“Of course the US wants to break apart the BASIC bloc. It has been a force in the negotiations, and it’s probably still going to raise its head here in some fashion. I’d be very shocked if it didn’t.

“But [the coal deal] is probably going to knock off the rough edges of how it operates, if South Africa knows that it’s going to have this funding stream coming in for saving their utility system, which is a complete shambles.

“South Africa may not swing in as hard behind what China wants. So I think the US has gone through a very deliberative process here.”

So what does China want? Well, traditionally, China and BASIC have pushed back against calls to strengthen emission reduction ambitions.

At this COP, there may also be differences on the design of new rules on how emissions are to be measured. Some developing nations are concerned about the cost and technical feasibility of measuring the carbon output of their economies.

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Efforts to split China from its broad support among many climate-vulnerable and developing nations are not new. Indeed, Hillary Clinton originally announced the US$100 billion that rich nations promised to “mobilise” annually by 2020 for developing nations to achieve just that.

The figure, says Mohamed Adow, director of think tank Power Shift Africa, was neither sufficient for the task, nor based on any serious analysis of need. Rather it was a political wedge.

In the end it was never delivered, serving only to reinforce the sense of abandonment felt by those nations to which it was promised.

While the West overpromises and under delivers, says Adow, China has been steadily building friendships in Africa with funding for infrastructure and, during the pandemic, with vaccines, he says.

Because temperatures continue to rise and adaptation targets were never even properly set, let alone met, developing nations now need funding for loss and damage due to extreme weather events.

Having set what Boris Johnson called “the Doomsday Clock” in motion with the industrial revolution, rich nations have failed developing nations at every turn, says Adow.

South Africa’s stance within BASIC may be blunted by their new funding, but the rest of Africa is unlikely to abandon its more reliable friend in China, says Adow.

Adow’s fear is that the geostrategic competition at the COP undermines the unity of action the crisis demands, and which the Paris Agreement went some way to securing.

He looks back to World War II when Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill forged an alliance to defeat Hitler.

“Don’t look at the physics of climate change,” he urges. “Look at the politics. It is not up to it.”

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