"I think you are going to see that debate is moving beyond some of these discussions we've had in the past and focussing on the issue of what we are going to do about solving these inter-related problems," Hadley said.

Those included pollution, poverty alleviation and development of secure energy supplies, he told reporters on board Air Force One, the US president's aircraft, during a flight to Denmark where Bush will spend the night before travelling to the July 6-8 G8 meeting in Britain.

"They are still discussing the language in the (G8) communique about climate change," Hadley said, adding that Washington wanted the issue "to be addressed in the context in which I have described it".

TOP OF AGENDA

Together with aid for Africa, climate change is a top-of-the-agenda issue at the G8 meeting.

Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair, the summit's host, said last week he had been having tough negotiations with the United States, the world's biggest polluter, before the summit in Gleneagles, Scotland.

Washington has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on carbon dioxide emissions and the greenhouse effect.

In response to speculation in the British media that the US administration was softening its stance ahead of the meeting, a White House spokeswoman said this was not the case.

"President Bush has stated his climate policy in 2001 and it remains the same," Michele St. Martin, a spokeswoman for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said from Washington.

"He believes that in order to address climate change it must be through the development and deployment of clean energy technologies," she said.

All the other G8 powers -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia -- have signed on to the treaty to cut emissions of carbon dioxide, which came into force in February.

"The Kyoto treaty wouldn't work unless all nations were involved. And as you know, many of the developing nations weren't involved in Kyoto," Bush said in an interview with Britain's ITV1 television broadcast on Monday.

"So some of the discussions we're going to have at the G8, thanks to Tony Blair's leadership, is to work with India and China as to how to share technology with them, so that we can all work together to clean up the environment, and at the same time have sustained economic growth," he said.