US:Businesses across the US have woken up to the climate crisis but the administration of President George W Bush is failing to act fast enough, according to former US vice-president Al Gore.
In a new, hard-hitting foreword to a reissue of his bestselling book, Earth in the Balance, Mr Gore said Wall Street and city mayors across the US had started to take action and, while time was running out, the battle was not lost.
"Wall Street knows we have a problem, and I believe that, with the right signals and the right investments, we can create the kinds of publicprivate partnerships that will unleash the power of the markets to solve the climate crisis," he wrote.
He cited a regional greenhouse gas initiative in the northeast of the US, a western governors' climate agreement and the business environmental leadership council as examples of climate self-help.
Scientists predict that global average temperatures will rise by between 1.8-4 degrees this century due to burning fossil fuels for power and transport, causing floods, famines and storms and putting millions of lives at risk.
In the new foreword, Mr Gore accuses the Bush administration of being the willing tool of big oil firms in undermining the warnings of scientists.
The former presidential candidate said the science of climate change was no longer in dispute; what was lacking was the political will to translate that into effective action. "Unless we act boldly and quickly . . . we are in grave danger of crossing a point of no return within the next 10 years."
The foreword was written before Mr Bush said last month that he would call a summit this year of the world's worst polluters to discuss long-term cuts in carbon emissions - a call environmentalists dismissed as undermining the Kyoto Protocol.
Mr Gore, whose documentary on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, won an Oscar this year, first published the book in 1992. - (Reuters)