Japan cools the climate waters
has been widely criticised as too weak - and not just by environmentalists, but by the EU environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas, and implicitly by the UN's top climate official, Yvo de Boer.
Under the , Japan pledged to cut emissions by 6% by - well, by around now, in fact.
In fact its emissions have risen in recent years - it's not the only Kyoto country in that situation - so its pledge to cut emissions by 15% from 2005 levels by 2020, when untangled, takes it only 2% beyond the Kyoto 6% pledge in a further 11 years.
Confused? If so, I'm think that may be part of the point.
Until a few years back, everything in the UN climate treaty framework was calculated with regard to 1990 - a clear and simple baseline against which every commitment could be measured and compared.
Japan has never liked the 1990 baseline, and there are some good reasons for that. With few indigenous energy sources, and caught out by the 1970s oil crisis, it made huge gains in energy efficiency before 1990.
In contrast, the bulk of European emission cuts came immediately after 1990 when Soviet bloc economies collapsed, Germany re-unified and the UK put its recently-developed North Sea gas resources to use.
Hence Japan's current choice of a later year - 2005 - against which to measure its latest 15% pledge. ; and President Obama's pre-election promises, which have not yet gained the status of a national target, referred to 2007.
Does this profusion of base years matter? Absolutely.
One reason is that the change of baseline year allowed Japan's Prime Minister Taro Aso to claim that his commitment matches . It does, approximately, if you start from here - but not if you start from 1990, since when EU emissions have fallen and Japan's risen.
More profoundly, it creates an environment in which politicians can eternally start anew, forgetting what their predecessors promised in 1992 or 1997 - promises that are supposed to be internationally binding commitments.
Jenson Button, who currently leads the Formula One motor-racing championship, has to win races over the full distance. The rules don't allow for him to say "well I was fastest over the last 20 laps, so I win the race" - and that is basically what Mr Aso, Mr Rudd and (potentially) Mr Obama are trying to do.
It may make governments look better against a domestic landscape of economic turmoil and business desperation; but it surely plays very differently on the international stage, where the support of the poorest countries is a precondition for securing a climate pact at December's Copenhagen meeting.
By accident or design, Mr Aso chose to announce his 2020 goal during the second week of an important , a staging post on the road to Copenhagen.
It came a day after green groups lambasted EU finance ministers for not stumping up what to fund climate programmes in developing countries.
In terms of its climate rhetoric, the industrialised world is as healthy as it has ever been.
As we come closer to the key Copenhagen summit, fewer and fewer of the politicians' fine words are being matched by their deeds - and that must make prospects of a real deal in Copenhagen progressively slimmer and slimmer.
I'm Richard Black, environment correspondent for the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News website. This is my take on what's happening to our shared environment as the human population grows and our use of nature's resources increases.
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