With deepest apologies to INXS.

Congregate, heads of state, don’t be late, big G8
Planet’s fate, cannot wait,
Don’t stall debate or hesitate, designate your carbon rate
A one world state, Italianate, on July 8, won’t abrogate
A gentle trait, a balding pate, a girlish gait, pontificate
We’ll predicate our specs ornate, officiate, not deviate
Green groups berate, gesticulate, packed in a crate, their sounds abate.
Congregate, heads of state, pasta ate, it was great.

Fritter away more of your time by checking out previous verses.

 Boom boom, ain’t it G8 to be crazy.WhiteHouse.gov

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G8 officials don't want Silvio Berlusconi to play a leading role in any climate talks that may occur this summer during the July summit in Italy. (Photo Livio Anticoli, Courtesy Prime Minister of Italy's Office)

Barack Obama has a problem, one he shares with Gordon Brown. And, for that matter, with Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, Stephen Harper, and even Lula da Silva.

The problem these A-list world leaders are dealing with is bald, perma-tanned, and once worked as a cruise ship crooner. Oh yes, and he just happens to be prime minister of Italy, one of the most colorful (and that's not just his tan) and controversial figures ever to have lead a major western country.

A media tycoon and one of Italy's richest men, Silvio Berlusconi has a knack for hitting the headlines, most recently for appointing Mara Carafagna -- a former topless model who celebrates Sarah Palin as one of her political heroes -- as his spokeswoman. And he has a talent, too, for giving rise to embarrassment.

Last summer, in an infamous incident, the red face belonged to George W. Bush, whose staff had to apologize for "an unfortunate mistake" after they issued a press kit for the G8 summit that described the Italian premier as "one of the most controversial leaders in the history of a country known for government corruption and vice."

Berlusconi, it went on, "was hated by many, but respected by all at least for his personal style" and was "regarded by many as a political dilettante who gained his high office only through use of his considerable influence on the national media." And all this just a month after Bush had warmly hailed Berlusconi as "a good friend."

But to get to the point, the Italian leader poses a threat to President Obama's latest attempt to galvanize the glacially slow international negotiations on a new climate treaty, which is the topic for an ongoing international gathering in Bonn. At Obama's suggestion, the leaders of the world's 16 most important economies - both developed and developing - are to hold a special summit designed to inject high level political will into the process.

The question was where and when they could meet soon enough to have an early enough impact on the talks leading up to the make-or-break negotiating session in Copenhagen this December. The obvious answer was to meet immediately before or after July's G8 summit, when most of them would be together anyway, either as leaders of the eight major industrialized economies that meet each year or as the heads of the big developing countries that have recently been regularly invited to join them.

The venue of the meeting rotates each year around the G8 countries. This summer it is to be held on a rocky granite island renowned for its beaches -- La Maddalena off of Sardinia. Which means, as you will have guessed, that the summit will be held in Italy and that Mr Berlusconi, as host, would normally chair it.

The trouble is that the irrepressible Italian leader seems to be far from keen on urgently combatting climate change. Five years ago, during an earlier spell as premier, he failed altogether to turn up to a meeting of European environment ministers in Milan to make a crucial speech backing the Kyoto Protocol. And since the outbreak of the financial crisis this autumn, he has led attempts to persuade the European Union countries to water down measures to tackle global warming. In December he told journalists that it was "absurd to speak of emissions when there is a crisis going on", adding: "It's like someone with pneumonia thinking about having a perm."

He is, admittedly, not alone. Coal-dependent Poland's premier, Donald Tusk, has joined Berlusconi in trying to obstruct European action ("We think that the simplistic 'polluter pays' principle is unacceptable," he says.) And the Czech president, Vaclav Klaus, is an out and out global warming naysayer, telling a conference of 600 climate change 'deniers' in Washington last month that those advocating action want "to stop economic growth and return mankind several centuries back."

But Berlusconi is a much bigger fish than either and so could step into the chief climate villain spot -- a position only recently vacated by Bush. All this means that his fellow G8 leaders do not want him in charge for any climate negotiations that occur at La Maddalena this summer. "He will be the host of the meeting, but not the chair," one well-placed source tells me. But they have yet to decide who will take his place.

The G8 countries need to sort it out soon. The meeting will be all the more important because the leaders attending the G20 meeting in London this week will do no more than issue warm words on the need for a climate deal in Copenhagen and to build a low carbon economy. They will instead address the struggling global economy and leave the real talking on climate to La Maddalena -- but not, it is to be hoped, to Mr. Berlusconi.

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After days of feasts -- intellectual, social, and culinary -- my mind is too scrambled to put together a more structured column. Instead, here are some impressions and observations from Terra Madre while they are still fresh, written on a train ride between Turin and Florence. There is more to report; look for additional blog posts next week.

"We are the world's largest multinational," declared Carlo Petrini. He was addressing an international crowd of 7,000 food producers, chefs, and activists at Slow Food's biennial gathering in Turin.

