Earthwatch has called on motorists to boycott Esso petrol and other products in protest against the US administration's stance on the Kyoto Protocol.
At a small rally outside the US embassy in Dublin yesterday, Mr Jim Woolridge of Earth watch said that as well as being the biggest American oil company, Esso was the largest single contributor to President Bush's election campaign.
"We are asking people to stop buying petrol from Esso if they want real action on climate change," he told fewer than 40 demonstrators outside the gates of the embassy in Ballsbridge.
This was the only way to send a clear message to the US administration. He said the US, with only 5 per cent of the world's population, was responsible for 25 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Yet its government had not only reneged on Kyoto but wanted to drill for more oil in Alaska.
On the 225th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence, he quoted Benjamin Franklin, who remarked after signing it: "We must indeed hang together or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately." The same was true, he said, of climate change.
Mr Pat Finnegan, representing a new Irish climate change campaign group called Grian, said the principles of freedom, equality and mutual aid which underpinned the US Declaration of Independence in 1776 were never envisaged as an "a la carte menu".
Mr Trevor Sargent TD of the Green Party said countries most immediately threatened by climate change, such as Bangladesh, were "crying out for leader ship on this issue".
