New US president will help climate change fight: Australian PM

AFP, August, 2008

WELLINGTON (AFP) — The next US president will provide fresh impetus to the fight against global warming, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Tuesday.

Both candidates for the November US election, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama, had advised him that they would take action on climate change, Rudd told a conference in Auckland.

"What is heartening on that question is that both candidates, Republican and Democrat, have indicated that they will be moving on this, and with an ambitious set of targets," he said.

Rudd signed the Kyoto Protocol on climate change as soon as he came to power last year, leaving US President George W. Bush as the only leader of a major industrialised nation to have refused to ratify the international treaty....