The bottom line for Tony Blair going into the G8’s climate change talks is to get the USA to agree a framework for action using the United Nations.

Securing promises to cut carbon emissions by 50 per cent by 2050 or to limit temperature rises to no more than 2C are desired, and will be demanded.

Similarly, the Prime Minister is pressing President Bush to give his backing to carbon emission trading schemes like the one already operational in Europe.

But all these aims and considerations very much take second place in Mr Blair’s eyes to getting the G8 nations, particularly the US, to agree a framework through which the specifics required to combat climate change can be set out.

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

While ‘framework’ is hardly an inspiring word it is seen as crucial for the G8 summit because it will define the areas that need to be agreed.

It would incorporate a five-point plan that should by 2009 have secured a stabilisation target such as a 50 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2050, worldwide carbon trading schemes, agreement on transferring technology from rich to poor nations and assistance in adaptation, and a mechanism to stop deforestation.

Downing Street believes that once the framework is agreed the rest will follow, hence Britain’s willingness to contemplate defeat on its push for a G8 pledge to limit temperature rises to 2C by 2050.

And the noises being made by the White House suggest that a 2C pledge would be a step too far for Mr Bush, who has to take into account not just his own scepticism about how seriously climate change should be combatted, but that of many of his most ardent supporters.

He will be aware that to leave Heiligendamm having committed the US to a specific 2C target will leave him open to accusations of making a humiliating U-turn and of kowtowing to the Europeans. His position on a framework involving the United Nations is less hard-line.

Confidence that one can be agreed rose today in Downing Street in the light of Mr Bush’s statement that his idea for an international meeting to trash out a plan to beat global warming would “fold in” to UN efforts rather than operate as a rival initiative undermining the UN.

There is also a degree of optimism that Mr Bush can be brought to look favourably on linking carbon trading schemes.

The US would demand that China, second only to the US in carbon emissions, and India are included such schemes. Simultaneously, China and India are determined that their economic expansion continues without being hamstrung by the costs of carbon trading.

Downing Street sees no reason why a compromise cannot be reached, with China and India accepting they must bring emissions down while avoiding the more onerous costs imposed on first world nations.

Britain and Germany, under its chancellor Angela Merkel, have been working closely in recent months on aims tactics for climate change talks at the summit and their demands are much the same.

If they succeed in winning US acceptance of a UN-led framework, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change summit in Bali at the end of the year will assume a new importance. Instead of being a mere forum for discussion it would suddenly become a venue for thrashing out the details of how global warming should be brought under control.

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