WASHINGTON (AFP) — Al Gore's crusade to spur the world into action over climate change may have won him the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, but it is unlikely to trigger any policy U-turn in the White House.
The administration of US President George W. Bush applauded the honor bestowed on the former vice president with spokesman Tony Fratto saying: "Obviously it's an important recognition."
But asked if the Nobel win would pressure the Bush administration to adopt a "Gore-style" approach to tackling climate change, Fratto flatly replied: "No."
Friday's award marks the culmination of a decades-long campaign by Gore, who sought to alert the world's top polluter to the dangers of global warming in lectures around the country well before it became a hot-button issue.
Gore shared Friday's honor with the UN's top climate panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body of about 3,000 experts which has highlighted the human role in steadily mounting global temperatures.
The former Democratic vice president has said that had he won the 2000 presidential elections, he would have pushed climate change up the White House agenda.
Instead his Republican rival Bush was handed a razor-thin victory by the Supreme Court and, with an eye on big business and the US car industry, swiftly abandoned US support for the Kyoto treaty on climate change.
In recent months though, Bush under growing global pressure has sought to find a way to address the issue, while balancing the needs of his energy-guzzling nation and its powerful multinational companies.
Late last month, the US president hosted an international conference of the world 16 biggest polluters in Washington, and proposed a summit among major emitters in 2008 to set a long-term global goal for curbing greenhouse gases.
Fratto said Friday that the next step "really the most difficult step, is implementing climate change strategies that are effective and practical."
He said such strategies should "allow for continued economic development and for contries to do the work that they need to do to lift people out of poverty. And that's a challenging task."
At last month's conference, Bush endorsed the United Nations as the final arena for tackling global warming, but refused to give an inch to those demanding the United States impose a legally-binding cap on its own massive carbon emissions.
"Energy security and climate change are two of the great challenges of our time. The United States takes these challenges seriously," Bush, a former Texan oil industry executive, told the September meeting.
He called on the group to set "a long-term goal" for reducing global greenhouse gases -- the outcome of burning the fossil fuels which also drive the world's economy.
"By setting this goal, we acknowledge there is a problem. And by setting this goal, we commit ourselves to doing something about it."
But Bush also rammed home the message that the United States, hugely dependent on oil, stood by its six-year-long opposition to setting mandatory caps on its own emissions.
"Each nation will design its own separate strategies for making progress towards this long-term goal. These strategies will reflect each country's different energy resources, different stages of development and different economic needs," he said.
Amid mounting fuel prices, Bush earlier this year ordered his government to slash US dependence on foreign oil, in a move also aimed at making the US energy supply less vulnerable to terror attacks.
In May, he directed that gasoline usage should be cut by 20 percent in the next decade to make the United States "more secure for generations to come," help economic growth and safeguard the environment.
He has called for new regulations to be in force by the end of 2008, when the Bush administration will already be in its dying days.
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