Senior Bush Official Denies Change in Climate Policy

Reports from Downing Street officials that US President George Bush was to use next week’s State of the Union address to announce a successor to the Kyoto protocols have been denied by Tony Snow, a Senior White House spokesman.
 

Reports published over the weekend in the British press publicly added Tony Blair to the list of international leaders lobbying Mr Bush to revise his stance on the need for a 'cap and trade' system to reduce carbon emissions. In the past two weeks Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and Jose Manuel Barroso, European Commission president have also raised the issue with Mr Bush.

However yesterday the White House spokesman Tony Snow rebutted these claims saying: "I want to walk you back from the whole carbon cap story...the carbon cap stuff is not accurate. It’s wrong."

Hope came on the same day in the form of the announcement that Democrat Barack Obama, a popular US senator, will be running for US president in 2008. Mr Obama, along with five other senators - including the Republican presidential front runner John McCain - presented a cap and trade proposal to make high carbon industries such as electricity providers cut greenhouse emissions by a third of their 2000 levels by 2050.

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