DON’T hold your breath. This notion of a new deal on climate change is something that Tony Blair has cooked up, with a fair degree of passion, but not yet much claim to reality.

The plan has two roots, it seems. The first is the Prime Minister’s desire to set his mark during 2005 on Britain’s presidency of the G8 — the club of industrialised nations, which indulgently includes Russia.

Long ago he earmarked Africa (including Aids) and global warming for the top of his agenda, Washington has acknowledged. “Wouldn’t you think he could stick to solving the Middle East and Northern Ireland?” one US official said, with a gibe at yesterday’s collapse of a Belfast deal.

The second reason is to solidify Britain’s ties with the US, but here he is on shakier ground. “The thing is, the British (team) hasn’t yet explained to us why we should really care,” said one official close to a senator familiar with the talks.

The plan was formed in the first few days of November, after President Bush had been re-elected but before the Prime Minister went to Washington.

The British pitch was tried out first on a visiting team from Congress. “Look how badly the US has suffered internationally from snubbing the Kyoto Protocol. Why don’t we try to see if there is some deal the US could sign up to, which would show how it is making strenuous efforts to cut carbon emissions?” That was the thrust of it.

It didn’t get a very warm response. The congressional team was keen to impress on the Brits that the US’s refusal to sign up to Kyoto was not a casual oversight, which would not have been made if the US had foreseen the brickbats that it would receive.

The members of Congress did not need European lectures about the “cost” to the US’s reputation abroad. Come to that, even if lectures were delivered, they did not much care.

The real point, said the team, newly assertive given the strong Republican majority on Capitol Hill, was that Congress would never pass anything resembling Kyoto, even if a president, bewitched by the will-o’-the-wisp of foreign adulation, was crazy enough to put his name to it. Any pledge to cut carbon emissions would cut American jobs. It would give an unjustified boost to developing countries that were not subject to pollution curbs — meaning China and India.

This position, which happens to be exactly in line with the White House’s position, has been very convenient for the Bush Administration. It means that Bush does not need to take the blame for the US’s stubbornness; he can hide behind the vocal bulk of Congress, even if that is a subtlety lost on activists outside the US.

When Blair arrived in Washington, a few days later, his team presented a more nuanced version of the pitch to Bush’s team. Britain could help the US to repair relations with Europe on this front, they argued. It could help the rest of the world to understand that the US was, indeed, working hard to reduce emissions and did take global warming seriously, even if it was not in the Kyoto club.

So what might a non-Kyoto deal on global warming look like? The Blair team have worked hard to fill in this enormous blank. It might include a statement about technologies that could help to combat the emission of greenhouse gases. Yet this could cause problems for Blair, as one of the technologies most able to do so is nuclear power, a subject on which Blair’s Government has been energetically non-committal.

It might also include an agreement on scientific evidence about global warming, although this, from the US point of view, is controversial. The Bush Administration has not wanted to commit itself to a public statement that science unambiguously determines global warming to be a threat.

Nor has the Blair team yet found a way around the US’s main concern: that any deal should bring China and India firmly under its umbrella, in a way that Kyoto does not. Kyoto allows them the forgiving status of “industrialising” countries, although their manufacturing boom — and their share of the world’s emissions — makes this look out of date. Nothing that Britain has come up with appears to resemble a plan that would appeal both to the US and to China and India. Yet Blair’s support of Bush has bought him at least civility from Washington. During Britain’s presidency of the G8, polite evasion seems to be the most likely American response to his bright new idea.

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