[OS X Emacs] Environment variables and Aquamacs 2.0

[George Nurser]

Hi,
First to say that I have been using Aquamacs 2.0 for a few months now
and I am really very impressed. It's now a really nice application.

My problem is a fairly standard one I think, though. In the Aquamacs
manual under changes to v1.2a it states
 'Aquamacs has always imported the environment from the login shell,
e.g. any environment variable you might have set in your
~/.bash_profile'

However, (running Aquamacs from a Dock icon, 10.6.3) this does not
appear to be the case.
If I do e.g.
M: (getenv USER)
I get
Debugger entered--Lisp error: (void-variable USER)
  (getenv USER)
  eval((getenv USER))
  eval-expression((getenv USER) nil)

I get the same for other environment variables that I have explicitly
exported in my ~/.bash_profile

So, do I have to change the environment.plist, or is there a less
invasive way of getting environment variables into Aquamacs?

--George.