JAPAN:THE PICTURESQUE lakeside resort of Toyako in Japan's northern island of Hokkaido is the setting for this year's Group of Eight summit meeting, which kicks off today smothered in the country's largest security operation in years, writes David McNeill.
About 21,000 police have been deployed to protect the leaders of host nation Japan, Britain, Germany, Canada, France, Italy, Russia and the US.
Destroyers and aircraft are patrolling off the coast of Hokkaido and a no-fly zone has been imposed over the resort, amid fears that a hijacked plane could plough into the mountain-top Windsor Hotel Toya, where the leaders are staying.
Protesters, activists and journalists are being kept miles away from the summit venue in government-designated campsites.
Some, including anti-G8 political scientists Susan George and Walden Bello, have complained of lengthy airport interrogations, and a group of trade unionists from South Korea was barred from entering the country.
Inside the summit's security bubble, climate change will top the agenda, although African development, nuclear proliferation, terrorism and the global financial meltdown are also up for discussion.
The summit's environmental theme is symbolised by its official logo: green leaves sprouting from a seed in blue earth. Many desperately want the G8 nations to stop the planet cooking by announcing a shared goal of halving global CO2 emissions by 2050.
But with the world's two strongest economies led by lame duck leaders, two of its worst polluters denied a place at the G8 table and fierce squabbling between the developed and developing countries over who should act first on climate change, agreement on even that modest objective is likely to be elusive.
Although Japanese prime minister Yasuo Fukuda declared this year that Japan will lead the way toward a low-carbon future with a 60-80 per cent emissions cut, he is considered too politically weak to nudge the rest of the world toward that goal.
Many political pundits doubt that he will survive until the next G8 meeting.
George W Bush, a famously reluctant convert to the climate change cause who has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, will of course have retired to his Texas ranch by then. Mr Bush effectively killed expectations of a G8 breakthrough in April when he proposed merely halting US emissions by 2025, a proposal dubbed "Neanderthal" by Germany's environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel.
Activists blame the US president for trying to drive a wedge through this week's event by pushing for a watered down climate-change deal, with 16 of the top greenhouse gas emitters outside the G8 framework.
Mr Bush will meet the leaders of these countries at the major economics meeting on Wednesday, diluting any G8 agreement that may be reached.
"We are all just waiting for him to go before progress can be made," said Yurika Ayukawa, vice-chairwoman of G8 Summit NGO Forum, an umbrella group of over 100 Japanese NGOs.
"We fear that the Hokkaido meeting will be a step backwards from last year." At the 2007 G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany agreed to "seriously consider" a plan to halve emissions by 2050.
Washington has refused to sign up to a long-term climate-change deal without agreement from developing countries like China and India, which want the rich nations to commit first to specific mid-term goals.
Neither country is a G8 member, although they have been invited to "outreach" meetings, along with Brazil, Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Australia, South Africa and several other African nations.
The exclusion of China, which is now a larger economy than Italy and is believed to have overtaken the US last year as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, particularly rankles among G8 critics.
"Without China and India at the top table, the G8 is a shameful sham," said Kevin Rafferty, former managing editor of publications at the World Bank in the Japan Times last week. "It has long since passed its sell-by date as a body that pretends to world leadership."
Even if a climate change deal can be cobbled together, many environmentalists now believe that Japan's 2050 emissions goal is too modest. US researchers warned last month that the Arctic summer ice-cap may disappear 60 years earlier than expected in 2013, an announcement made just as the world's leaders were pleading with Saudi Arabia to push up oil production.
All that adds up to a flaccid affair, even for an annual conference that has for many become increasingly bloated and irrelevant since it began as a fireside chat in Rambouillet over 30 years ago.
But given the enormous expense of staging the G8 event, Mr Fukuda will be under intense pressure to pull something out of the bag.
Japan's last G8 conference in 2000 cost its taxpayers $750 million dollars, and the final price tag for Hokkaido is likely to be not far off that figure.
The Japanese leader will be hoping that he doesn't go down as the host of another G8 disaster.