It will not be easy. Iraq is the issue most on the minds of his electorate and Bush's new policy of 21,500 troop reinforcements to curb the harrowing violence of Baghdad has already been roundly condemned in the Democratic-controlled Congress and the opinion polls suggest that the skepticism of the American public has even increased.

So the White House is signaling that Bush's speech Tuesday evening will focus on two other issues that Americans think to be critical: health insurance and global warming. The president's radio address Saturday on health reform suggested a modest attempt to cut the number of people without health insurance, by imposing taxes on those deemed to have too much. Initial jeers from the Democrats suggest that this is unlikely to give Bush the new political momentum he needs.

Global warming is another matter. It is an open question whether his policies on Iraq or his rejection of the Kyoto Protocol have done more to damage the world-wide image of President Bush. But there is a historical irony in the way that former Vice-President Al Gore, who beat him in the popular vote in the 2000 election but lost in the decisive Electoral College, has now come back to haunt Bush with his remarkable film documentary on the threat and impact of greenhouse gases and climate change, "An Inconvenient Truth."

Bush has been his own worst enemy on this issue. There is a reasoned case to be made against the Kyoto Protocol, but Bush failed to make it. The Protocol delays for too long the essential participation of fast-growing economies like China and India, who are fast overtaking the United States as polluter-in-chief. And it fixed the game to Europe's advantage, allowing Germany to take advantage of the post-unification closure of its old East German power plants that burned filthy lignite, known as "brown coal."

It is probably now too late for Bush to win the argument over the Kyoto treaty, but there are two other arguments that he can and must make, if his speech Tuesday is not to have the same gloomy impact as his policy of a "surge" in troops for Iraq.

The first argument he should make is that the Kyoto strategy of curbing greenhouse gas emissions is not enough. Even a full and global embrace of the Kyoto targets for cutting emissions would only have a modest impact on global warming over the coming decades.

The real challenge will be to wean the global economy away from fossil fuels and from carbon, and this will depend on the development and worldwide deployment of new technologies from (convincingly safer) nuclear power to hydrogen-powered fuel cells, bio-fuels and more efficient wind and solar and tidal power systems.

This will mean a full-hearted effort to push research and development, backed by the resources (including the carrots and sticks of the tax system) of the United States. So far, Bush has given little attention, funding or support to his first-term initiative of the Climate Change Technology Program. This ought to change fast.

Bush's second argument must show that he understands the degree to which he has already been overtaken by the private sector, which should now become government's (and the environment's) best ally. Corporations around the world now understand that there is money to be made, new customers and a higher stock to be won from meeting this challenge.

Wal-Mart's shift from incandescent to energy-saving life bulbs is going to transform the industry. Tesco, the British grocery giant, is pledged to become carbon-neutral. In the 18 months since it was launched, GE's Ecomagination program to develop products "as economically advantageous as they are ecologically sound" has generated over $20 billion in sales of desalination technologies, high tech windmills, super-efficient locomotives and so on.

The U.S. Climate Action Partnership embodies this trend, bringing together some of the traditional big polluters like chemical giant DuPont, earth-mover Caterpillar, aluminum producer Alcoa and BP with environmental campaign groups like Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council. They promise to launch their own proposals this week for a public-private partnership to reduce greenhouse gases and get beyond dependence on carbon fuels.

The White House's favorite think-tank, the conservative leaning American Enterprise Institute, has startled many observers by promoting the idea of a carbon tax. A new AEI paper by Lee Lane says: "Such a tax will be hard for President Bush to swallow, but it may be the price he needs to pay to make his alternative to Kyoto credible and buy time for the next generation of clean energy technologies to develop."

And if Bush does not come up with a credible policy of his own, the Democrats in Congress are determined to do it for him, with a spate of new bills that seek to impose targets for cutting emissions and a new special committee on climate change (designed in part to get around the Energy Committee run by the veteran Congressman John Dingell from Michigan (where many of his voters are auto-workers who put their jobs first).

In the Senate, Barbara Boxer is the new head of the Environment and Public Works Committee, and she says global warming is by far her top priority. She wants to get the United States out in front of the Kyoto targets by requiring a cut in emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

And if all that were not enough, Bush is being overtaken on environmental policy in his own party, with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger now demanding that his state enact a 25 percent cut in greenhouse gases by the year 2020.

