LONDON, (Reuters)

Businesses across the United States have woken up to the climate crisis but the administration of President George W. Bush is failing to act fast enough, according to former U.S. Vice-President, Al Gore.

In a new, hard-hitting foreword to a reissue of his best-selling book Earth in the balance, Gore says Wall Street and city mayors across the United States have started to take action and, while time is running out, the battle is not lost.

Problem

"Wall Street knows we have a problem, and I believe that with the right signals and the right investments, we can create the kinds of public-private partnerships that will unleash the power of the markets to solve the climate crisis," Gore wrote.

He cited the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in the northeast of the United States, the Western Governors' Climate Agreement and the Business Environmental Leadership Council as leading examples of climate self-help.

Scientists predict that global average temperatures will rise by between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius this century due to burning fossil fuels for power and transport, causing floods, famines and storms and putting millions of lives at risk.

In the new foreword Gore, who says mankind is on a collision course with nature, accuses the Bush administration of being the willing tool of the oil majors in actively undermining the warnings of climate scientists.

The former presidential candidate pipped at the post by George W. Bush in elections in 2000 said the science of climate change was no longer in dispute, what was still lacking was the political will to translate that into effective action.

"Unless we act boldly and quickly ... we are in grave danger of crossing a point of no return within the next 10 years," he wrote.

The foreword was written before Bush said last month he would call a summit this year of the world's worst polluters to discuss long-term cuts in carbon emissions — a call environmentalists dismissed as undermining the Kyoto Protocol.

Gore, whose striking film An Inconvenient Truth on the scale of the crisis won an Oscar this year, first published his best-selling book in 1992 after the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit and as he campaigned with Bill Clinton for the presidency.