BERLIN, April 18 (UPI) -- U.S. President George W. Bush's policies to combat climate change have come under fire in Europe, with Germany's top energy policy official accusing the U.S. president of demonstrating "losership instead of leadership."

Bush earlier this week in a speech on his government's climate protection policies laid out the plan to halt the growth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 "and begin to reverse thereafter, so long as technology continues to advance."

Bush said these were "realistic goals," whereas it was wrong to "raise taxes, duplicate mandates, or demand sudden and drastic emissions cuts that have no chance of being realized and every chance of hurting our economy."

While the speech was Bush's first connected to concrete emission caps, it fell short of what the U.S. delegation had agreed to at a U.N.-led conference on climate change last December in Bali, Indonesia.

At the time, the U.S. delegation under pressure gave up its blocking strategy and agreed to negotiate a new climate-protection accord by the end of 2009, also backing a conference paper that found that "deep cuts in global emissions will be required" to stop global warming.