The failure of the G-8 summit last week to make substantive progress on addressing climate change is no big surprise. Leaders of rich countries still lack the courage to try to bring along the mass of their skeptical citizenries to sacrifice in the short term to curb man’s role in climate change. The recession makes it even tougher. Economic anxiety trumps all.

And developing countries, especially China and India, are leery of entering into any agreements that would slow their breakneck growth, which their leaders see as necessary to maintain social order. So they demand aid from rich countries to implement major climate-change programs. While the latter are so far remarkably noncommittal — there’s little pressure from rich nations’ citizens to provide the money! — such aid will be necessary.

In the United States, such tough actions as putting tariffs on goods from countries that don’t limit their carbon emissions are bound to be unpopular because many fear steep price rises from them.

Probably the most effective thing that the U.S. could do to deal with the climate change caused by burning of fossil fuels would also be the simplest –– levy a hefty tax on gasoline. That would quickly encourage the development of alternative fuels and be a user fee — the fairest way to levy a tax. It would show the world we’re serious.

But politicians, while mouthing rhetoric about the menace of global warming, have not yet evidenced the courage to ask people to do inconvenient things. Consider the big climate bill that recently passed the House. While better than nothing, its excessive avoidance of truly rigorous programs to achieve long-term carbon-dioxide reductions and its inclusion of too much pork with little to do with climate change is depressing. Indeed, the main intention of the package almost seems to be to obfuscate that sacrifices are needed. The same thing applies in varying intensities in other countries. (And note that parts of the “stimulus” package actually encourage energy waste through supporting sprawl development.)

Still, the negotiations at the G-8 last week were but a way station. There will be further talks at the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh in September and more after that leading up to the big climate-change meeting in Copenhagen in December, which is supposed to set new targets. Let us hope that the United Nations’ warnings that the world must avoid the potentially catastrophic effects of a predicted average 2-degree temperature rise are taken more seriously by then.