Sydney - United States President George Bush said on Wednesday that the claim that he didn't care about climate change was "preposterous" and berated Europeans for trumpeting their binding Kyoto emission-reduction targets and not meeting them.
Speaking at a joint press conference in Sydney with Australian Prime Minister John Howard, Bush also made a strong pitch for nuclear power and its capacity to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are heating up the planet.
"Now, I know that some say, 'Well, since he's against Kyoto, he didn't care about the climate change'," Bush said. "That's urban legend, and it's preposterous."
Bush, in Sydney to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (Apec) summit, said the binding reduction targets enshrined in the Kyoto Protocol and championed by European countries "just didn't make sense for the United States".
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The US and Australia are the only industrialised countries to have rejected the 1997 United Nations-sponsored Kyoto initiative. They argued that accepting a target would adversely affect their economies and that Kyoto is flawed because it doesn't rope in big developing country polluters like China, India, Indonesia and Brazil.
Bush said that at June's Group of Eight summit of leading industrialised nations in Germany, he "took the message that said to our partners that if you really want to really solve the global climate change issue, let's get everybody to the table".
"Let's make sure that countries such as China and India are at the table as we discuss the way forward," he added.
"Otherwise, I suspect if they feel like nations are going to cram down a solution down their throat and not give them a voice on how to achieve a common objective, they'll walk."
The US has long held the title as the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter, but by some accounts, China surpassed it this year.
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