Americas

Gore: Bush greenhouse summit plan 'smoke and mirrors'

Updated: 2007-06-02 04:53

U.S. President George W. Bush's call for a summit to look at ways to reduce greenhouse gases is "purely and simply smoke and mirrors," former vice president Al Gore said Friday.

At a signing for his new book "The Assault on Reason," Gore said it was a delay tactic for Bush to suggest Thursday that the U.S. and other nations need to develop a long-term strategy for cutting greenhouse gases.

"Just yesterday the president offered a new approach that is purely and simply smoke and mirrors and has the transparent purpose of delaying the efforts that could start now," Gore said.

"The other nations are ready to go ... the world is looking to the United States of America for the moral leadership we should be providing right now _ not at some point a decade from now," Gore said.

Global warming has long been Gore's cause _ the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" about his power-point presentation won an Oscar this year.

Bush is proposing that the United States and about a dozen other nations hold a series of meetings to set long-term goals for reducing greenhouse gases by the end of next year. The final list of nations has not yet been decided, but other participants would likely include India, China, Brazil, Russia, Canada, Japan, Australia, South Korea and the European Union.

The president outlined his proposal just days before he attends a summit in Germany of leading industrialized nations. Global warming is a major topic on the agenda, and Bush will feel pressure.

Gore called Bush's proposal "a scheme to just have more and more talk, and more and more research without recognizing that we have a planetary emergency right now."

The White House said the president's proposal addresses "life after" the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

While the United States signed a 1992 global agreement on climate talks, it refused to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol limiting emissions. Bush argued that Kyoto would harm the U.S. economy, unfairly excluded fast-growing nations like India and China and said nothing about cutting emissions after the treaty expires in 2012.

"The G-8 nations of the world _ the strongest, largest, most powerful nations _ are meeting at the end of next week," Gore said. "And our country unfortunately is blocking a consensus on the desire and the efforts of the other nations there to move quickly to solve the climate crisis."