Blair is not always on the same side as Bush

At a time when the world's attention is focused on Iraq – a problem that Bush and Blair agree on – it is worth sparing a thought for another global crisis on which they passionately disagree: global warming. This Sunday will be the second anniversary of the disastrous afternoon when the President spat out the Kyoto protocol with a Texan smirk, declaring it "fatally flawed". Tony Blair responded at the Johannesburg summit this February with his starkest challenge to the President so far. "There will be no genuine security," he explained, "if the planet is ravaged by climate change. We in Britain have shown that it is possible to break the relationship between economic growth and ever-rising pollution." Our so-called poodle's response to US pressure to "lose Kyoto" was to declare that Kyoto was "not radical enough" and embrace far more ambitious targets.

Kyoto proposed to reduce greenhouse emissions to below 1990 levels by 2012, a real cut of just 2 per cent. In fact – as Tony Blair and the Royal Commission on Environmental Protection explained – a 60 per cent cut by 2050 is necessary to cut global warming. Environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth had begged Blair to take this course, and he came through – but US resistance could still wreck our planet.

So how does George Bush defend the fact that his country, with just 4 per cent of the world's population, consumes 28 per cent of the world's natural gas, 23 per cent of its solid fuels, 20 per cent of its hard coal and 42 per cent of its motor gasoline?

The Administration's environmental stance should be seen in two distinct phases. The first lasted from the Presidential campaign until June 2002, and focused on a denial of the existence of global warming altogether. (Bush is developing a record of denying scientific truths: he does not believe in evolution either.) Although only a handful of scientists (almost all, surprise, surprise, hired by big business) dispute the fact that the rise in world temperatures is caused by fossil fuels, the Administration carefully promoted the idea that global warming was a contested notion, and that another 10 years of research was needed before any action could be taken.

Then, suddenly, there was a rhetorical shift. President Bush admitted last year that global warming does exist, but said that Kyoto was not the way to deal with it. He preferred "voluntary" regulation, which his corporate friends would, as decent folks, obviously abide by. In place of the top-down Kyoto model that seeks to restrict emissions, it proposes faster market development because this "inevitably" generates cleaner technologies. Intellectuals sympathetic to the Administration have attempted to flesh this out into a right-wing environmentalism. They never tire of repeating the fact that, as the US became richer, catalytic converters became popular. They conclude that the worst thing you can do for the environment is to slow down advanced economies, because this traps them in earlier, less clean stages of development.

Dubbed "Enron environmentalism", the policy is as bankrupt as the company it takes its name from. While increased wealth may give consumers the means to buy new, less polluting technologies, there is no evidence that they actually do it unless the government forces them to. Throughout the 1990s, most Americans be came richer and richer, but they didn't invest in clean technologies: they bought gas-guzzling SUVs and people carriers.

The only way to make growth compatible with protecting the environment is to legislate to make citizens, and most importantly businesses, use cleaner technology. It is absurd to say, as Bush does, that the solution is simply to ask nicely. A US government led by a man who is, as Ralph Nader put it, "more a corporation than a human being" seems in reality to be casting around for excuses for doing nothing to limit environmental damage. The fact that his political campaigns are bought for him by Big Oil is, of course, hardly irrelevant.

The belief that Blair is an old-style Thatcherite is proved false again by his actions on the environment. He is a believer in constructive state action and supranational co-operation – ideas that make both Thatcher and the US Republicans want to throw up. He is urgently trying to persuade other countries to act, as his government has (risking considerable unpopularity), by pushing up the price of petrol at the pump and, as in Ken Livingstone's London, introducing congestion charging. It is a distinctively centre-left vision: not anti-business but equally not in favour of letting the market rip up our environment.

And it is in clear opposition to the Bush administration, which is dismantling existing regulations by the fume-pumping truckload. They even postponed until 2006 Clinton-era plans to reduce the amount of arsenic in drinking water (no doubt the pro-arsenic lobby was jubilant). The disagreements over Kyoto also shed light on Iraq. Whether you agree with Blair or not, his motives for acting are clearly not unthinking loyalty to the US or sycophancy to a superpower. If they were, he would have toadied to them on Kyoto.

Blair's government is by no means environmentally perfect: they have invested only £37m in renewable energy sources this year, a tenth of the sum the Department of Trade and Industry asked for. But they are ahead of most other countries in complying with Kyoto, and are fighting to keep it alive. Bush, by contrast, seems determined to drop the Mother Of All Bombs on Kyoto as well as Iraq.

johann@johannhari.com