The scene had the feel of a United Nations confab. We were assembled in an arena built for the 2006 Winter Olympics. Everyone wore headphones tuned to simultaneous translations in one of eight languages. From where I sat in the nosebleed seats (floor seating was reserved for delegates -- no press allowed), Petrini cut a tiny figure, gesturing expansively as he spoke. But there were several giant television screens suspended high above the crowd, from which I could see the puckish twinkle in his eye as he made his points.

Petrini and his comrades started Slow Food in 1986, aghast at the idea of a McDonald's opening just below Rome's Spanish Steps. They declared a universal "right to flavor" and set themselves the task of defending the diversity of global foodways against encroaching homogenization.

By "largest multinational," Petrini must have meant the global network of "food communities" represented by (but not encompassed by) Slow Food -- and not the organization itself. Amid news of accelerating global financial turmoil, the remark resonated. "The economy of financial wizardry, the spectral economy, is collapsing before us," he declared. "You are the real economy -- the economy of the land." The crowd erupted into applause.

I've heard Petrini speak several times now, and read at his book, Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, and Fair. He's a charming but at times maddeningly impressionistic, unstructured thinker. He often expresses himself in florid, elaborate metaphors that seem to go nowhere. He's full of declarations of what "must" happen (we must ensure that food producers receive a fair price, etc.), but light on ideas of how to make things happen. I often find his liberal use of words like "good" and "virtuous" reductive and vaguely defined.

But at this particular speech, I felt like I got Petrini. He brings people together. He creates a sense of community among broadly diverse factions. In the United States and Europe, Slow Food struggles with a reputation for elitism, fending off charges that it's a food-and-wine club whose events price out all but the well-to-do. To be sure, America's wealth was demonstrated by the huge contingent of delegates, numbering some 800 (more than any other nation besides Italy itself). But Petrini assembled at Terra Madre an impressive display of cultural diversity: food artisans and smallholder farmers fighting to protect traditional livelihoods, alongside North American back-to-the-landers striving to revive lost traditions and establish new ones. These were elites, to be sure, only not of the Nieman Marcus variety.

A trip through the thicket of Petrini's metaphors often enough leads to a kind of visionary poetry. He works his magic both among the globe's far-flung food producers, and also between producers and consumers. (His act sometimes falls flat -- as it did in an ill-starred trip to San Francisco in 2007.)

I also felt like I understood Slow Food a little more than I had in the past. Its representatives, including Petrini, sometimes confuse the organization itself with the loose, hydra-headed movement to challenge the hegemony of globalized, corporate-controlled, industrial food. Slow Food does not embody the movement -- but it forms a valuable part. It is in many ways a high-end dining club, but it's also more than that. At its best, it foments solidarity between the various activists, producers, and consumers across the globe working to create on-the-ground alternatives to industrial food. It also provides a vital public platform for cogent, sharp-edged critics of the food system like Vandana Shiva.

"If you haven't noticed yet, Slow Food is about to get political!" announced Erika Lesser, executive director of Slow Food USA. She was addressing the Slow Food USA chapter -- for one day, Terra Madre had broken into meetings of regional and national contingents.

Few could have missed the political turn. Unlike many Slow Food USA events I've been to, there were few or no odes to the transformative power of a perfect peach. Here, speakers focused on how to broaden access to healthy, ecologically raised food.

Josh Viertel, Slow Food USA's new president, set the tone. He announced that the organization would from now forward pursue two main priorities: youth organizing and social justice. "Our food system disproportionately hurts poor people and people of color, and alternatives aren't accessible to those groups," he said.

He said that in the past, the group had focused its rhetoric on values: commitment to "good, clean, and fair food," for example. From now on, it would emphasize rights. "Access to good, clean, and fair food is not a privilege," he declared. "It's a right, and we have to make that clear." That message, he insisted, was the most important one that delegates could bring back to their communities.

He also vowed that Slow Food USA would work to avoid doing something it has been accused of doing in the past: suck the air out the sustainable-food movement by hoarding resources and media attention at the expense of social-justice activists.

As if to demonstrate Viertel's vision, an impressive array of U.S. farmers and food-justice activists took the floor. Representatives of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers gave a brief, hard-hitting take on the dire state of labor conditions in industrial-vegetable farm fields (and increasingly, large-scale organic fields). Ian Marvy, founder and executive director of Added Value (here's a feature I did on them a couple of years ago), also spoke inspiringly. His group operates a variety of youth-oriented food programs in a Brooklyn neighborhood whose median wage lies well below the poverty line, including a CSA and farmers market fed by a three-acre neighborhood farm.

But Will Allen and his daughter Erika of Growing Power stole the show. Growing Power brings healthy food, much of it grown on inner-city farms and garden plots, into low-income neighborhoods in Chicago and Milwaukee. The Allens are widely hailed for their highly productive farming techniques, which range from worm-based composting to aquaculture, as well as for creating skilled, responsible jobs for inner-city youth. Still basking in the glow of his recently announced MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, Will Allen pointed out that economic collapse in inner-city areas had left behind food deserts and exposed people "to the worst kind of food possible and a level of everyday violence that few of you have ever experienced."

