President Bush is trying hard to polish his image on global warming, but buried in his fancy talk about setting long-term goals for reducing emissions by mid- 2008, the U.S. president’s core message is still the same – don’t dare mess with economic growth.

Instead of binding limits on greenhouse-gas emissions, favored by the United Nations and many countries, he’s still pushing a voluntary approach on climate change and lobbying some of the world’s biggest polluters to rally behind him.

The surprise finding, announced by HSBC, the world’s fourth-largest corporation, showed India leading both the developed and developing worlds – far ahead of the UK, France, Germany and the US. HSBC said it shatters the widely held myth of the industrialized world leading the pack on global warming.

Carbon ranching is a way to protect rainforests, which inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen to help cool the planet. At present, these woodlands are threatened by logging, mining, cattle production and, increasingly, sugar and palm oil plantations to fuel growing demand for ethanol. In fact, destruction of the world’s tropical forests now contributes more to global warming than China’s well-publicized industrial-pollution surge.

A pledge to help poorer nations reduce carbon emissions caused by slashing and burning their forests was in the final communiqué issued at the Group of 8 summit in Germany. The Bush administration has financed some tropical forest conservation projects in the past. Now, as Congress energetically debates new climate-change legislation, greater incentives for carbon ranching are advocated. As usual, the solution is simple economics.

Global warming has taken center stage at the meeting – whose theme is “growth and responsibility in the global economy” -- and Bush risks alienating his German counterpart , a former physicist who has made climate change her signature issue.

CNN has a story today on the melting of Zugspitze, the last glacier in Germany. Economic losses are already resulting, despite the efforts of locals to slow down the melting by creating an anti-glare shield to reflect sunlight away from the glacier.  

Environment Ministers from the G8 have agreed to study the world economic impact of species being driven to extinction by global warming. The ministers have agreed to conduct the review along the lines of last year’s report by economist Sir Nicholas Stern.