Ilan Zugman is Latin America Director at 350.org, based in Brazil, and Fanny Petitbon is France Team Lead at 350.org.
When G20 finance ministers gather in Rio de Janeiro this week, Brazil and France have a chance to put these powerful countries on track to deliver a global wealth tax that could raise over $680 billion per year in the fight to tackle poverty and the climate crisis. Both countries have been vocal supporters of taxing the super-rich to fund international development and climate action.
In April, finance ministers Fernando Haddad (Brazil) and Bruno Le Maire (France) announced their intent to tax the wealth of billionaires by at least two percent annually, prompting ministers from Germany, South Africa and Spain to back the proposal. As the current host of the G20, Brazil commissioned an investigation into the feasibility of this global wealth tax – and the results were published by French economist Gabriel Zucman in June, generating further momentum in efforts to fill the funding gap for climate and development.
Zucman’s findings show that a global wealth tax on the super-rich – billionaires and people with assets worth more than $100 million – could be enforced successfully even if all countries did not adopt it. It is also a popular measure: more than two-thirds of people across seventeen G20 countries show support for making the super-rich pay higher taxes as a means of funding major improvements to our economy and lifestyles.
This isn’t surprising. Ensuring that billionaires are properly taxed could deliver significant, tangible benefits in people’s lives and go some way to addressing the systemic injustices and inequality reflected by the climate crisis and poverty.
The world needs a new global deal on climate and development finance
An ambitious global wealth tax, together with higher and permanent tax on oil corporations and extraction, would provide hundreds of billions of dollars/euros each year to properly fund scaling up renewable energy, rolling out heat pumps and insulation programmes to lower the cost of heating or cooling our homes, new public transport links, future-proof jobs and much more – helping communities to thrive.
It would also end more than a decade of broken promises by G20 states, ensuring that some of the world’s wealthiest countries have enough money in their national coffers to provide adequate finance to pay for those suffering the consequences of climate impacts now. Helping the poorest communities prepare for unnatural disasters like increased wildfires, flooding and sea level rise, and ensuring people can rebuild their homes, infrastructure and places of work when preventative measures are not an option.
Power to communities
A global wealth tax is a moral imperative. By implementing a fairer system of taxation, the G20 could accelerate a just transition to a low-carbon economy, cutting dangerous carbon emissions and boosting living standards and energy access at great scale, while also tackling deep-rooted injustice. Delivering finance for community-oriented renewable energy projects across Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Pacific would put power back in the hands of communities that continue to suffer from the violent legacy of colonialism and extractive profiteering.
For this to be achieved France, and other wealthy nations in the G20 like Germany and the UK, must be willing to make concessions and assume historical responsibility for exploiting fossil fuel extraction in the economically poorer countries whose citizens are experiencing the worst consequences of the climate crisis. The emerging French government must deliver concrete plans to redirect its fortune and tax its billionaires towards a renewable energy-powered planet.
Where East African oil pipeline meets sea, displaced farmers bemoan “bad deal” on compensation
It is incumbent on both Brazil and France to seize the opportunity presented by growing support to deliver a global wealth tax at the meeting of powerful finance ministers this week. Both countries must do everything they can to build trust and political will around the crucial proposal. But this will be a challenge if they undermine their stance on the international stage with contrasting domestic policy, something both governments are guilty of.
Brazil has been pushing for new oil projects, including in the Amazon and is gearing up to become the fourth-largest oil producer in the world. France, despite being fined by the European Commission, is still not on track to meet its domestic renewable energy targets and announced in February a two billion-euro cut to the budget allocated for environmental and energy transition programmes. It is high time for both countries to stop the smoke and mirrors approach to international diplomacy, by aligning their commitments at national and international levels.
Leaders’ summit
This week, ministers Haddad and Le Maire have a responsibility to rally their G20 counterparts around the wealth tax proposal and send a strong and unified signal to heads of state and governments to take concrete action that delivers a global wealth tax on billionaires when they meet in November.
The stakes are high. The vast scale of global inequality means that nearly one in eleven people around the world live below the poverty line according the World Bank. In addition, this is set to be yet another record-breaking year for climate impacts, in a critical decade to prevent global heating from tipping over the 1.5°C threshold – a limit beyond which the ability of impacted communities to survive and thrive will be put at intolerable risk. We need to see vast quantities of finance mobilised to scale up renewable energy at the speed needed, and billionaires and multi-millionaires need to be forced to pay up.
