Britain wants to launch a major international clean energy project with other European countries, Japan and the United States in a drive to combat climate change, Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Tuesday.
Blair said the project could focus on carbon capture and storage -- where carbon dioxide produced from burning coal is buried under the ground or the seabed instead of being released into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming.
But he indicated the goals of the project had not yet been finalised.
"We have an idea ... of a major project, which we will try and agree internationally, for one particular type of energy to be dealt with in a different way and it may well be that carbon capture and storage is where we go with it," he said.
"I think there is a real possibility of getting ourselves and the other Europeans and the Americans and Japanese and others into a major project which will allow us -- in relation to a particular form of new energy source -- to make the investment in the research and technology necessary to deliver it," he told a parliamentary committee.
Britain is discussing this and other ideas on countering climate change with other countries, he said.
"The thing that will make the biggest difference is if you get the investment in the science and technology that will allow us to develop, for example, fuel cells for the motor vehicle (and) carbon capture and storage," he said.
Environmentalists have criticised Blair in the past for putting his faith in technological solutions to climate change.
The European Union and Norway said last Friday they would cooperate in developing carbon capture and storage technologies, seen as key to meeting the bloc's ambitious targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENT KEY
Blair repeated his view that an international agreement to combat climate change was "the single biggest thing that will make a difference on this issue".
He said he would be holding further talks on climate change with the United States and other countries in the next few weeks. Blair wants a binding international agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which runs to 2012.
The Kyoto Protocol aims to slash greenhouse gases but does not include countries including India, China and the United States, responsible for a quarter of the world's industrial greenhouse gas emissions.
It obliges 35 developed nations to cut emissions of greenhouse gases to 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12.
Blair has said any new agreement must include the United States, China and India.
"I think there is a changing mood in America as well which is very positive," Blair said. "That's why I think it is possible, I don't say it's yet probable ... that we would get an agreement at least to the principles that should govern the Kyoto framework after 2012."
A new agreement must include a goal to stabilise climate change, an agreement to set a carbon price and technology transfer to poorer countries, Blair said.
U.S. President George W. Bush last month recognised climate change as a challenge and asked Americans to cut gasoline usage.
