President George W. Bush on Wednesday acknowledged more openly than in the past the role of human activity in causing global warming, as he travelled to Scotland for the summit of the Group of Eight industrialised nations.
“I recognise the surface of the earth is warmer and that an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem,” he said during a visit to Denmark en route to Gleneagles.
However, he reaffirmed his administration's criticism of efforts to control greenhouse emissions via the Kyoto agreement, which the other G8 nations have espoused.
“It did not work for the world. The reason it did not work is many developing countries were not included. I have also told our friends in Europe that Kyoto would have wrecked our economy. I do not see how you can be president of the United States and agree to an agreement that would have put a lot of people out of work.”
He reiterated his longstanding emphasis on technological solutions, rather than mandatory emissions reductions, calling it astrategy for the “post-Kyoto era”.
But Mr Bush's views diverge from US public opinion, shown in a poll this week from the Program on International Policy Attitudes (Pipa), a Washington-based research group. It found that 56 per cent of respondents would be willing to incur significant economic costs to address climate change, if there was agreement in the scientific community on global warming, and 73 per cent felt the US should “participate” in the Kyoto protocol.
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