G8, No Teeth in Emission-Cutting Goals

June 9, 2007 – Vol.12 No.11

G8, NO TEETH IN EMISSION-CUTTING GOALS.

As much as the G8 Summit is a headline making event every year, it really doesn’t mean much. Sure, it’s a chance for supposedly responsible leaders of the planet’s supposedly more economically powerful nations to get together and talk about big, worldly things. Yet nothing they say is binding. There are no penalties for G8 leaders who fail to deliver on promises. No one gets fined or goes to jail. There’s not even a slap on the wrist.

Further, the member states of the core G8 - Germany, France, the UK, the US, Italy, Japan, Canada and Russia - hardly represent the world as it is today.

Sure, there are the other five, the G8 + 5 nations - Mexico, Brazil, India, China and South Africa - that are minor players at the talks, but what they say doesn’t make headline news. (Even though China, India and Brazil are certainly big economic powerhouses.) And where are other large nations: Indonesia (pop. 235 million), the Philippines (pop. 91 million almost 60 million larger than Canada) or Iran (pop. 65 million, five million larger than the UK)? Why is the G8 only about economic power? Don’t people matter?

The meetings are soon forgotten and it’s just as well. Maybe this year’s G8 will be the last G8, but I doubt it. The largely western nations’ belief that they hold the strings of the world will continue for years. Arrogance dies hard.

This year did mark something a little different. It was the first time all agreed that something needed to be done about greenhouse gases. The growth of greenhouse gases needs to be stopped then brought down. They didn’t agree, however, to real commitments, timetables or emission caps. They did agree to George Bush’s “goals” idea on cutting emissions which are just voluntary of course.

We all have goals in life and unfortunately rarely meet them. In 2005 G8 leaders agreed that the science behind global warming was sufficient to justify action. The US didn’t take any.

But at least these leaders were in the same room, talking. That’s a start. By the time the Next Occupant replaces the Current Occupant (as columnist/humorist/author/musician/generally talented guy Garrison Keillor likes to call George W. Bush) the US and every other nation on the planet should be well on its way in its attempt to save itself. Can it? I don’t know.