We’re all rooting for this one to work – it can take us a long way.
The post A global wealth tax is needed to help fund a just green transition appeared first on Climate Home News.
A global wealth tax is needed to help fund a just green transition
It’s been less than 20 years since baby food in plastic pouches first appeared on supermarket shelves. Since then, these convenient and popular “squeeze-and-suck” products have become the dominant packaging for baby food, transforming the way that millions of babies are fed around the world. But emerging evidence raises concerns that big food brands are feeding our children plastic pollution with unknown consequences, by selling baby food in flexible plastic packaging.
Testing commissioned by Greenpeace International in 2025 found plastic particles in the baby food products of two global consumer goods companies – Danone and Nestlé. The study suggests a link between the type of plastic the pouches are lined with – polyethylene – and some of the microplastics found. Tests also suggest a range of plastic-associated chemicals in the packaging and food of both products.
Sign the petition for a strong Global Plastics Treaty
Governments around the world are now negotiating a Global Plastics Treaty – an agreement that could solve the planetary crisis brought by runaway plastic production. Let’s end the age of plastic – sign the petition for a strong Global Plastics Treaty now.
Climate Change
U.N. General Assembly Embraces Court Opinion That Says Nations Have a Legal Obligation to Take Climate Action
The U.S. was among eight countries that voted against endorsing the nonbinding ruling that said all nations must take steps to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly in favor of a climate justice resolution championed by the small Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu. The resolution welcomes the historic advisory opinion on climate change issued by the International Court of Justice in July 2025 and calls upon U.N. member states to act upon the court’s unanimous guidance, which clarified that addressing the climate crisis is not optional but rather is a legal duty under multiple sources of international law.
The number of new coal-fired power plants built around the world hit a “10-year high” in 2025, even as the global coal fleet generated less electricity, amid a “widening disconnect” in the sector.
That is according to the latest annual report from Global Energy Monitor (GEM), which finds that the world added nearly 100 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-power capacity in 2025, the equivalent of roughly 100 large coal plants.
It adds that 95% of the new coal plants were built in India and China.
Yet GEM says that the amount of electricity generated with coal fell by 0.6% in 2025 – with sharp drops in both China and India – as the fuel was displaced by record wind and solar output, among other factors.
The report notes that there have been previous dips in output from coal power and there could still be ups – as well as downs – in the near term.
For example, nearly 70% of the coal-fired units scheduled to retire globally in 2025 did not do so, due to postponements triggered by the 2022 energy crisis and policy shifts in the US.
However, GEM says that the underlying dynamics for coal power have now fundamentally shifted, as the cost of renewables has fallen and low usage hits coal profitability.
China and India dominate growth
In 2025, coal-capacity growth hit a 10-year high, with 97 gigawatts (GW) of new power plants being added, according to GEM.
(Capacity refers to the potential maximum power output, as measured in GW, whereas generation refers to power actually generated by the assets over a period of time, measured in gigawatt hours, GWh.)
This is the highest level since 2015 when 107GW began operating, as shown in the chart below. This makes 2025 the second-highest level of additions on record.
The majority of this growth came from China and India, which added 78GW and 10GW, respectively, against 9GW from all other countries.
Yet GEM points out that, even as coal capacity in China grew by 6%, the output from coal-fired power plants actually fell 1.2%. This means that each power plant would have been running less often, eroding its profitability. Similarly, capacity in India grew by 3.8%, while generation fell by 2.9%.
China and India had accounted for 87% of new coal-power capacity that came into operation in the first half of 2025. The shift up to 95% in the year as a whole highlights how increasingly just those two countries dominate the sector, GEM says.
Christine Shearer, project manager of GEM’s global coal plant tracker, said in a statement:
“In 2025, the world built more coal and used it less. Development has grown more concentrated, too – 95% of coal plant construction is now in China and India, and even they are building solar and wind fast enough to displace it.”
Both China and India saw solar and wind meet most or all of the growth in electricity demand last year.
Analysis for Carbon Brief last year showed that, in the first six months of 2025 alone, a record 212GW of solar was added in China, helping to make it the nation’s single-largest source of clean-power generation, for example.
However, the country continues to propose new coal plants. In 2025, a record 162GW of capacity was newly proposed for development or reactivated, according to GEM. This brought the overall capacity under development in the country to more than 500GW.
China’s 15th “five-year plan”, covering 2026-2030, had pledged to “promote the peaking” of coal use, while a more recent pair of policies introduced stricter controls on local governments’ coal use.
