Bush heads for Europe

President George Bush begins his fourth trip to Europe this year in Denmark, dining with royalty and saying thanks to a wartime ally. He ends his visit in Scotland, where rich nations are being asked to do more to ease poverty in Africa.

Bush and the other leaders are holding three days of talks at the Group of Eight summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, where British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who set the agenda as this year’s host, wants to achieve breakthroughs not only in African aid but also on climate change.

The summit follows Saturday’s Live 8 concerts which featured hundreds of top musicians performing at free rock concerts in 10 cities around the world to raise awareness about Africa’s plight and bring pressure on G8 leaders to act.

The leaders are expected to agree on billions of dollars in new support for Africa, the world’s poorest continent.

Beyond Africa, Blair has made climate change a central issue of Britain’s G8 presidency, describing it as “probably the most serious threat we face”. He wants an agreement among G8 leaders on the scientific threat posed by global warming and the urgent need for action.

The US is the only G8 country that has not ratified the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. Bush declared last week on Danish television that meeting the Kyoto emission reduction targets would have “wrecked” the US economy.

Environmentalists would like to see a strong statement on the issue coming out of the G8 meeting, even without Bush’s concurrence.

French President Jacques Chirac on Sunday called for a statement to include specific mention of Kyoto, which took effect in February and obliges participating industrialised nations to reduce their combined greenhouse gas emissions.

Bush, in an interview yesterday, renewed his insistence that Washington would not sign Kyoto or any similar deals limiting gas emissions.

Still, he described climate change as “a significant, long-term issue that we’ve got to deal with” and acknowledged that human activity is “to some extent” to blame.

“My hope is – and I think the hope of Tony Blair is – to move beyond the Kyoto debate and to collaborate on new technologies that will enable the US and other countries to diversify away from fossil fuels so that the air will be cleaner and that we have the economic and national security that comes from less dependence on foreign sources of oil,” Bush said.

Today, Bush becomes only the second sitting US president to visit Denmark, where he will express appreciation for the several hundred troops the Scandinavian nation has sent to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Trans-Atlantic relations and advancing freedom around the world also will be on Bush’s agenda during talks tomorrow with Denmark’s prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

“I’m looking forward to a good night’s sleep on the soil of a friend,” Bush said in an interview leading up to his first stay in the country.

He lamented that security considerations would prevent him visiting with ordinary Danes. “It would be unfair to the people of Denmark if I tried to move around too much because the security would be quite inconvenient to them,” he said.

More than traffic jams, Europeans are irked at Bush about the war in Iraq. Public opinion about the war has been slipping recently in the US, but has been the subject of much greater anti-war demonstrations in Europe.

“In defence of my policies, I did go to the United Nations, not only for Afghanistan, but for Iraq,” Bush said. “And we did work with allies and we did ask people’s opinion.”

After breakfast and a bilateral meeting tomorrow morning with Rasmussen, the president and Mrs Bush will attend a luncheon hosted by Queen Margrethe and her French-born husband, Prince Henrik.

In Scotland for the rest of the week, Bush will join the leaders of Britain, Russia, France, Germany, Canada, Italy and Japan under heavy security.