The Prime Minister

Eighteen months after the September 11th attacks, British Prime Minister Tony Blair stepped up to a podium in London and identified the biggest long-term threat confronting the world. "There will be no genuine security," Blair declared, "if the planet is ravaged." He went on to equate global warming with weapons of mass destruction, a position later elaborated by his chief science adviser, Sir David King: "Climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today -- more serious even than the threat of terrorism."

Blair's international reputation was damaged when he supported President Bush's invasion of Iraq -- but he has tried to use his political capital to push the White House to wage war on global warming. Blair made climate change one of his top two priorities at the G8 summit last summer, and he warns that only "timely action" will avert a threat "so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power that it alters radically human existence." Britain's own record debunks Bush's insistence that curbing climate change would hurt the economy: Since 1990, Britain has reduced its greenhouse-gas emissions by fourteen percent, while its economy has grown by forty percent.

Blair, 52, is no newcomer to the fight. After a briefing by his science advisers in 2001, he ordered a detailed investigation into the impact of climate change. The conclusion: Global warming will become irreversible unless the world slashes CO2 emissions by sixty percent within fifty years.

In a stroke of diplomatic genius, Blair pledged to achieve such reductions in Britain by 2050 -- making him the first world leader to propose concrete targets beyond the time frame outlined in the Kyoto Protocol. Spurred by his example, France, Germany and Sweden followed suit. "If there is one political leader who has most vigorously championed the issue of climate change, it is Tony Blair," says Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme.

An Oxford grad who played in a rock band as a student, Blair is an avid nature buff who has hiked the Pyrenees mountains and an obsessive scholar who has been known to read the Koran on vacation. His urgency over global warming sharpened considerably in 2003, after a record heat wave in Europe left 30,000 people dead. In recent years, he has ordered his government to purchase a fleet of hybrid cars and make its buildings more energy-efficient.

So far, the Bush administration has ignored his calls for action. But Blair remains determined to force the U.S. to take responsibility for its contribution to global warming. "The blunt reality," he warns, "is that unless America comes back into some form of international consensus, it is very hard to make progress."

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