Energy ministers from the Group of 20 (G20) concluded three days of talks in Houston on 16 September with agreement that plentiful, cheap energy is what makes a country prosperous, and that a prosperous country is one best able to look after its environment. South Africa, a founding member of the G20, was not there. Since December, it has been excluded from every G20 event the United States (US) has hosted or will host this year, including the upcoming leaders’ summit in Miami in December.

The meeting, called the Energy Abundance Ministerial, was run by the White House energy council with the American interior, energy and environment departments. It dealt with three things: reliable and cheap electricity from power stations that run all the time; faster approvals for building energy projects; and secure supplies of the minerals on which grids, batteries, and factories depend.

Until 2023, the G20 was made up of 19 countries and the institution of the European Union. In 2023, the African Union was added. South Africa was excluded from this year’s meeting as a result of its anti-American activities, and Poland was invited by the Americans as a guest. The attendees are set out in the graphic below.

A statement released by the attendees quoted US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright saying, “Energy is the essential ingredient that enables everything we do... A highly energised society brings health, wealth, and opportunity.”

Lee Zeldin, the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, said that “strong environmental stewardship and economic prosperity go hand in hand”.

The sentiment expressed out the G20 meeting was very much at odds with the sentiment on energy policy that has come out of recent Davos gatherings as well as climate summits that have attracted some of the world’s most important governments. The sentiment coming out of those meetings has been that energy is a danger and a threat to the environment and that it therefore needs to be rationed, with the implication that a cleaner world must be a poorer one.

That kind of sentiment flowed naturally out of the climate fearmongering and doomery that became such a Western cultural phenomenon over the past 20 years. A small green shoot of hope that such delusion was dissipating came last year, when Bill Gates walked back much of his own fearmongering and doomery about the consequences of climate change. At the time, The Common Sense’s Reine Opperman asked the question of whether global institutions such as the COP30 would follow suit. The G20 decision suggests that her intuition was not far off, given the climb-down on climate hysteria that the Houston summit amounted to.

After attending the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) summit in London earlier this year, The Common Sense reported on figures given by scientist Steve Koonin, once an adviser to the Obama administration, that over the past century the earth warmed by about a degree and a half whilst deaths from climate-related causes fell by around 95%, and living standards rose roughly twenty-fold.