Speech by Michael Meacher MP at Campaign Against Climate Change Rally during Bush Visit

So, welcome to Britain President Bush. It is customary to bring a present and in your case you may like to bring several because you are owing us quite a lot. You're owing us over the Iraq War which was fought to provide the US economy with access to new sources of oil to extend the fossil fuel economy even further. You owe us over the weakening of environmental laws and the opening up of pristine wildernesses to increased oil and gas exploration. Above all, you owe us over Kyoto where your unilateral withdrawal has put at risk the whole of the rest of the world's efforts to deal with climate change, probably the greatest threat facing mankind, and even putting at risk human survival on this planet within the next few centuries if nothing is done, which seems to be your policy.

And what were your reasons? You said it would damage the US economy: what about damage to the rest of the world –

• Vast flooding in China and Bangladesh
• Cyclone in Orissa in India
• Enormous mud slides in Venezuela
• Hurricanes in Nicaragua and Honduras

All of which killed thousands of people? But you aren't even right about the US economy. In the next 10 years, the US economy will probably grow by 30%, and the established cost of climate change measures in the US under the Kyoto Protocol would be 0.1 to 1% of that growth; to say that cannot be afforded is absurd. Indeed, how can you afford not to do it in view of the climate change driven, unstoppable forest fires in the mid-west, drastic flooding the in Louisiana in the south, and hurricanes on the Eastern Seaboard? How much more destruction do you need to see in your own country, let alone the rest of the world, before you understand this is caused by humans, and above all you, since the US is responsible for a quarter of the total world global gas emissions?

Then you say it's not fair for the US to take part in Kyoto because it's ‘only' responsible for a quarter of world emissions, and the developing countries responsible for most of the rest are not taking any measures. Wrong again – China has drastically cut its coal and petroleum subsidies (far more than US), and India now uses more wind power than the whole of the US. So they are already doing more than the US, but the reason they won't sign up to targets is because their view is that industrialised countries caused the problem in the first place, so we should be the ones to take action initially to show that we are serious now about stopping climate change. So your policy, President Bush, of doing nothing is shooting yourself in the foot. You are preventing the one thing that you say is necessary, namely getting developing countries to come on board and play their full part under the Kyoto Protocol.

What the rest of us resent so strongly is the selfishness of US policy over climate change – that you are so in thrall to you Texan oil interests that you are blinded to how the world is crying out for American participation and American leadership over an issue that affects every country and every individual on this planet. How can America claim leadership of the world when on the one issue that is most pressing for the whole world, America is absent?

You once said you did not believe climate change was happening –you reject that now. You then said that Kyoto was not the right way forward, and America would come up with its own plans, but you reject that now too. If you now accept that there is such a thing as global warming, and hence that America disproportionately contributes to it, how can you be so irresponsible as to do nothing about it? You owe us, President Bush, and what you owe us more than anything else is an acceptance that the world is no longer a place where unilateral military and economic power wins empires, it is now a place where human survival depends on multilateral sharing of responsibility, sharing of duty and sharing of action. Because what some of us to affects all the rest, and what the rest do affects us closely. If you get to understand that, this visit will not be in vain.