US: US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi has urged President Bush to wake up to the "reality" of climate change as Berlin and Washington locked horns on global warming ahead of next week's G8 summit in Germany.
Officials are battling over the text of a climate change communique: Washington officials have said Berlin has crossed a "red line" by expecting leaders to sign a multilateral agreement on carbon emission reductions that paves the way to the period beyond the Kyoto agreement in 2012.
"We are of the opinion - and I made this clear - that we need a multilateral agreement to be able to fight globally this challenge to humanity," said Dr Merkel after her meeting yesterday with Ms Pelosi, a Democrat who opposes Mr Bush's environmental policy.
Then, choosing her words carefully, Dr Merkel said that, on the issue of binding emissions targets, there was "a lot of movement" in the US.
Ms Pelosi told reporters she had seen "first-hand evidence" on a stopover in Greenland "that climate change is a reality; there is just no denying it".
"It wasn't caused by the people of Greenland," she said. "It was caused by the behaviour of the rest of the world." US officials complained last week, in a document leaked to Reuters, that German demands on climate change "[run] counter to our overall position and crosses multiple 'red lines' in terms of what we simply cannot agree to".
They have already removed from the draft communique a commitment to halve carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.
Now, according to German press reports, US officials are pushing for acknowledgment of the "growing role of nuclear electricity production" in climate protection.
Nuclear energy is Dr Merkel's Achilles' heel: though herself a supporter, her Social Democrat (SPD) coalition partners are firmly opposed. The last SPD-Green government ratified an agreement to wind down all nuclear power stations by 2020 and SPD officials will oppose mention of nuclear power in the G8 paper, at the risk of splitting the German government.
A week ahead of the summit, the language is getting blunter, with one SPD official warning the US not to turn climate talks into a "poker game".
"The Americans have to be reminded that they are the ones who kicked off the climate discussion in the 1980s," said Michael Müller, an SPD secretary of state in the environment ministry. "They are the ones who carry the main responsibility for climate change."