NEWS

Rich club musn’t miss chance on climate change

07/08/2008

Some previous G8 meetings have chiefly been rhetorical achievements. But the world does not need more hot air on climate change.

FIRST they were six, then seven, then they became eight. Now, to remain credible, the eight must invite to their annual rich nations’ summit representatives of other rich nations that are not members of the club, and representatives of some poor nations as well. This week, heads of government of the G8 Group, which notionally comprises the world’s leading economic powers, are meeting at Toyako on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. And so far, the only thing that is clear is that this protean organisation, which has no standing in international law but is assumed to wield more influence than many organisations that do, faces challenges that may lead to yet another of its many changes of shape and direction.

When they met last year, the leaders of the US, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan and Canada issued a communique declaring the global economy to be in good condition. That won’t be an option this year, as the world succumbs to a credit squeeze generated by the subprime mortgage crisis in the US, to steadily rising global oil and food prices, and to the multiple hazards of climate change. In some ways, the state of the world now more closely resembles the atmosphere of crisis confronting the original meeting of the rich nations’ club at Rambouillet, France, in 1975, in the wake of the OPEC oil embargo that ended the post-World War II long boom. The G7 group that emerged later became the G8 when Russia was invited to join after the end of the Cold War. Russia wasn’t, and still isn’t, a "rich" nation in the sense that the G7’s North American and European members and Japan are. But, as the successor state of the former Soviet Union, it was undoubtedly a great power. The transition from an avowedly economic grouping to one recognising wider contours of power had begun, and this week in Japan it continues.

China and India are not members of the club. Yet their rapid industrialisation and economic expansion are so central to understanding the challenges the world faces, including climate change, that a strong case can be made for enlarging the G8 to become a G10. That won’t happen this time around, but tomorrow there will be a "major economies" session, in which the G8 leaders will meet representatives of China, India, Brazil, South Korea, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and Australia. The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, will get his opportunity to make a contribution to global climate-change policy. South Africa is also part of a group of African nations whose leaders have been invited to the G8 summit to discuss aid and indebtedness, and who will no doubt want to know why the massive aid pledged to Africa at the 2005 G8 summit in Scotland is likely to fall $40 billion short of the amount scheduled to be delivered by 2010.

So the G8 meeting is really a series of lesser summits feeding into the grand summit. This is both a strength and a weakness - the former because the G8 leaders accept they cannot act in isolation, and the latter because as the summit grows in complexity it necessarily loses the flexibility inherent in the informal deliberations of a small group.

Whatever structural changes may lie ahead for the G8, however, the present meeting must deal with the problems before it. The credit squeeze arising in the US is already dragging the superpower’s economy into recession, with inevitable global consequences, which may mean that the African nations will leave Toyako without even the promises that the G8 leaders bestowed on them at the 2005 summit. And on the overarching issue of climate change, this summit seems likely to end in the same stand-off that has paralysed so many international meetings on the same topic.

President George Bush of the US, a late convert from climate-change scepticism, still insists that there is no point in a global agreement to cut carbon emissions unless China and India share the pain; for their part, the emerging industrial powers say the long-industrialised West has primary responsibility for a problem it created, and they should be indulged while they catch up.

The world will hope that, when this G8 meeting concludes, the result will not just be another bland communique, but on past G8 form the world will not hold its breath. All G8 members are democracies, and as Australia’s own domestic politics is revealing, climate change is likely to be the great test of democracy in the 21st century. Will the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations be prepared to show real leadership on this issue? Or will the need to chase votes mean that no government seriously tries to change present patterns of energy consumption?