Along with almost all intellectually gifted, sophisticatedly modern and environmentally conscious people, I was horrified last week when I first heard President Bush’s so-called proposals last week on global climate change ahead of the G8 summit this week in Germany.

How could he? After all the hopes placed in the world’s leadership for sensible policies to combat the greatest threat to our civilisation since Hannibal crossed the Alps? How could he let us down this time?

Of course, the reasons for my concern were somewhat different from those of the vast and expanding climate change lobby; all those hip young people from Greenpeace and all those teachers who want compulsory readings from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth to replace morning assembly.

My concern was that, as it was initially presented, the proposals seemed to represent a genuinely alarming change of heart by Mr Bush.

It’s Grrrrr8 (honest)

As the G8 summit begins in Germany, Hugo Rifkind explains everything you need to know – and lots of stuff you don’t

Multimedia

• Video: Our young man in Heiligendamm

• Audio: Behind the scenes at the G8

• Pictures: G8 summit

BACKGROUND

• Quotes: what Putin told The Times

• Blair reinvented the Middle Ages

• The West is starting this Cold War

• Save the planet: give to China

Related Internet Links

• Official site of the G8 summit Heiligendamm

Related Links

• Blair pushes climate agenda

After years of steadfastly resisting the insistent demands of the climate alarmists, of bravely ignoring the ridicule of the world’s media elites, Mr Bush was finally caving in. The talk from officials in Washington was all about the global scientific consensus on the need to reduce carbon emissions, about the need for international agreements. Over in Brussels C. Boyden Gray, Mr Bush’s sibilantly smooth Ambassador to the European Union, was out there on all the news programmes, confirming that, yes, this really was Mr Bush’s Damascene moment.

Fortunately, as the rest of the world quickly discovered to its horror, it took only a slightly more detailed perusal of the speech than Ambassador Gray had obviously given it to realise that this great capitulation by the United States was nothing of the sort. Mr Bush was not, after all, kneeling at the altar of the Church of Environmentally Aware Correctness and asking to be baptised anew in the healing waters of Kyoto-style targets and carbon emissions caps.

He was, in fact, to the disgust of the climate change lobby’s hierarchy, politely declining to join the Gadarene rush of European Union’s leadership into the economic abyss and, instead, largely repeating the only really sensible set of proposals to deal with the challenge.

The parties meeting at the G8 this week will do their best to hide their divisions on the subject, but there is no getting away from it. Europe remains intent, at least in its public declarations, to commit itself to policies that are based on what can only be called an ideology of climate change, a faith-based approach to long-term environmental policy, with scant reference to hard political and economic facts. The US has opted for pragmatism. The broad outlines of the American approach can be summarised as follows. Yes, global warming is a reality. Yes, it is caused in significant part by human activity and, yes, much of that is the result of the production of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide.

But, no, we will not sign up to targets that are either unattainable or meaningless, or worse, if taken seriously will prove economically self-immolating.

Into this category can certainly be put Angela Merkel’s plans for strict targets on global temperatures (can we also aim for compulsory targets on the number of wars, terrorist attacks and embarrassing defeats by our national football teams while we’re at it?)

No, we will not ignore the inescapable reality that three quarters of the increase in greenhouse gas emissions in the next 50 years will be produced by developing countries, which means that, even if we reduced our own countries to a stone-age level of economic activity, we would make barely a dent in the scale of C02 emission concentrations in the atmosphere.

And so, yes, we will continue to place much hope (and quite a lot of our cash) in the rapidly expanding possibilities of technological change.

Early estimates for the US in 2006 show that emissions actually fell last year for the first time since 1991, and for the first time ever in a year when the US did not experience a recession. That suggests that American companies and consumers are already finding ways to trim their carbon footprint and to lower the carbon concentration of their economic activity. This progress would certainly be further assisted by good public policy, such as a carbon tax, a proposal many of the current crop of presidential candidates on both sides of the political divide, now favour.

Have you noticed, by the way, that Europeans like to sneer at the US for being antiscience and replacing the rule of reason with Biblical fundamentalism? In fact, almost all the really exciting new research into the technologies of emissions reduction, carbon capture and carbon sequestration are being done by clever scientists in the US.

Most of the dire warnings of the global climate change crowd are based on the most extreme projections of the impact of warming, combined with projections of absolutely no improvements in the technology that will help us deal with the challenge over the next century. You don’t have to be a sunny optimist to think that that gloom-laden scenario, wholly at odds with historical precedent, will prove to be more than a little off the mark.

Times Recommends

• How did she get the insurance?
• Protesting against Charles? Bonkers
• Will a degree help an anxious patient?