They came, they jawed, they failed to conquer

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: was already slipping. (Here, though, Japan can hold its head higher: in May it hosted a big African aid gathering, promising substantially to increase aid and technology transfer.)

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.