For its part, in India some 28GW of new coal capacity was newly proposed or reactivated last year, bringing the total under development to 107.3GW and under-construction capacity to 23.5GW.
The Indian government is planning to complete 85GW of new coal capacity in the next seven years, even as clean-energy expansion reaches levels that could cover all of the growth in electricity demand.
Outside of China and India, GEM says that just 32 countries have new coal plants under construction or under development, down from 38 in 2024.
Countries that have dropped plans for new coal in 2025 include South Korea, Brazil and Honduras, it says. GEM notes that the latter two mean that Latin America is now free from any new coal-power proposals.
This means that both electricity generation from coal and the construction of new coal-fired power plants are increasingly concentrated in just a few countries, as the chart below shows.
Indonesia’s coal fleet grew by 7% in 2025 to 61GW, with a quarter of the new capacity tied to nickel and aluminium processing, according to GEM.
Turkey – which is gearing up to host the COP31 international climate summit in November – has just one coal-plant proposal remaining, down from 70 in 2015.
The amount of new coal capacity that started to operate in south-east Asia fell for the third year in a row in 2025, according to GEM.
Countries in south Asia that rely on imported energy are increasingly looking to other technologies to protect themselves from fossil-fuel shocks, such as Pakistan, which is rapidly deploying solar, states the GEM report.
In Africa, plans for new coal capacity are concentrated in Zimbabwe and Zambia, the report shows, with the two countries accounting for two-thirds of planned development in the region.
‘Persistence of policies’
While new coal plants are still being built and even more are under development, GEM notes that the global electricity system is undergoing rapid changes.
Crucially, the growth of cheap renewable energy means that new coal plants do not automatically translate into higher electricity generation from coal.
Without rising output from coal power, building new plants simply results in the coal fleet running less often, further eroding its economics relative to wind and solar power.
Indeed, GEM notes that electricity generation from coal fell globally in 2025. Moreover, a recent report by thinktank Ember found that renewable energy overtook coal in 2025 to become the world’s largest source of electricity.
GEM notes that coal generation may fluctuate in the near term, in particular due to potential increases in demand driven by higher gas prices.
It adds that gas price shocks, such as the one triggered by the Iran war, can cause temporary reversals in the longer-term shift away from coal.
According to Carbon Brief analysis, at least eight countries announced plans to either increase their coal use or review plans to transition away from coal in the first month of the Iran war. However, a much-discussed “return to coal” is expected to be limited.
GEM’s report highlights that global fossil-fuel shocks can have an impact on the phase out of coal capacity over several years.
In the EU, for example, 69% of planned retirements did not take place in 2025, due to postponements that began in the 2022-23 energy crisis triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to the report. Countries across the bloc chose to retain their coal capacity amid gas supply disruptions and concerns about energy security.
Yet coal-fired power generation in the bloc is now more than 40% below 2022 levels. Again, this highlights that coal capacity does not necessarily translate into electricity generation from coal, with its associated CO2 emissions.
Overall, GEM notes that “repeated exposure to fossil-fuel price volatility is as likely to accelerate the shift toward clean energy as it is to delay it”.
GEM’s Shearer says in a statement:
“The central challenge heading into 2026 is not the availability of alternatives, but the persistence of policies that treat coal as necessary even as power systems move increasingly beyond it.”
In the US, 59% of planned retirements in 2025 did not happen, according to GEM. This was due to government intervention to keep ageing coal plants online.
Five coal-power plants have been told to remain online through federal “emergency” orders, for example, even as the coal fleet continues to face declining competitiveness.
Keeping these plants online has cost hundreds of millions of dollars and helped drive an annual increase in the average US household electricity prices of 7%, according to GEM.
Despite such measures, Trump has overseen a larger fall in coal-fired power capacity than any other US president, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
Meanwhile, according to new figures from the US Energy Information Administration, solar and wind both set new records for energy production in 2025.
Despite challenges with policy and wider fossil-fuel impacts, the underlying dynamic has shifted, says GEM, as “clean energy becomes more competitive and widely deployed” around the world.
It adds that this raises the prospect of “a more sustained decoupling between coal-capacity growth and generation, particularly if clean-energy deployment continues at current rates”.
The post New coal plants hit ‘10-year’ global high in 2025 – but power output still fell appeared first on Carbon Brief.
New coal plants hit ‘10-year’ global high in 2025 – but power output still fell
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