Washington

Further distancing his administration from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, President George W. Bush last week rejected the idea of reducing US greenhouse-gas emissions to below current levels.

The president's long-awaited alternative to the Kyoto plan effectively calls for no new action on the part of the United States. The Kyoto signatories pledged to cut greenhouse-gas emissions to below 1990 levels by 2012. Bush instead envisions reducing the “emissions intensity” — the ratio of emissions to a nation's economic output — by 18% over the same period. Using this measure, US emissions intensity dropped by about 15% in the 1990s, although actual emissions went up by 15%.

Any reductions in industrial emissions would be strictly voluntary, as mandatory caps would harm the economy, he added. Bush said that the country should reconsider this course of action in 2012 based on progress in reducing emissions and improved scientific understanding of global warming.

The new policy deepens the divide between the United States and other industrial nations, which have been more supportive of the Kyoto agreement, at least in their rhetoric. No major economy has yet ratified the protocol, but Japan may soon become the first to do so (see page 822).

US advocates of action on global warming are now set to shift their attention to the Congress, where their first objective is legislation to force corporations to report their greenhouse-gas emissions publicly. Such reporting is voluntary under the Bush plan.

Bush's statement on 14 February drew fire from environmental groups and from some in Congress. Senator Jim Jeffords (Independent, Vermont), who chairs the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, says the policy is “divorced from the reality of global warming”.