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Bush set for climate change U-turn

Gaby Hinsliff, Juliette Jowit and Paul Harris

Move could lead to agreement on curbing emissions

London/New York: George Bush is preparing to make a historic shift in his position on global warming when he makes his State of the Union speech later this month, say senior officials at the office of the British Prime Minister in London.

Tony Blair hopes that the new stance by the United States will lead to a breakthrough in international talks on climate change and that the outlines of a successor treaty to the Kyoto agreement, the deal to curb emissions of greenhouse gases which expires in 2012, could now be thrashed out at the G8 summit in June.

The timetable may explain why Mr. Blair is so keen to remain in office until after the summit, with a deal on protecting the planet offering an appealing legacy with which to bow out of Number 10 Downing Street.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair held private talks on climate change before Christmas, and there is a feeling that the former will now agree a cap on emissions in the U.S., meaning that, for the first time, American industry and consumers would be expected to start conserving energy and curbing pollution.

"We could now be seeing the beginning of a consensus on a post-Kyoto framework," said a source close to Mr. Blair. "President Bush is beginning to talk about more radical measures."

The move will be seen as part of a wider repositioning of the Bush government after its comprehensive defeat in last autumn's mid-term elections.

A change of heart on the environment was signalled earlier this month when the U.S. administration unexpectedly announced that polar bears were now an endangered species because their habitat in the U.S. state of Alaska had suffered from melting ice sheets caused by global warming. The Government is now required to act on threats to the bears' survival. The E.U. has its own so-called cap and trade scheme, under which industries are given a quota of carbon dioxide emissions: if they exceed the limits, they must pay for extra credits that can be bought from cleaner industries — an incentive to firms to go green.

Downing Street is increasingly confident that the arguments pushed by Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the recent Treasury report on the cost of global warming, that doing nothing will eventually prove more costly than trying to avert catastrophe are now gaining in momentum.

However, Mr. Stern warned: "The U.S. will work it out for itself. Nobody will be telling them what to do, and nobody should."

But a source close to the negotiations warned that Mr. Bush had previously appeared to give ground on climate change, only to fail to make real concessions.

The best hope could lie with a post-Kyoto deal for 2009, the source said — by which time Mr. Bush will be out of office. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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