13 August 2026, citing Andrew Puzder’s Financial Times op-ed of 12 August 2026 and the European Commission’s response. https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/latest-news/electric-power/081326-brussels-defends-cbam-after-us-ambassadors-protectionism-claim
4. EUobserver (Source 2), citing the EU’s projected CBAM revenue of approximately €10 billion per year at full implementation by 2030; and the July 2025 BRICS climate finance declaration language on undermining BRICS countries’ capacity to invest in their own just transitions.
5. New Delhi Declaration (Source 1) call for WTO Appellate Body appointments and dispute-settlement restoration; Wikipedia, “Appellate Body,” consulted for the 2019 US blockade of appointments, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellate_Body; S&P Global (Source 3) on Russia’s 2025 WTO dispute against CBAM and the EU ETS. No source reviewed for this brief confirms the Appellate Body vacancy crisis has been resolved as of this writing; this is stated here as an open structural gap rather than inferred.