ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that in 1979 the G7 summit created the global governance of climate change, forming a control regime more ambitious and effective than any before or since. It continued to control carbon through its moves on the economy, energy, and the environment, with diminishing force after 1980 until Germany and Britain identified the environment as an issue in its own right at the 1984 London Summit. In its climate change performance, the 1979 Tokyo Summit was a striking, historic success, given the state of the physical problem, consensus knowledge about it, and the context of global governance at the time. After a subsequent four-year demise in G7 climate governance, driven by the diversion of a divisive new cold war, the G7 began to revive its attention in 1984 as it rediscovered that those vulnerabilities remained. Only in 1984 did a classic Middle East energy shock return, to support Germany's leadership on the environment at the London Summit.
