The derision that greeted President George W. Bush’s pre-Group of Eight speech on global warming last week was understandable. His remarks did signal a new willingness to work towards international co-operation on greenhouse-gas abatement, but they came six years late and merely point towards talks about aspirations. What Mr Bush seems to have in mind, in the fullness of time, is a far looser regime than the one the European Union and other Kyoto protocol ratifiers entered into long ago. Since he is arriving at the issue after everybody else, and even now with only the vaguest of proposals, his assertion of American leadership on the subject was indeed laughable.

But when you have finished laughing, consider an unsettling possibility: that the Kyoto approach to climate change does need to be abandoned and Mr Bush has been right all along. The White House has been unforgivably slow on the matter, but the policy the president is inching towards may make better sense.