WASHINGTON - September 30 - Statement of Carl Pope, Sierra Club Executive Director

"Today, the Russian government announced that it will put the international global warming treaty into effect by ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. This is one more piece of evidence that the industrialized world takes global warming seriously with the glaring exception of the United States. The Bush administration has alienated the rest of the world by pulling the United States out of Kyoto, even though the United States accounts for 25 percent of the world’s global warming pollution. It is an issue of justice that the United States puts the rest of the world at risk by being the world’s largest global warming polluter while refusing to engage in international solutions."

"The Bush administration has continually broken its pledges to address global warming. In its first months in office, President Bush broke a campaign pledge to cut heat-trapping emissions from coal-fired power plants and then announced that the U.S. was pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol, angering key allies. The United States needs to move forward and propose a fundamental system to stabilize the global climate. It is time for the Bush administration to take its head out of the sand on global warming and rejoin the world in the fight to stop climate change."

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