Oil prices 'drive US action on climate'
July 1, 2005
The environment itself is not the burning issue at the White House - but the price of gas is.
The pressure on the US president to do something on global warming along the lines sought by other world leaders comes not from traditional green activists, but from rising oil prices.
Every increase causes a flutter of concern among drivers on supermarket forecourts, where the larger bill for filling a tank means less money to spend on consumer goods - so threatening to put a brake on general economic growth.
And that causes more than a flutter of concern in Detroit where the two big American car-makers, General Motors and Ford, are losing market share to Japanese makers of cleaner cars.
So Mr Bush is proposing a raft of proposals in an energy bill which "will help us make better use of the energy supplies we now have, and will make our supply of energy more affordable and more secure for the future".
Further information can be found on the BBC News site.
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