“It is not real in any language. We are looking for accountable language and numbers. I might be be a rock star, but I can count.”
Bono

He is talking about the G8 announcement on aid for AIDS in Africa, a 25 page document that manages to have no committments whatsoever in it, but he might as well be talking about the Bush global warming ‘initiative’.
These announcements are nothing more than disinformation, stalls and denial campaigns, in other words, carefully crafted lies designed to keep us from actually doing anything. This has become a pattern among politicians of all stripes worldwide. The problem is that we face a worldwide, long term crisis that requires concrete collective action now. And the nationalistic political systems we have in place are simply not up to the task of working on a global scale.
As a capitalist, I think the best hope is that some of the major multi-national businesses realize it is in their interest to deal with this, not waiting for governments to act. This may be driven by profit or the need to protect their markets but it has to happen. Unfortunately the big oil companies are collectively short-sighted from a strategic perspective because they know that nothing can replace the short term cash cow they are riding. Until they come around and stop their lobbying and funding of massive disinformation campaigns, progress will be slow and deadly.
I realize that my statements regarding global corporations will horrify some but I have to ask: Who else is going to lead it? There is a reason why most speculative fiction (near term sci-fi) writers usually project a world run by global conglomerates- they cannot see any other obvious future.