Once again we have watched the world’s richest nations – the G8 - come together for their annual summit. Once again, we watched them talk, pontificate, but fail to deliver on the key issues up for discussion. Last year they failed on debt, aid and climate change. This year, by focussing on energy security, they have undermined what little progress has been made on issues such as climate change.

But before we look at energy security and what this year’s summit achieved, we need to examine what has happened since last year’s G8 Summit in Gleneagles in Scotland. Hosted by Tony Blair, the Gleneagles meeting was one of the most important international meetings in recent years as the G8 promised radical action on alleviating poverty, canceling debt and climate change.

At their meeting last year, the G8 made these promises on aid: “We have agreed to double aid for Africa by 2010. Aid for all developing countries will increase, according to the OECD, by around $50bn per year by 2010, of which at least $25bn extra per year for Africa.”

They promised on debt: “The G8 has also agreed that all of the debts owed by eligible heavily indebted poor countries … should be cancelled”. They promised on climate: “We have issued a statement setting out our common purpose in tackling climate change, promoting clean energy and achieving sustainable development”.

So what have they achieved on aid? According to the development charity, Oxfam, the promise to increase aid by $50 billion annually by 2010 is “only half of what the UN calculates is required by 2010 to reach the Millennium Development Goals. It will take rich countries to the point where they are giving 0.36 per cent of their gross national income, exactly half of the 0.7 per cent target they all signed up to over 30 years ago in 1970”.

Barbara Stocking, the Director of Oxfam says that: “At the current rate of progress real aid is not rising nearly fast enough across the G8 countries to meet their Gleneagles aid commitment to increase by $50 billion by 2010. The G8 must make clear how and when they will deliver real aid increases, to pay for vital services such as health and education”.

On debt there have been some improvements with the International Monetary Fund cancelling the debt of 19 of the world’s poorest countries. The World Development Movement (WDM) is a non-governmental organization that works to protect the world’s poor. It welcomes debt relief to the 19 countries, but says many more countries “will have to wait years to benefit because of the damaging economic hurdles they must jump first”. WDM argues that the G8’s “most important promise, that poor countries would be allowed to decide their own economic policies, has been broken”. 

“If the G8 had really meant it” continues the WDM “they would have proposed abolishing all the harmful economic strings - like privatisation and liberalisation - attached to World Bank and International Monetary Fund loans, grants and debt relief. This did not happen. Providing more money for the poor will not work unless there is an end to these policies”.

They are not alone in their criticism. A new campaign group, DATA, which stands for Debt, Aid, Trade, Africa, is headed by the popstar and Africa campaigner Bono. It adds that progress on the G8 Gleneagles commitments so far have been "painfully slow, proceeding at best at half-pace". DATA’s executive director Jamie Drummond, says: “The G8 strode forward down the promised path of debt, but have shuffled with a halting half-pace on aid, while falling backwards on trade”.

And finally what about action on climate change? Well, in short, there has not really been any. Oxfam says simply that there has been “all talk and no action” from the G8.

Therefore the G8 leaders have failed on what they said they would deliver last year. It does not bode well for this year’s summit. Ironically to make matters worse, to achieve the goal of this year’s summit – that of energy security, the leaders will undermine many of the goals of last year’s summit even further– primarily climate change, debt reduction and poverty alleviation.

Despite this the G8 says it is building on the successes of what was achieved last year. The draft communiqué for the G8 Summit on energy security says that “We reaffirm our commitment to implement and build upon the agreements in the area of energy reached at previous G8 summits, including in Gleneagles”. So we have classic political doublespeak, which is saying one thing, but doing the exact opposite.

Let’s look at climate change as an example. If the G8 leaders were serious about climate change they would be putting forward a plan that called for disinvestment from fossil fuels into renewables and clean energy, as they committed themselves to at Gleneagles. They would be looking at decentralized energy solutions that could especially help poorer nations develop in a sustainable way.

However they are calling for the exact opposite. The plan says that “significant investment resources are needed to create an efficient and shock-proof system of global energy supply”.  The G8 then says it “should jointly contribute” to the effective mobilization of some 17 trillion US dollars until 2030, the majority of which will be ploughed into fossils fuels and nuclear energy. The G8 is also calling for a global effort to reshape regulatory regimes and remove “unjustified and administrative barriers”.

These legal and regulatory changes will assist the private sector in finding more oil and gas reserves, and assist increasing oil and gas production and refining. This fossil fuel extraction will rapidly increase greenhouse gas emissions that can only lead to dangerous climate change. Ironically even the G8's own 2005 Communiqué on Climate Change, Clean Energy and Sustainable Development warns against doing this.

But the more we carry on trying to find ever-depleting reserves of oil rather than investing in alternative energy sources, the more we get locked into the current cycle of over-dependence on a commodity whose price keeps on rising. Currently the oil price stands around $75 per barrel. The more the oil price increases the harder it will be for the poorest countries to develop, especially if they have to import oil to develop.

Therefore soaring oil prices will undermine what progress there has been on debt cancellation and poverty eradication. The poorest countries will have to divert resources away from combating HIV/AIDS and improving primary education to paying for oil imports.

The G8 leaders are also backing nuclear power.  “We believe that the development of nuclear energy would promote the global energy security”...” and “we intend to make additional joint efforts to ensure non-discriminatory access to this energy source.”

The G8 cannot get away from the fact that the civil nuclear industry and military nuclear weapons are intrinsically linked, so expanding civil nuclear power will undermine efforts to control the spread of nuclear weapons and to promote global security.

Last week in a move likely to be copied by other G8 countries, Britain signaled its intention to build a new generation of nuclear power plants at the end of six month review by Tony Blair’s government. Critics have pointed out that if investors back nuclear power this is likely to starve clean and renewable energy sources such as solar and wind.

But Blair is backing nuclear, just as the rest of the G8 will be doing so soon. All the leaders are backing oil too in their energy security plan. It is not surprising that the G8 plan is being met with hostility. To give you just one example: Youth organizations from 21 countries have issued a statement calling on the G8 to abandon its disastrous “Energy Security” strategy. Over fifty youth organizations say the G8 plan of action, “is in direct contradiction to steps taken by the G8 in 2005 to address human induced global climate change and global poverty, and as such an outrageous abdication of leadership by the G8 leaders. From the most powerful political leaders on Earth, we demand better”.

Instead of things getting better, though, they will get worse. When the G8’s plan of action was released yesterday it sought to “create”, “maintain”, “encourage”, “expand” and “develop” oil and gas reserves, as well as production, processing and transportation capacity.

“Last year the G8 got together to discuss fighting climate change, this year they put out a plan that will fuel climate chaos,” says Graham Saul, International Program Director for Oil Change International. “G8 Leaders are playing Russian roulette with climate chaos. Like addicts in denial, they are putting future generations in jeopardy in order to feed their oil addiction. We need a new energy revolution, not more public hand-outs to Big Oil.”