KEY POINTS:
President George W. Bush's initiative on climate change inevitably invokes mixed feelings.
In the tormented geopolitics of climate change, what needs to happen next is for the United States to get serious about reducing emissions.
So if the US call for meetings of the 15 largest emitting nations to agree on a "long-term, aspirational" goal, and thrash out what each can do about meeting it, is a step away from inertia and towards some leadership on this issue, then good.
The glass half-empty view, however, is that Bush is a lame duck President with the worst credentials in this area. On the record of the past six years, he is the last person one would want to see influencing the design of the post-Kyoto international regime.
What is needed is not only agreement on a scientifically credible long-term objective but short and medium-term targets consistent with that, for which countries are accountable.
Otherwise all you have is something like Apec's half-forgotten Bogor goals for free trade in the Asia-Pacific region. Better than nothing but not much.
The Gleneagles G8 two years ago was supposed to initiate a process of international consultation on tackling climate change wider than Kyoto. Whatever became of that?
Informal gatherings of the major players in a multilateral process have their place. If there is ever a breakthrough in the Doha round of world trade talks, it will probably come out of the meetings of the G4.
But the objective has to be to facilitate and energise the process, not to sideline or subvert it. US officials insist that was never the intention.
Whatever the process, what matters is the political will. Otherwise such meetings are just another forum for a coalition of the unwilling to trade excuses or wag admonishing fingers at each other.
Bush's comments imply that US commitment in the fight against climate change remains somehow contingent on the willingness of China and India to shoulder some of the burden. Up to a point this is fair enough - but only up to a point.
On International Energy Agency projections, China is expected to overtake the US as the world's largest emitter by 2010 and, five years later, to outstrip the combined emissions of the rest of the OECD.
It has reiterated it will not commit itself to to any mandatory cap on emissions that might slow down its rapid economic growth.
China has a billion more people than the US and its GDP per head is about one-sixth of the American level.
It is atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases, not the latest year's addition to those levels, that drive climate change.
So China, like other developing countries, argues that just as rich countries enjoy the economic legacy of their industrial revolutions, they have to take responsibility for the climatic legacy as well.
It is not as if China is doing nothing to clean up its act. It has 30 million homes with solar hot-water systems and manufactures more photovoltaics than the US.
If the fundamental problem is global population growth, China is the country with a one-child policy.
And it does not need anyone else to tell it the expanding desert in its north and the shrivelling glaciers in the Tibetan headwaters of its great rivers augur nothing good for the food supply.
In India, with a per capita income about half China's, the dilemma or tradeoff between economic development and the impacts of climate change is even more acute.
The New York Times recently ran a story about a family called the Khabhus. They used to be farmers until incursions of seawater from the Arabian Sea poisoned their land. They now labour for a pittance hand-making bricks for an energy-inefficient, coal-fired brick kiln - one of about 100,000 nationwide. They are victims of climate change and contributors to it.
For the planet's sake that cottage industry needs to be replaced by cleaner technology. But where does that leave the Khabhus?
Local businesses commonly argue that the pace and stringency of this country's efforts to combat climate change have to depend on what the big emitting nations do.
Most of our trade is with countries outside the Kyoto system - Australia, the US, all of Asia bar Japan. So where doing our bit ends and futile self-sacrifice begins depends on what they do.
The equivalent argument in the US is that the low-wage economies of Asia have enough of a competitive advantage already without adding cheaper energy to the list.
But this is the same kind of defensive, backward-looking thinking you get from the protectionist side of the trade liberalisation debate.
It is all about protecting the capital sunk into incumbent technologies, and the associated jobs, rather than embracing inevitable change and seeking out the opportunities it offers.
Across the Tasman, Prime Minister John Howard has abandoned his longstanding aversion to the idea and come out in favour of a cap-and-trade regime for Australia.
But not until 2012, two years later than the state governments' plans to introduce emissions trading, and with no decision on where the cap should be set until next year.
That, of course, would be on the other side of coming federal elections.
Howard is saying to Australian voters: either way you will have emissions trading. Who do you want to set the cap, good old Peter Costello and me, or Kevin Rudd and that greenie ex-rock star Peter Garrett?
At least Howard is honest about the fact that it will increase energy prices. The real issue is how much.
By contrast, US policymakers so far have opted for measures like tax credits for ethanol and wind power.
That is an exercise in picking winners among the technological options and then subsidising them handsomely at the expense of other taxpayers.
It is the politically soft option compared with carbon taxes or cap-and-trade. It shields the consumer from higher energy prices but at the expense of economic distortions in the short term and a bigger environmental problem in the longer term.
Among the beneficiaries of those distortions right now are our dairy farmers. Underpinning the bumper payout Fonterra has foreshadowed for the coming season is less production from Australia, due to drought, and little prospect of an increase in output from the US because of the spillover effects of the ethanol boom on the price of feed grains.
Ironically, the increased payout is likely to encourage more dairy conversions here, increasing our contribution to global warming.
