The exposure of what the White House really thinks about European efforts to tackle climate change will shatter any hope of progress towards new Kyoto-style targets at the G8 summit on June 6 – 8 in Germany.

The notes scrawled in red ink by US officials on the carefully-prepared draft final communiqué show the mountain that Chancellor Angela Merkel had to climb before persuading this US President to submit his country’s industry to rigid targets.

George Bush has modified his language on climate change considerably since taking office in 2000 and now accepts that greenhouse gases are a “problem”. That is a leap for a White House which has poured scorn on whether climate change was man-made at all.

But no-one should be that surprised at the tough US bargaining position. There was never any chance that Mr Bush would agree to binding targets for reducing CO2 emissions, which Congress has been united in viewing as punitive for the US economy.

The private views of the Chinese at this stage in negotiations might not have looked much different to the US position and China is set to overtake the US to become the world’s biggest polluter within a few years.

At least President Bush has been making some steps towards tackling emissions, notably by decreeing that 20 per cent of petrol should come from biofuels by 2020. This will ensure a de facto contribution towards cutting harmful gases. At his last press conference with Mrs Merkel, Mr Bush talked of a virtuous circle of biofuels making money for developing countries and cleaning up emissions in developed countries.

He has also committed millions of dollars of federal research funds to developing the technologies that the EU hopes the developing world will adopt. The EU talks loftily of carbon capture being the way forward to help countries like China reduce emissions, yet not one large scale experiment has been undertaken to prove this really works.

So, although Mrs Merkel will have to scale back her ambitions, she will not be too disappointed that the tough US position has leaked out. Anything she can get agreement on at the summit will be viewed as a bonus now.

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