US:World business leaders welcomed US president George Bush's acknowledgment of climate change as "a serious challenge" and called yesterday for a long-term emissions standards regime.
Mr Bush declined in his annual state of the union address to support mandatory caps on heat-trapping carbon gases that US companies such as General Electric have pushed for, instead backing new technologies to cut the amount of petrol used in the US.
While supporting the White House nod to alternative energies such as ethanol, wind, solar and nuclear power, executives meeting at the Swiss ski resort of Davos said they wanted Washington to lock in stricter US emissions standards.
"It is a good step, but we need to take many more," said Duke Energy chief executive James Rogers at the World Economic Forum meeting, where climate change is dominating talks among some 2,400 participants from around the globe. Power plants being built today will be used for 50 years, so a sense of future regulations is critical for current investment decisions, he said.
"We are not sitting on the sidelines waiting. A tremendous amount of work is going into being prepared [ for a new regulatory regime]," he said.
Alcoa chief executive Alain Belda agreed, saying it was untenable for the US climate change agenda to continue to be set by individual states such as California. "I think the country needs one rule," he told a climate change panel at Davos, noting such a standard could reduce the risks for companies of adopting new and often expensive emissions-cutting technologies.
He also said that strong leadership from the US, the top global source of greenhouse gases, could spur other less wealthy countries to tighten their emissions rules.
In Japan, the head of the United Nations climate secretariat, Yvo de Boer, celebrated Mr Bush's environmental messages as a sign "that the climate on climate is changing in the US". Former German environment minister Jürgen Trittin said the speech could "improve transatlantic co-operation in the fight against climate change". But others dismissed it as too little, too late.
"The president failed to produce a comprehensive plan," said Sven Teske, a renewable energy expert at environmental group Greenpeace. "It's a collection of technical suggestions, but no real policy shift.
Diane Wittenberg of the California climate registry, an organisation that helps companies and other groups monitor their emissions, said the speech was a disappointment.
"He started behind the curve and never got ahead of it," she said, noting that most US climate change leadership has come from state governments and the private sector, who are seeking to shape future environmental policies to their favour.
"Businesses see that climate will make a new set of winners and losers in the business community, and they want to be on the winning side," she said.
A new PricewaterhouseCoopers survey released at Davos shows that 40 per cent of 1,100 chief executives globally are concerned about threats from climate change, though in the US, the figure was 18 per cent.
Mark Spelman, head of European strategy at consultancy Accenture, said increased corporate attention to environmental issues was partially a public relations exercise to woo green-conscious consumers, but also reflected long-term calculations over future energy costs.