Al Gore last night urged a climate conference to be ambitious in its attempts to check global warming and to ignore US objections because President Bush would soon be out of office.

The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize was the latest heavyweight American politician to round on his own Government over the issue. His words ended a day in which delegates made increasingly explicit attacks on the US for trying to keep detailed goals out of a “road map” cutting greenhouse gases.

Mr Gore, the former US Vice-President, spoke as European Union and American ministers confronted one another in tense last-minute negotiations. The EU even threatened to boycott a US-sponsored meeting on climate change unless Washington compromised.

“My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali – we all know that,” Mr Gore said in a speech at the UN talks on the Indonesian island. “But my country is not the only one that can take steps to ensure that we move forward from Bali with progress and with hope. You can feel anger and frustration, and direct it at the United States. Or you can decide to move forward and do all of the difficult work that needs to be done and save a large open blank space in your document and put a footnote by it that says this document is incomplete.”

BACKGROUND

• UN chief to return to Bali climate talks

• Al Gore: free of diplomatic niceties

• Al Gore lambasts US climate obstructions

• Scorching decade claims eight hottest years

2007: worst year for the environment

As UN climate talks go down to the wire, scientists across the world says 2007 was a 'year of worsts' for the planet

• This decade breaks records in table of world's hottest years

BACKGROUND

• US rejects Bali climate change guidelines

• UN chief: act now on climate or face oblivion

• Al Gore calls for climate ‘mobilisation’

• Carbon emissions are 'higher than claimed'

• A convenient £50m for green Gore

Multimedia

• Video: protests in Bali

• Video: Going green with God

• The environment - 2007 in pictures

BACKGROUND

• Carbon stand-off puts climate talks at risk

• US 'must change lifestyle' for planet's sake

• Woodman, spare that high-carbon tree

• Act now or prepare for disaster

US laws will sap Europe’s energy

There is a serious danger that the politics of the American cornfield are again threatening trade and development

BACKGROUND

• Water shortages 'likely trigger for wars'

• Global crisis reveals big cracks in policies

• UN climate circus rolls in on CO2 cloud

• Carbon Trust not meeting the challenge

We’re not doomed yet

Should we really be listening to the views of one man just because they are eye-catchingly more dramatic than the consensus?

BACKGROUND

• Brown’s bid to seal fate of carrier bags

• Opec ponders wealth of alternatives

• Climate change panel verdict: the future is bleak

• A global warning for UN chief

Related Links

• Al Gore: free of diplomatic niceties

• This decade set to be hottest on record

After applause from the audience of politicians, government officials, scientists, environmental campaigners and journalists from 190 countries, he added: “One year and 40 days from today, there will be a new inauguration in the United States. Over the next two years, the United States is going to be somewhere it isn’t right now. You must anticipate that.”

Since the two-week conference entered its final stage on Wednesday, the US has found itself increasingly isolated as it resists demands for a detailed and ambitious road map, intended to lay the foundations for a successor treaty next year to the Kyoto Protocol. Mr Gore is one of a number of prominent Americans who have travelled to Bali to express dissent from the Bush Administration’s policy, which leans towards voluntary cuts in greenhouse gases, rather than mandatory targets.

The Democrat senator John Kerry made a one-day trip to Bali early in the week and supported a European demand for an explicit statement of the intended range of greenhouse gas cuts. Yesterday the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, gave a speech calling for a tax on carbon dioxide emissions – a measure that the US Government rejects.

One US congressman, Edward Markey, found an imaginative solution to one of the dilemmas of Bali: the massive amounts of greenhouse gases such a conference produces. Instead of flying to the island in person he delivered a speech on Second Life, the “virtual world” on the internet.

David Waskow, of Oxfam America, said that the presence of such leading US figures at a climate conference was unprecedented. “It’s part of a general policy shift in the US in the past two years,” he said.

This has partly been the result of Mr Gore’s campaigning and the success of his Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth. It has also been driven by anxiety over weather disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, which may have owed its intensity to the effects of global warming.

Rising oil prices have also caused Americans to reflect on their reliance on fossil fuels, and a growing number of lobbying groups have taken up the anticlimate change cause. They range from trade unionists, a large delegation of whom are in Bali, to evangelical Christians who object to the “blasphemous desecration” of God’s creation, even if they do not believe in evolution.

Most importantly, US state and city governments have enacted ambitious climate change legislation. California’s Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has brought in laws to reduce emissions by utility plants, oil refineries and cement factories by 25 per cent below their projected levels for 2020.

A Bill is making its way through the US Congress that would introduce mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions and a system of carbon trading. All the leading Democratic contenders for the presidential nomination and two Republicans have set out detailed positions on climate change, embracing mandatory emissions cuts.

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