Why the G20 saved banks but not the climate

Key points

• The G20 once coordinated a global rescue after Lehman Brothers collapsed. Climate campaigners hoped it could summon the same resolve to confront global heating.

• That hope suffered a serious blow during the G20 energy meeting in Houston, where the US pushed fossil fuels, rolled back climate measures and stripped “energy transition” from the G20’s vocabulary.

• The contrast is stark: banks accepted tougher rules because they needed saving, while oil, gas and coal interests have every incentive to resist policies that threaten their business.

• The G20 should not be abandoned, but climate action can no longer depend on its communiqués. Regional, national and grassroots efforts must keep building momentum while global leadership falters.

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Sixteen years ago this week, there was financial panic, not Climate Week, in New York.

In 2008, investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering a global systemic banking crisis that threatened the global banking system and the personal wealth and livelihoods of billions.

Then something remarkable happened. Leaders of the G20 — representing roughly 85% of global GDP — came together and rewrote the rules of global banking. None of it was legally binding; the G20 has no charter or enforcement power. What it did have was influence.

Within months, major economies coordinated roughly US$5tn in fiscal stimulus, committed $1tn in new IMF resources, accelerated $100bn in lending to poorer countries, and upgraded the Financial Stability Forum (FSB) into the Financial Stability Board — a standing body built to catch the next systemic threat before it metastasised.

For a rising generation of climate advocates, this was proof of concept. If the world could mobilise trillions in months to save its banks, surely it could do the same for the climate. The G20 — until then best known as an annual photo op in matching regional shirts — looked like the forum with the power to act again.

Houston, we have a problem

That dream died in Houston.

On the main stage of the G20 Energy Ministers’ meeting on 14 September, US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Lee Zeldin proudly announced a repeal of Biden-era carbon standards for coal- and gas-fired power plants — a rollback that could add a gigaton of new carbon to an already overheated atmosphere. Gone too was the G20 vocabulary of “energy transition” and “decarbonisation,” replaced instead by fossil-fuel-approved favourites like “energy abundance,” “all-of-the-above,” and “technology-neutral.”

Houston capped a string of victories for the fossil fuel industry ever since Donald Trump took aim at the “woke” G20. First, he boycotted last year’s summit in Johannesburg. Then he sought to bar South African president Cyril Ramaphosa from attending the planned summit at his Trump National Doral Miami golf course in December.

Earlier in August, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stripped climate from the finance ministers’ agenda in Asheville, North Carolina — even as that state continued to rebuild from the ravages of Hurricane Helene. By the time the G20 met in Houston, the US had even scrubbed the FSB’s 2026 Work Program, dropping all mentions of “climate.”

Dashed hopes

This was not what climate advocates had in mind when they first embraced the convening power of the G20.

For nearly a decade, climate philanthropy bet the club of global leaders, not the UN and COP alone, was where systemic change could happen. During China’s 2016 presidency, the Green Finance Study Group was formed. Then came Germany’s F20 platform, and Italy’s 2021 Sustainable Finance Working Group and subsequent BIS Green Swan conferences, pulled the Financial Stability Board into climate’s orbit.

At last year’s Johannesburg summit, more than 3,000 civil society organisations were pressing leaders to, as Civil20 Sherpa Mabalane Mfundisi said, reflect “the lived realities and policy priorities of communities most affected by inequality, exclusion, and crisis.”

Clearly, that is no longer on the agenda.

Playing hardball

So why did the G20 fail to replicate its Lehman moment for climate? Just follow the money.

In 2008, the G20 moved to save, not end, the banking system. Financial institutions resented the new rules that came with the rescue, but they needed the panic to stop to keep ATMs, investing and lending running. They swallowed the bitter medicine.

The opposite was true in the climate crisis. A Lehman-style coordinated global response directly threatened oil, gas, and coal interests, which resisted almost all elements of the G20 climate agenda, including the phase-out of fuel subsidies.

The harsh reality is that unlike the 2008-2009 financial crisis, most G20 leaders were sympathetic, but never really pressed to turn advocacy into action back home, particularly in the US where there are no capstone Basel III bank rules or Dodd-Frank legislation for climate. And the voluntary alliances it championed quickly buckled under public and private pressure. Look no further than the now defunct Net Zero Banking Alliance, which sought to normalise net-zero alignment until member institutions resigned amid an intense conservative backlash.

Instead, the G20’s passive-aggressive patchwork of non-binding initiatives was ruthlessly exploited by emboldened fossil fuel advocates. The industry and their state sponsors dug in and opposed declarations, voluntary commitments, and new initiatives. They waited and lobbied until they built an alliance with an American administration stocked with their own people.

When it came time to push back, fossil fuel advocates did not just get angry – they got even. According to OpenSecrets, the oil and gas sector alone has spent roughly $1.2 to $1.5bn on total federal lobbying over the past decade (2015–2025) in the US alone.

And according to landmark research by InfluenceMap, the world’s five largest publicly traded oil and gas companies (ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, and TotalEnergies) spend millions on direct climate branding and policy control. A primary goal of this budget is slowing down international treaties and protecting $1.4tn in public financial support in G20 countries to fossil fuels annually (via subsidies, investments by state-owned enterprises, and public finance), according to Energy Policy Tracker.

Whether this is a pyrrhic victory remains to be seen. Let’s hope not. As the celebration wound down in Houston, thousands of climate activists prepared for Climate Week NYC. It is the largest of a series of similar gatherings in Hong Kong, London, Norway, Ireland, Paris, and soon, Thailand.

Nor has the money dried up. Climate mitigation philanthropy hit a record $11.7–18.4bn in 2024, more than 2% of global giving, with foundation funding alone reaching $6bn — up 30% and more than double its 2020 level. Early 2025 data suggests funding held firm through a turbulent year.

If there is a lesson to be learned, it is that just as the physical climate crisis is accelerating, the global institutions built to answer it look weaker than their architects hoped. The silver lining is that vast public and private resources, expertise, and local operations to fight climate change continue to expand worldwide without global coordination and rule-making. They are not only a hedge against the passing political whims of global leaders, but also the foundation of real climate action, which does not need a G20 communique to enact.

Not that the G20 should be abandoned. There may come a day when it will face a Lehman-like global climate moment. But don’t count on it. Instead, focus on regional, state and local initiatives to keep driving climate action by supporting community lenders, building local capacity, and funding everything from investigative journalism to legal accountability to hyper-local groups connecting clean energy to lower bills, increase jobs, and improve health.

The Lehman moment taught the world that financial systems can be saved by unprecedented global coordination. However, we also learned this week that actions to fight a systemic global environmental and social crisis can be blocked by a minority of interests who profit the most from a global failure to respond.

The task now is to make that defence harder to sustain, and ensure that when the next opening comes, the movement is ready.

This article originally appeared on GCB’s Substack. Sign up to our newsletters to get the latest news. 

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