KEY POINTS:
In 2005, a Group of Eight summit pledged to double development aid by 2010. Two years on, the rest of the world is still waiting for the rich nations to make progress towards that goal. The same Gleneagles summit also delivered the blandest of statements on global warming. Two years on, the G8 will revisit the issue this week in the German town of Heiligendamm knowing that much has changed in the interim. Climate change has become a cause celebre, and another meaningless communique will condemn the summit to failure.
This should have been the meeting that agreed on the way forward when the United Nations' Kyoto Protocol on the curbing of greenhouse gases expired in 2012. Not any more. The fly in the ointment is, yet again, President George W. Bush, a man who previously revelled in the United States' absence from the protocol but has belatedly become a climate-change convert. Not, however, to a degree that embraces the lofty ambitions of the European Union. US support terminates at the first hint of any cost to American consumers, or of American companies being placed at a competitive disadvantage to their Chinese and Indian rivals.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the White House frowns on the proposal of the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, who wants G8 members to cut carbon dioxide emissions in half by the middle of this century, and to back this with a commitment to limit global warming to a rise of 2C. So it has put forward an alternative. This involves it and 14 other big emitters setting, by the end of next year, a "long-term global goal" for reducing emissions.
The German approach would lay down principles for the start of negotiations on a long-term climate pact beyond 2012 at a UN meeting in Bali in December. The Bush Administration's policy would not, even if its proposed talks were productive, produce binding emission targets (the core of the Kyoto process) or the use of "cap and trade" financial mechanisms. The US insists, nonetheless, that the two approaches could be complementary. A tighter unit might, indeed, make more rapid progress than that usually associated with the UN. But only if there was a will, and only if the US demonstrated real leadership. This seems unlikely.
All the signs suggest President Bush's embrace of climate change, while laudable in itself, is half-hearted. If so, he is, of course, far from alone. The electoral fortunes of John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, have occasioned the same switch. But President Bush, devoid of such domestic concerns - indeed, the US heartland seems to place relatively little importance on the issue - seems merely to be tipping his hat to international concern.
Green Party co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons, commenting on the National Party's plan to reduce carbon emissions to half their 1990 levels by 2050, said it was "like announcing that your destination is the North Pole, but having no boats or planes or rafts or balloons, and no proposals or timetable to build any before it melts away". Such is the case with much climate-change rhetoric. The White House, however, has not even taken aim at the North Pole.
Until its alternative policy was announced, there was a developing consensus towards an international deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol and agreement on the framework for negotiation. Now, the G8 summit must somehow find a way to integrate the American plan under the UN umbrella. The Europeans need the US on board, not only because it is the world's biggest polluter but because of its influence on China and India. If, as seems certain, the Americans stick to their guns, Germany's bold initiative will be sunk. An unambitious communique seems, yet again, the likely outcome.
