frogblog

The G8 is meeting again, this time in Japan, and deciding what it wants to see happening in the world over the next few months.  As a concept the G8 always irritates me irrationally.  It’s kind of like the school yard bullies getting together and deciding a school’s lunch distribution policy.  Yes, they might have the power to enforce their decrees, being the 8 wealthiest countries, but that hardly means they are in the best position to come to an impartial solution.

On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with a group of democratic leaders of powerful governments coming together and devising a strategy on working together for common goals.  It’s just a shame that the thing that they have on common and that is motivating them to work together is wealth and power, rather than shared ideals.

Every big summit of this nature seems to have a big theme that drives momentum at the summit.  Some years it is one of the leaders’ choosing and others it comes from grass roots movements of people (take for instance the Gleneagles aid pledge).  Treehugger has a brief plea that the theme this time will include a formal commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but it doesn’t seem very hopeful:

While the official G8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit website has surprisingly little real information in English related to GHG emissions, there is a little presentation about the wonders of nuclear energy. Not suprisingly, the powers that be still seem to be a little out of touch with the opinions of the little people. However, they do have a “Carbon Offsetter’S-MART” page on the site which allows those visiting the Summit to offset their carbon emissions.

The Guardian editorial describes this year’s theme as a string of ‘f’ words: food, fuel and finance. (It sounds a lot like New Zealand’s election issues!)

At a time when the world economy could do with leadership, it is unlikely to get it. A similar drift is likely to beset those recent G8 priorities of aid and climate change. The all-important summit agreement currently in draft does not even mention the aid figures pledged at Gleneagles. That is a disgraceful backtracking on previously cast-iron promises and must be made good. Almost as little could happen on climate change; at most a fund for green technology in poor countries. This G8 shows every sign of being summed up by a fourth F-word: feeble.

Meanwhile the Guardian’s economics editor gets some even stronger language out of the dictionary:

If the G8 was doing its job properly, this week’s communique would be rather shorter than usual. It would say the world is about to be battered by a triple crunch of a credit-fuelled financial crisis, galloping climate change and - even in the absence of speculation - a long-term increase in energy prices caused by the imminence of peak oil.

We’ll wait to see.  I’ve only covered some of the pessimistic views but that’s probably because I think the G8 could achieve so much more than the limited goals it always sets itself.

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