BRITAIN:No matter what Tony Blair says, all that has changed in President Bush's stance on climate change is his rhetoric, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
British prime minister Tony Blair was grasping at straws on Thursday when he described George W. Bush's latest speech on climate change as a "big step forward ... something we have been working for all the way through". It is nothing of the kind; all that has changed is the US president's rhetoric.
So Mr Bush has at last accepted that global warming is a problem, and admitted that science "has deepened our understanding" of it. You would have needed to be an ostrich with its head in the sand not to have taken note of the latest assessment by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
But to term the US president's speech as a "U-turn" on the issue by his now lame-duck administration, as American spin doctors would have us believe, would be naive in the extreme - especially when the measures he has proposed are unlikely to achieve an international consensus on the right way forward.
EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas correctly read what Bush said as a restatement of "the US classic line on climate change: no mandatory reductions [ in greenhouse gas emissions], no carbon trading and vaguely expressed objectives" - an approach that has proven ineffective in cutting US emissions.
By suggesting that the US could get together with China and India to agree on a "long-term global goal of reducing greenhouse gases", Bush appeared to be stealing a march on the forthcoming G8 summit on Germany's Baltic coast, where the whole issue of climate change and what to do about it is high on the agenda.
But he was not comparing like with like. Although China is expected to overtake the US as the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases within the next 10 years, the truth is that its emissions are only a fraction of those of the US on a per capita basis - which is the only equitable way of measuring any country's contribution.
Bush's continued insistence on ruling out mandatory caps on American emissions is also totally at odds with the position adopted by the US delegation in the negotiations that ultimately produced the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change; indeed, the concept of carbon trading as a "market mechanism" was put forward by the US.
At the time, the EU and others regarded it as a ruse to evade making actual cuts in US emissions.
But, ironically, it was embraced by the EU and has turned out to be quite successful.
According to the Financial Times, about $30 billion in carbon credits was traded last year, of which $3 billion was under the Kyoto Protocol.
The UN climate change summit in Bali next December is meant to lay out a timetable for agreeing on a global target for reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, leading to a new treaty to succeed Kyoto.
But this is less likely to happen without EU member states, the US and other developed countries demonstrating their bona fides.
At annual UN climate summits at least until the last one in Nairobi in November 2006, the US has played a negative role - constantly seeking to minimise the scale of the threat facing humanity and seeking to minimise, or evade, any serious effort to deal with it in on a multilateral basis. Its stance at Bali will be the acid test of any change.
Environmental groups are also sceptical about Bush's proclaimed U-turn. "The White House is just trying to hide the fact that the president is completely isolated among the G8 leaders by calling vaguely for some agreement next year, right before he leaves office," said Phil Clapp, of the US National Environmental Trust.
Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, was even more scathing. He saw Bush's proposal for new international negotiations on climate change, with the end of next year as the supposed deadline for concluding them, as "a transparent attempt to derail negotiations that are already going on in the G8 and the UN".
Indeed, it was at the insistence of the US delegation to the last two G8 summits that references in the final communiques to the need for urgent action to deal with the threats posed by global warming were deleted. Other than a change in the American political climate, there is no hard evidence of a real change in the US position.
A Texas oilman to the core, who surrounded himself with other oilmen from Texas and elsewhere on taking office in January 2001, it is unlikely that President Bush has experienced a Pauline conversion on this issue, and equally unlikely that we will see any real movement in Washington's position until he leaves office in January 2009.