Left Flank

Realizing the G8 summit would be a farcical disappointment, I refrained from knocking the dearth of blogging I committed to it. Yet, even my low expectations were cut down at their knees.

To Yasuo Fukuda, Japan’s prime minister, whose domestic standing is extremely shaky, the summit’s smooth passage was a huge relief. He even showed a flash of statesmanship. In answer to perennial criticism that the G8, a self-appointed steering group for global problems, was hardly representative of the world, he invited seven national leaders from Africa to join Japan, the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia to discuss the continent’s development.

At another point, Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev found himself hobnobbing not only with the old-time capitalist club but also with fellow leaders (see picture) of the BRIC gang of fast-growing giants—in other words, his counterparts from Brazil, India and China. By inviting that lot, plus Mexico, South Africa, Indonesia, South Korea and Australia, the Japanese were able to bring together the bulk of the world’s greenhouse-gas emitters. This was easily the G8’s biggest “outreach” to date, and Mr Fukuda skilfully ensured that disagreements among that disparate bunch did not break out angrily into the open. Carry on like that, people at the summit quipped, and the 71-year-old leader might one day make a competent foreign minister.

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The big disappointment was over climate change—despite some word games. Last year, Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, overcame the reluctance of George Bush and got the G8 to promise to “consider seriously” cutting greenhouse emissions by at least half by 2050. This time the G8 vowed to “consider and adopt” such cuts. Ms Merkel hailed this tighter language; the hosts called it the summit’s biggest victory, coming just 18 months before 180 countries meet in Copenhagen to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto protocol. In effect, Mr Bush has at last committed America to a quantifiable target. With just 200-odd days of his presidency to run, this may be his final input to the climate-change debate; some would call it his only contribution.

Yet the strength of the G8’s commitment starts to crumble under scrutiny—even without one cynical Russian diplomat pointing out how absurd it is for today’s politicians to take responsibility for meeting goals four decades from now. The baseline from which the cuts are supposed to occur has been left vague. The European Union wants them to begin from 1990, while Japan (which unilaterally says it will aim for a 60-80% cut in emissions) thinks it more realistic to start from 2005 or perhaps this year. America hardly has an opinion.

To some, this obsession with distant targets is beside the point. The G8 could not come up even with nearer-term goals to cut emissions—say, by 2020. The lack of more immediate and concrete measures, says Michael Grubb of the Carbon Trust, set up by the British government to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, underscores an “abdication of responsibility”. At the least, he says, the G8 leaders could have promised to treat cuts eventually agreed under UN auspices as legally binding. And they could have moved to bring the huge, dirty market in bunker fuel for shipping and aviation, hitherto excluded from discussion of caps, into the negotiations.

Without such marks of resolve, it is little wonder that the five biggest developing polluters, which account for a smallish amount of the man-made carbon dioxide now clogging the air but a fast increasing share of new emissions, refused to make any firm pledges. A Japanese diplomat worries that the relationship between the G8 and the so-called G5 (India, China, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa) over climate change may soon resemble management-and-labour stand-offs at their worst.

But then, how could the world's leaders beat the Bush administration and the EPA for sheer skill at political shenanigans.