The world's top economic leaders are asking oil producers to pump more crude and are demanding better market data to determine why oil costs have roared to levels that imperil the best growth prospects in 30 years.
The focus on oil, which topped $50 a barrel while the Group of Seven finance ministers and central bank chiefs met last Friday, stole some of the spotlight from historic talks between China and the elite economic club that took place after the formal session.
China's attendance at the G7 dinner in Washington marked a significant upgrade of dialogue between the emerging Asian giant and established world powers on economic issues and moves to free up China's controversial fixed currency regime.
While China pledged to keep shoring up its financial system to safely withstand a freer currency, it gave no assurances or timetable for relinquishing its tight peg to the US dollar.
Energy costs were clearly the ministers' paramount worry. "Oil prices are high and remain a risk," the officials from the United States, Britain, Japan, France, Germany, Italy and Canada said in a closing communique after hours of talks.
"So first, we call on oil producers to provide adequate supplies to ensure that prices moderate," they said in their closing communique. "Second, it is important consumer nations increase energy efficiency."
Benchmark crude oil prices have risen some 20 per cent since G7 finance ministers made a similar call for higher production at a meeting in New York in May, contributing to a slowing in growth in the US and Japan in the second quarter.
"We are urging the countries with reserves to do everything they can to make sure that the supplies are adequate to meet market requirements," the meeting's host US Treasury Secretary John Snow said at a later news conference.
"That commitment on their part to make adequate reserves available will help deal with some market uncertainty, which I think is feeding some speculation and which is taking the stock price well above the fundamentals in the market," Mr Snow said.
The elite club also pressed the International Energy Agency to improve "oil data transparency".
Effectively, the oil-consuming nations are asking the agency, set up during the 1974 oil crisis, to help sort out whether scarce oil supplies, speculation or raging demand is the main culprit behind a relentless upward march in prices.
Despite the obvious worry about energy, the G7 said economic prospects were promising and inflation pressures were relatively subdued.
"Global economic growth is strong and the outlook for 2005 remains favourable," the communique said. "Inflation and inflation expectations remain low in our economies."
The IMF's World Economic Outlook, issued earlier this week, foresaw the strongest performance for the global economy this year in three decades, with output growth of some five per cent.
But like the G7 ministers, the IMF warned lofty oil prices were a shadow on a largely sunny horizon.
The G7 dwelt on the positive, by and large, and said it would "return to the issue of medium-term energy demand and supply at our next meeting."
The US has hosted all four of this year's G7 meetings. Two of the regular meetings will switch to Britain in 2005 under a rotation through the wealthy nations. G7 ministers moved from their formal proceedings to a working dinner with China's finance minister Jin Renqing and central bank chief Zhou Xiaochuan.
The talks were in part to discuss Beijing's steps to loosen its yuan currency, something the Bush administration is pressing China to do.
The peg is a sore point for US exporters, who charge that it gives their Chinese competitors an unfair edge, has cost American jobs and adds to massive trade deficits that have become an issue going into November's presidential elections.