Tony Blair, this year's president of the Group of Eight industrial powers, looks once more to be stranded somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, this time over climate change. Leaks of the draft plan on global warming from next month's G8 summit at Gleneagles show it to have been holed below the (rising) waterline by US objections.

Virtually all that was active in this action plan has been swept into the inert limbo of square brackets - meaning there is still no agreement on its inclusion - while much of what remains is pious waffle. His hopes for radical measures to combat climate change and determination to get George W. Bush on board seem to have collided. The summit simply has to do better than that.