The G-8 meeting in Hokkaido, Japan, has endorsed a plan for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions to combat climate change. The plan is to cut emissions by half by 2050. But then no base year has been set-ideally it should have been 1990, the recognized baseline in all climate change negotiations from Rio through Kyoto to now. Second, commitment is non-binding-meaning as in Bali last year and several meetings before that this is a pious resolution. The outcome is obviously a trade-off between the European Union (EU) and the US. The EU, to its credit, has over the years shown an admirable commitment to reducing emissions without riders, but the US has steadfastly refused to take the matter seriously.

This is where the issue of India, China and other developing and emerging economies come in. At the behest of the US, all commitments still come with the rider that India and China must also undertake to cut emissions, but that is a less than fair demand. G-5 countries-India, China, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa-have iterated that, at least to begin with, developed countries, not just G-8, must show the way by undertaking unilateral emissions cuts, because in the process of developing they have been responsible for sending up by far the largest part of greenhouse gases that are now, causing climate change.

There is another issue. The developed world must help the developing countries to cut emissions through funding and technology transfer. And this cannot be on the basis of aid. It must be in the form of a tax that the North pays for its historical role in causing anthropogenic climate change and for imperialist stifling of the developing world, which now needs the emissions space to develop. The conference of parties will meet in Copenhagen next year to fix the roadmap for a post-2012 (post-Kyoto) agreement. There was a time when the G-7, represent the world’s largest economies-Russia was co-opted as a reward for dumping communism, but not anymore.

The G-8 represents the old economic powers, not the new ones. If you are worrying about the scale of the forthcoming global downturn, what China does is as important as what the US or the EU does, for it is adding more demand to the world than either the US or Europe. If you are worried about the price of oil, what matters is the capacity of West Asia to produce more, and the additional demand from China and India. If you are worried about carbon emissions in 2050, what the G-8 pledges or doesn’t is marginally relevant.

The US would still matter a lot not just as the world’s second largest economy but also because of its technical and educational competence. It would tie with the UK as the world’s richest country in terms of GDP per head. Social and environmental pressures on China and India will restrict their growth but what about the chaos that Indonesia has experienced? And could Turkey (and the UK) really become bigger than Germany? Certainly and prediction of the world more than 40 year on has to be taken with an appropriate quantity of salt. But short of such a catastrophe, this sort of new world order is a plausible outline.