Petition to the US Congress on Cutting Greenhouse Gases

The wording of the text which follows is unchanged since its inception in October 2000. It is considered just as relevant now, notwithstanding the Hague Summit, the US Presidential Election, Bush's about turn, the Bonn Summit and the traumatic events on 11 September. However great the international crisis at the present time, climate change will continue and accelerate until and unless radical action is taken to arrest it.

The Petition was to have been wound up at the time of the World Summit in September 2002, but as the Bush Administration is still turning deaf ears to climate change, we are keeping the Petition going until a better opportunity arises for presenting it.

To the Members of the US Congress

Most of us are not citizens of the United States, but we all feel compelled to shame you into ratifying the Kyoto Agreement and making radical and real reductions in climate changing carbon and other emissions. Whether or not we elect you, we are all affected by your lack of commitment to and consequent ineffectiveness in making any contribution towards a reduction of 7% on 1990 levels. We know that the United States is responsible for 25% of all the world's emissions; and yet you appear to let purely internal considerations permit not a reduction but an increase of over 20% above the 1990 benchmark levels!

As if that neglect of action were not enough, you appear to complain that you are not able to make any reductions, whereas the truth is that you show no intention of doing so. Your claimed inability is of your own making, for having resisted so arduously and for so long, denying the problems and deceiving your people as to the real threats to their livelihoods, you have made it increasingly difficult for yourselves to rectify the situation - to the eventual devastating cost of your people and those of us from around the world who are reaping the consequences ahead of you.

What you may not realise is that your stubbornness in this matter has resulted in a false sense of security elsewhere as well as in the United States. The widely proclaimed 'gas-guzzling lifestyle of the US people' and insistence upon 'business as usual' have held down one big side of what organisations and governments take to be a 'level playing field' of glibly termed 'sustainable development'; whereas its true nature should be likened to the steeply tilting deck of a ship that soon will plunge to the bottom of the ocean.

Without the developed countries, led instead of hindered by the United States, first contracting their levels of carbon emissions, and then joining developing countries in converging their emissions to truly sustainable levels, all species surely face extinction through uncontrollable global climate change. Time is rapidly running out. In place of your 'won't do' we need the famous 'can do' attitude of the American people, 80% of whom, we believe, support the action that we plead with you to take.

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