Bush declares he won't sign Kyoto's landmark treaty on global warming

World agreement on how to tackle global warming was in tatters last night after the US President, George Bush, let it be known that America would not implement the Kyoto treaty on climate change.

World agreement on how to tackle global warming was in tatters last night after the US President, George Bush, let it be known that America would not implement the Kyoto treaty on climate change.

The treaty, under which the major industrialised countries, including Britain, agreed to cut their emissions of the gases causing the greenhouse effect ­ such as carbon dioxide ­ was regarded as a triumph of international co-operation when it was negotiated in Japan in 1997. Tony Blair has thrown his weight behind it and pledged three weeks ago that Britain would ratify the treaty by 2002.

But yesterday, to cries of protest from environmentalists around the world, the White House said President Bush would not implement the agreement as it left out too many other countries. A White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said the President would seek an alternative that would "include the world".

But most observers now believe Mr Bush will make no serious attempts to reduce America's emissions of greenhouse gases, the world's largest. With less than 4 per cent of the world's population, the US is the world's biggest emitter of CO₂.

Earlier this year, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, composed of the world's most eminent meteorologists, restated its view that global warming was real, would have potentially disastrous consequences, and was happening faster than previously thought.

The White House is understood to have asked the State Department for advice on how it can withdraw its signature on the treaty, which was negotiated for the US by Bill Clinton's vice-president, Al Gore.

Mr Bush's retreat from the Kyoto agreement will do nothing to improve his relations with Mr Blair or the rest of the European Union, whose member states have backed the agreement.

The President's stance is also a slap in the face for his leading green minister, the US environmental protection agency administrator, Christie Todd Whitman, who recently sent a memo to Mr Bush urging him to recognise global warming as a serious concern, and arguing that to back away from the issue would be damaging, domestically and internationally.