Schwarzenegger wants a cap-and-trade system that uses incentives and market forces to encourage companies to cut emissions, rather than simply mandating cuts like the Boxer plan. This is a debate that Bush can usefully join, debating the tactical questions of how best to do it, but above all showing in his speech Tuesday that the big strategic question is now settled: the Bush administration is going green.

Bush Resists Growing Pressure To Curb Global Warming
by Jean-Louis Santini Washington (AFP) Jan 18 - The battle over global warming is heating up, with President George W. Bush refusing to limit greenhouse gas emissions despite growing pressure from the Democrat-led Congress and around the world.

White House spokesman Tony Snow earlier this week said Bush's position on greenhouse gases remained unchanged, no matter what was reported by Britain's The Observer weekly.

The publication quoted an unnamed top official with Prime Minister Tony Blair's administration saying that Bush was preparing to announce a major climate policy change in his State of the Union address on January 23. "It's not accurate," Snow said at one of his daily press briefings.

"If you are talking about enforceable carbon caps, in terms of industry-wide and nation-wide, we knocked that down. That's not something we're talking about," he stressed.

"Look, we'll have a State of the Union address in a week and we'll lay out our policy on global warming," he told reporters referring to the president's annual speech before Congress.

In his 2006 state of the union address, Bush implicitly acknowledged the United States' contribution to global warming: "we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil," he said.

The United States imports 65 percent of the crude oil it burns in its cars, planes, power plants and sundry devices and spews forth one quarter of all greenhouse gases in the world considered a major component of global warming.

But Bush has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol that entered into force in February 2005 with the purpose of limiting global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), deeming it too costly for the US economy and of no practical use since major polluting developing nations such as China and India are not bound by it.

Instead, Bush insists on a voluntary approach to cutting greenhouse gases and has sponsored initiatives encouraging the development of alternative fuels such as ethanol.

The opposition Democratic party, boasting its new majority in the Senate and House of Representatives, has already presented four major bills to curb CO2 emissions and US dependency on foreign oil since Congress convened early January. And there is a promise of more to come.

Some of the measures have bipartisan support from Democrats and Republicans, making it quite likely they will clear both houses of Congress, but not the hurdle of a presidential veto, which can only be overridden by a very unlikely two-third majority vote in both houses.

Many lawmakers of both parties represent US states with heavy automotive and oil industry lobbies dead set, like Bush, against imposing Kyoto-style, enforceable CO2 limits defended by Europe and adopted by several US states, including the one with the biggest population and economy, California.

California movie star-turned-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger earlier this month announced his decision to cut his state's coal- and oil-produced CO2 emissions by 10 percent by 2020.

Neither Democrats or Republicans are in total agreement on any of the CO2 bills up for debate.

"There are a number of pathways for getting to a shared goal, and we should explore all of them," James Connaughton, chairman of the president's Council on Environmental Quality, said in an interview published Thursday in The New York Times.

He didn't rule out a compromise focusing on the cap-and-trade system -- by which industries trade CO2 permits on the marketplace -- provided in the Kyoto agreement, saying that "if corrected, might make (the protocol) a workable tool."

earlier related report
New Congress committee to spotlight global warming
Washington (AFP) Jan 18 - Congress will have a new committee dedicated to issues related to global warming, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Thursday. Pelosi announced the creation of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, "to raise the visibility of these urgent issues and gather critical information to protect America's security."

"The science of global warming and its impact is overwhelming and unequivocal. We already have many of the technology and techniques that we need to reduce global warming pollution, and American ingenuity will supply the rest," Pelosi said.

Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, said the creation of the committee is part of a major legislative push on global warming issues, which Pelosi said were given short shrift during the dozen years that Republicans -- the party deemed friendlier to business and industry -- controled Congress.

She said the committee aims to produce major legislation on global warming and US energy independence by early July. "With this new Select Committee, we demonstrate the priority we are giving to confront this most serious challenge."

"Now is time to act. The future of our country, indeed our entire planet, is at stake," Pelosi said.

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