Bush Takes Note

German leaders on Wednesday reacted positively to US President George W. Bush's annual State of the Union speech in which he called climate change a "serious issue" and urged Americans to cut their gasoline consumption by 20 percent over a decade, mostly through a nearly five-fold increase in use of home-grown fuels such as ethanol.

Bush also pushed for tighter vehicle fuel efficiency standards.

"A positive sign"

"The fact that the American president acknowledges climate change as a problem is definitely a positive sign," Karsten Voigt, the government's coordinator of transatlantic relations told Spiegel Online.

Voigt said Bush had realized that saving energy was not just important on the political level, but also for security reasons.

Former German Environment minister, Jürgen Trittin told German radio that Bush had realized that oil-dependency massively undermined his leveraging power. Bush's speech, said Trittin, could "improve transatlantic cooperation in the fight against climate change."

Bärbel Höhn, deputy leader of the Green group in parliament urged the German government to set similar ambitious goals on renewable energy like the American president did in his address.

"We have to be careful that we don't squander our leadership and technological edge in renewable energy," Höhn said.

"Moving in the right direction"

Sir Nicholas Stern, chief economic adviser to the British government and author of a report in 2006 that warned of the mounting costs of climate change, said Bush's speech was "a movement in the right direction."

"There is a recognition of the link between climate change and human activity," he told reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

"You have to recognise what everyone is doing. The United States is doing a lot on technology, a lot on standards. But then of course we have to scale up our action."

The executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Yvo de Boer, said Bush's speech marked a shift towards a more sustainable form of energy and noted his choice of words about climate change.

"He did not talk in his State of the Union address about international cooperation on climate change. But at the same time, he did put his remarks in the context of the need for global response," de Boer told reporters in Tokyo. "That I think is very encouraging."

Green groups say too little too late

But environmentalists and green groups in Europe were less impressed with the president's address and said his measures didn't go far enough.

Jan Kowalzig at Friends of the Earth Europe told news agency AFP that biofuel and fuel-efficiency initiatives were "worthwhile measures" but did not tackle the critical problem posed by US emissions of greenhouse gases.

Bush declined in his annual address to support mandatory caps on heat-trapping carbon gases that big US companies such as General Electric Co. have pushed for.

Only a mandatory cap on these emissions could drive down this pollution, said Kowalzig. He added that biofuels could in fact worsen the greenhouse-gas problem.

"In theory, they only produce as many greenhouse gas emissions as they suck up when growing, so they would be carbon neutral," Kowalzig said. "In practice, in most places, they are not, because transportation of the fuels, processing of the fuels, all that requires energy which is currently driven by a fossil-fuel economy," he said. "So all these biofuels projects currently add to the greenhouse-gas effect."

Bush u-turns on climate change

Bush's address had been trailed by several media reports that forecast a U-turn on climate change.

In 2001, Bush abandoned the Kyoto Protocol for curbing greenhouse-gas emissions, saying the pact's binding caps were unfair and too costly for the US economy.

Bereft of the United States, which by itself accounts for nearly a quarter of global carbon pollution, Kyoto has limped along and negotiations on cuts beyond 2012 are set to be long and bitter.

But Bush made no reference at all to the Kyoto process or the voluntary initiatives on emissions and alternative energy that he has launched bilaterally and regionally.

He did refer to global climate change, though, as a "serious challenge" that these technologies would help to confront.

"Bush out of step"

Some of corporate America's industrial giants, including Alcoa, General Electric and DuPont, this week called for mandatory caps on businesses' greenhouse gas emissions, and trading of emissions permits.

Some observers said Bush was out of kilter with domestic demands for action on climate change.

"He's clearly out of step with where the American public and US Congress are right now on climate change, which is ready to go much further than continuing technology initiatives," Jennifer Morgan, a Europe-based consultant on climate change and former spokesman with the green group WWF, told AFP.

European leaders however were less enthusiastic about Bush's plans for Iraq in his address which involve sending 20,000 more American troops to the violence-racked country.

Both Voigt and Trittin criticized the plans, saying they could not detect any coherent political strategy.