Blair urges Bush to act on climate change

Thursday, 9 December 2004 12:00 AM

Tony Blair is seeking to persuade US President George Bush to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The Times reports that Mr Blair has been meeting with influential US Republican senator John McCain at Downing Street to discuss how to broker a new international agreement.

Although Kyoto is due to come into force following Russia's decision to sign up to its demands, the USA has consistently refused to sign up. It claims that Kyoto is about politics and not science and many key advisors to Mr Bush deny that climate change is even happening.

Without America - the world's biggest polluter - international agreements stand little chance of significantly reducing the emission of greenhouse gases.

This is completely contrary to the position in Britain, where Ministers are frequently heard to refer to the effects of global warming and the Prime Minister has promised to make action on climate change a focus of the UK's EU and G8 presidencies.

It has been suggested that the recent devastating storms in Florida might have helped the case in pushing for American action and that the president might be willing to consider backing the development of renewable energy technology.

But there is little prospect that the US will agree to cut its emissions, as attempts to change the American culture of economic expansion and cheap and available car transport would require extreme political will.

Commenting on the reports of Mr Blair's efforts, the Liberal Democrat's environment spokesman Norman Baker said: "America must be part of any long-term solution on climate change and Tony Blair is right to engage with President Bush.

"America will never sign up to Kyoto or any treaty drawn up along similar lines. But Blair is making a serious miscalculation if he thinks that the US should be brought on board at any cost and he must not allow America to water down any future negotiations.

"International action must continue to be target based and the focus has to be on achieving real cuts in emissions.

"We need a twin-track approach. On the one hand we must engage with the US and work on new technologies. But on the other hand Britain must continue to work with the EU to build on Kyoto through a policy of contraction and convergence and to lead efforts to bring China, India and Brazil into post-Kyoto negotiations."

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