Whatever initiative President Bush announces to deal with global warming, it can be no substitute for US participation in the Kyoto Protocol, the only international treaty which would commit the US and other industrialised countries to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.
Although Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroder will be lobbying Bush hard to relent on his administration's decision last March to renege on the Kyoto Protocol, even they must know that the President is not for turning. He has said No repeatedly, most recently this week.
The G8 leaders would do well to get their hands on a dossier issued this week at the Bonn climate summit by the National Environmental Trust of Washington DC, which not only details the genesis of the US rejection of Kyoto, but also the environmental policies Mr Bush is pursuing.
Most notoriously, his administration's energy package, announced on May 17th, would open up Alaska's wilderness to oil exploration as part of a strategy which, as the New York Times noted, "relies heavily on finding more of the very fossil fuels that contribute to [global] warming".
Alarmed by the energy crisis in California, the Bush plan calls for the construction of between 1,300 and 1,900 new power plants, most of them coal-fired. This could increase emissions from the electricity sector by 35 per cent, amounting to 40 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.
Not only that. As the National Environment Trust's dossier points out, the administration's budget for 2002 would slash research and development programmes for alternative energy, geothermal, hydrogen, hydro, solar and wind, by an aver age of 50 per cent while increasing the allocation for fossil fuels.
Despite an explicit promise during last year's US presidential election campaign to reduce CO 2 emissions from power plants, Mr Bush was scarcely six weeks in office when he announced in mid-March that since carbon dioxide was not technically a "pollutant", it would not now be regulated.
This was described as a "fabulous victory" by the pro-business Competitive Enterprise Institute, which had lobbied against any controls. "President Bush and Vice-President Cheney have made the right decision on regulating CO 2 with a little good advice from their friends," it said.
Most striking about a debate in the US Congress, according to NET, were "repeated references to Bush's ties to the coal industry, the most fervently opposed of all industries to carbon-dioxide caps". But then Mr Bush had carried four of the top five coal-producing states in the election.
On March 27th the President's National Security Adviser, Ms Condoleezza Rice, told EU ambassadors that the Kyoto Protocol was "dead on arrival". The following day, Ms Christine Todd Whitman, head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, said the US had no interest in pursuing it.
Three weeks earlier at a meeting of G8 environment ministers in Trieste, Ms Todd Whit man had described global warming as "one of the greatest environmental issues we face, if not the greatest challenge" and then signed a declaration committing the G8 to ratifying Kyoto.
She was left high and dry by the President's decision to renege on the treaty. She must have felt equally uncomfortable about Dick Cheney's view of energy conservation as "a sign of personal virtue, but not a sufficient basis for a sound comprehensive energy policy".
Last month, in a report commissioned by Mr Bush, the US National Academy of Science said global warming was a real problem and getting worse. Indeed, temperatures were already rising because of the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as a result of human activities.
On June 11th the President acknowledged the problem. The issue of climate change respects no border. Its effects cannot be reined in by an army or advanced by any ideology. Climate change, with its potential to affect every corner of the world, is an issue that must be addressed.
But apart from calling for more research and promising EU leaders in Gothenburg that the US would not attempt to block other countries from making progress towards ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, Mr Bush has not said what action, if any, the US will take.
The Democratic minority leader in the House of Representatives, Dick Gephardt, echoed the views of many when he said that one could argue about the details of Kyoto and try to change it, "but the idea that we can just stand by here for five or 10 years and just do research is, I think, imprudent".
Others have noted the discrepancy between Mr Bush's determination to invest billions of dollars in an "unproven, expensive and diplomatically unpopular" national missile defence system, as Oregon Democrat Earl Blumenauer called it, and his unwillingness to confront climate change.
In response to a call from Congress, the White House Office of Management and Budget produced a report on June 29th detailing a decrease of $414 million in international assistance, global change research programmes and energy efficiency, conservation and renewable energy programmes.
Last week anti-Kyoto language in the Appropriations Bill for 2002 was removed by the House of Representatives without a vote. Its unopposed removal was seen by NET as "a positive sign that policy-makers are beginning to understand the role they can play in the fight against global climate change".
If Mr Bush wants to reduce US dependence on oil imports, Friends of the Earth has suggested the best place to start drilling would be under Detroit. "Improving the 19 miles per gallon of the average car by just three miles per gallon could re place all imports from Kuwait."
However, as the NET dossier notes, the Bush administration has not proposed raising fuel efficiency standards for vehicles despite the fact that an increase in fuel economy could eliminate the need to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other sensitive areas.
As the Chicago Tribune said on June 12th: "In the controversy over global warming, Europeans have come to regard President Bush as the spokesman for irresponsible Americans who are too addicted to comfort, excess and mammoth sports utility vehicles to care about the future of the planet".
Yet in a New York Times/ CBS News opinion poll last month, 72 per cent felt it was necessary to take steps "right away" to counter global warming. If Mr Bush continues to do nothing, he may not easily be forgiven.
Mr Bush will arrive empty-handed in Genoa, at least on climate change, like an emperor without clothes. How long he can persist in this posture will depend crucially on next year's congressional elections.