Dear Friends,

On the website for the film, An Inconvenient Truth, www.climatecrisis.net, I wrote  earlier this year:  “Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced.” 

The film has now become the #3 top-performing documentary in history, and the book of the same title has been on the NYT bestseller list for more than four months.  The reception to my message about global warming and the urgency to deploy solutions has been gratifying.   While I am doing what I can to spread awareness about the climate crisis and its solutions, others are spearheading much-need citizen actions.  One such organization is CCC – the Climate Crisis Coalition (www.climatecrisiscoalition.org).  By emphasizing not only the environmental aspects of global warming but also the corresponding issues of social and economic equity, they are helping us build a more diverse and stronger movement.

I am writing today to urge you to sign and help circulate CCC’s People’s Ratification of the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty petition.  I recently signed the petition and hope you will do so as well.

My support for this petition comes from a unique perspective. As Vice President I helped fashion the Kyoto Protocol.  As a candidate for President, I tried to make international cooperation on climate change a central concern. Now, at this critical juncture, the rest of the world needs to know that millions of U.S. citizens support the Kyoto Protocol, even if the current administration does not. The evidence for this rests on an extraordinary, if under-publicized, range of emission-limiting activities undertaken by more than 295 cities, some 44 states and countless numbers of universities. Many thousands of signatures on the People’s Ratification will add to this momentum. It is critical that this groundswell of activity be put squarely in front of all our candidates, both incumbents and challengers, in this year’s midterm elections for the 110th Congress.  

Please join me, in signing the People’s Ratification. You can sign online (as I have) at www.kyotoandbeyond.org or you can print the petition from the site, collect signatures on paper copies and send them to the CCC address provided.

 

Sincerely Yours,

Al Gore.

P.S. I also recommend the CCC's website for information about what they and other activists are doing; for their Climate Crisis News Engine (a great source of breaking climate stories from around the globe); and as a way to sign up for the free CCC Newsfeed, a valuable summary of climate-related developments.   And also visit www.theclimateproject.org, the site to learn about the program to train 1,000 committed individuals to take a version of my global warming slide presentation into their home communities.