Can America prevent the rich countries agreeing what to do about climate change? That's the other vital question at Gleneagles alongside Africa and its poverty and, last night, the omens did not look good.

President George Bush made anything but reassuring noises in a pre-summit television interview with Trevor McDonald, rejecting outright any suggestion that the US might join the Kyoto protocol on global warming, or consider any binding agreements to cut US emissions of greenhouse gases.

But Mr Bush's blunt stance - "I go to the G8 with an agenda that I think is best for our country" - was clearly aimed at opinion back home, and may not prevent Tony Blair putting climate change on top of the G8 agenda. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, insisted last night a deal was still possible.

Mr Blair's aims are concrete, but limited. He has accepted, even if many environmentalists have not, that the US will not rejoin Kyoto, certainly before the first period of the treaty ends in 2012, and that it will not accept targets to cut its emissions of carbon dioxide before then, under any circumstances.

America signing up to any of that has never been on his Gleneagles shopping list. Instead, he wants progress in three areas, which may take the business of tackling climate change on substantially, even while the Kyoto process itself is inching forward with the rich countries trying, and mainly failing, to shave a very small amount off their CO2 emissions.

Mr Blair wants a statement on the science of climate change, an agreement on the development of energy-saving technology and the beginnings of a climate change partnership with the developing world. He may still get all of them. If he does, he will have proved that he was right to put global warming at the top of the agenda at Gleneagles with Africa, although it has been the forgotten issue of the past few days.

Global warming was not mentioned in the global triumph of goodwill for Africa that was Live8. They did not sing about the warming atmosphere from the stage in Hyde Park, or in Philadelphia, Berlin or Rome. But if the unforgettable coalition of singers and performers could have looked into Africa's future rather than at the haunting images of its past and present, they surely would have done.

For everything that makes Africa hard to inhabit today will be made harder by global warming. Hunger will be made more acute; shortage of clean water will be more degrading; disease will be more painful, crippling and deadly; natural disasters will be more overwhelming. Climate change threatens to vitiate all the efforts to help Africa that the rich world can possibly come up with, all the debt cancellation, the aid increases and the trade liberalization.

Two weeks ago, a group of British aid agencies and environmental groups, from Oxfam to Greenpeace, forcefully pointed out this awkward truth. Their report, Africa - Up In Smoke? insisted the issues of African poverty and climate change are inseparably linked, and the first cannot be solved without dealing with the second. It was a direct challenge to the simple Live8 theme, that if only the economic basis of Africa's future can be sorted by a properly responsible rich world, the continent will come good. It will not, the report said, if we do not tackle the warming atmosphere.

There is no doubt Mr Blair has grasped that truth and it is reflected in his three aims from the summit. His statement on the science of climate change, signed by all the G8 leaders, is the simplest, but also the riskiest, of his initiatives at Gleneagles.

Its purpose, he told the Word Economic Forum in Davos in January, was " to set a direction of travel". Mr Blair believes the business community will not really get going on the task of building a low-carbon future, and investing in the new technology needed for long-term projects such as new power stations until it sees clearly that world governments are united on the essentials of climate change.

The scientific consensus that climate change is real and happening is now overwhelming. But that is to reckon without the astonishing attempts by the Bush administration in its second term to deny the science. Yesterday, however, there were reports that summit "sherpas" had managed to agree a text all G8 leaders could agree to, which, although not stating that global warming was happening, did state that scientists said it was. On such subtleties are summits sometimes rescued.

Mr Blair's second climate change aim at Gleneagles is to reach agreements about how new energy-saving or CO2-limiting technology can be speeded in development, and be adopted more quickly by industry. He has in mind renewable energy projects and others such as the hydrogen fuel cell, which may replace the internal combustion engine without emissions of CO2, and carbon sequestration, a method of taking CO2 out of the waste gases of a power station and burying it.

As that is hardly a contentious issue - and indeed, the US sees the way forward on climate change as developing technical fixes rather than agreeing to targets set by somebody else - Mr Blair may get his way.

His third and final initiative is perhaps the most vital: it concerns the developing countries. As we report elsewhere, in the next 20 years, China, India and other developing nations will produce gigantic emissions of CO2 as their economies boom. Yet they have no commitments to cut those emissions. If they do not tackle them eventually, all the CO2 savings the US and the other rich nations can make will go for nothing, because emissions from the emerging economies will more than make up for rich countries' cut. So Mr Blair wants to start a climate change dialogue with the developing world, reassuring them they can continue to grow but offering to help them grow cleanly, by using new energy-saving technology as soon as it comes on stream.

In all the righteous, clamorous protest about aid, trade, and debt in Hyde Park, amid the Geldof-inspired, rock'n'roll-fuelled euphoria, it was easy to forget that Africa can be ruined by the atmosphere as well as by economics. But in that luxury golfing hotel on the edge of the Scottish Highlands, it is going to be forcefully remembered.

© 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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