Joining the effort to rebuild healthy food economies in such areas is a responsibility for more-privileged people, he said. He added: "I'm glad to see that Slow Food is beginning to accept that responsibility."

Erika Allen wrapped up with a challenge: "How are you fighting racism in your food community?"

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How do you solve a problem like Silvio?

The European Union is running out of landfill space and faces a looming trash problem. All member nations have been directed to reduce landfill-bound trash 35 percent of 1995 levels by 2020, but many nations have slim chances of meeting that target; Italy, Spain, Greece, and Britain currently send more than 60 percent of their rubbish to landfills. Hopefully, E.U. trash laggards will look to the example of Hamburg, Germany: the city sent the majority of its garbage to landfills until 2000, when it decided to invest in top-notch recycling programs and low-polluting incinerators. Today, Hamburg produces less garbage than it did 10 years ago, despite population growth. The city recently agreed to a short-term deal to take 700 tons of garbage a day from Naples, Italy, where the streets are overflowing with refuse that the mafia-controlled trash industry has elected not to pick up.

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After banning nuclear power for two decades, Italy has announced plans to build a new wave of nuclear plants. Concerns about oil prices, energy security, and fossil-fuel emissions contributed to the about-face by the world's largest net importer of electricity. "Only nuclear plants safely produce energy on a vast scale with competitive costs, respecting the environment," the country's minister of economic development said Thursday. But the switcharoo won't solve any short-term problems: the government may need legal action to turn over the popular public referendum that closed the country's nuclear plants in 1987, and new plants take about 20 years to build. Italy also needs to figure out how to deal with its existing radioactive waste (provided pawning it off on the U.S. doesn't work out). And the government should prepare for pushback: the nuclear-power plan is, says the director of Greenpeace Italy, "a declaration of war."

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Some batches of Italy's famous buffalo mozzarella cheese have been tainted with dioxin, leading to alarm in the nation's $500 million mozzarella industry. The source of the contamination? Buffalo near Naples are likely grazing in soil tainted with dioxin from piles of toxic garbage that the mafia-controlled trash business can't, or won't, get under control.

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Know how the U.S. hasn't even figured out a long-term solution for its own nuclear waste? Perhaps importing 20,000 tons of radioactive material from Italy might not be the best idea. Not to mention that we don't want to do the Italians any favors until they decriminalize crotch-grabbing.

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The ongoing trash problem in Naples, Italy, has become so bad that the Italian army has been called in to bulldoze piles of rubbish that were blocking entry to city schools. Garbage collection stopped more than two weeks ago, for the simple reason that all of the area dumps are full to overflowing. The city of 2 million creates some 8,000 metric tons of trash every day; an estimated 100,000 tons of garbage has accumulated in the streets, and some has been lit on fire, releasing noxious fumes. Many blame the severity of the situation on the mafia, which has tight control of the trash business, profits from illegal transport and dumping of waste, and is accused of sabotaging plans for a new incinerator. Officials' attempts to solve the problem by reopening a landfill long closed for health concerns have been met by violent protests; government officials have been hung in effigy from lampposts, wearing placards that say "Good riddance to this rubbish."

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In Milan, congestion pricing is the new black. (Oh, like you have a better fashion pun?) Under Milan's new plan, which kicks off as a one-year trial, vehicles driving into the urban center on weekdays between 7:30 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. must pay up to $14 per day; low-polluting cars are exempt from the charge. Milan has the third-highest number of cars per capita in Europe, and some 89,000 cars enter the city center every day. The money raised will be put toward public transportation and bicycle paths, and Mayor Letizia Moratti hopes pollution will be reduced by 30 percent and traffic by 10 percent. On the first day of the scheme, traffic was estimated to be 40 percent lower than normal; the plan will be truly tested next week, when schools and businesses get back into full post-holiday swing.

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Congratulations to Castiglione di Cervia, Italy, the first place in modern Europe to feel one dismal effect of a warming world: a tropical disease out of its natural habitat. This summer, more than 100 people in the village of 2,000 came down with fever, exhaustion, and terrible bone pain later found to be caused by chikungunya, a disease spread by warm-climate-lovin' tiger mosquitoes. "Climate change creates conditions that make it easier for this mosquito to survive and it opens the door to diseases that didn't exist here previously," says Dr. Roberto Bertollini of the World Health Organization. "This is a real issue. Now, today. It is not something a crazy environmentalist is warning about."

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The Montreal Protocol turned 20 this weekend -- and you forgot to get it a gift, didn't you. As nearly 200 nations convene this week to discuss the protocol, which has been successful in spurring an international phaseout of ozone-depleting chemicals, it has been lauded by no less a person than Pope Benedict XVI, who declared on Sunday, "In the last two decades, thanks to an exemplary collaboration in the international community among politics, science, and economics, important results have been obtained with positive results for current and future generations." Da pope is on an eco-roll, having installed solar power at the Vatican and preached the green gospel to Italy's yoots. He may also soon preside over the world's first carbon-neutral state, as cardinals recently accepted a Hungarian startup's offer to offset the Vatican's emissions by planting trees.

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