Early days at the Vigil.
Weekly, Monday evenings, 5-7 pm
Every Monday evening Campaign against Climate Change runs a 'Climate Vigil' opposite the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, just South of Oxford Street (Bond street tube), Central London. It is our way of keeping the ongoing protest against the criminal folly of Bush's climate policy visible at the most appropriate place available in this country. It is also a way of bearing witness for the countless millions who are likely to suffer because of that policy, in the future.
The Climate Vigil has been maintained every week since November , 2000, the day the Hague Climate Talks broke down, due to the intransigence of the US in refusing to do their share in the fight against climate change. Already at this stage it was clear that the US was the greatest obstacle in the way of globally coordinated action to avert impending climate disaster - but the situation soon got much worse with the election (or appointment by the Supreme Court !) of George W Bush as the most tranasparently special-interest-dominated and overtly anti-environmental US President in history.
The vigil started as a 2 week 24 hour-a-day protest and was inspired by the first ever mass climate-protest that took place just previously at the Hague Climate talks. The vigil has been instrumental in catalysing bigger protests at the US embassy including an 'Inauguration Day' protest in January 2001, and the protests that followed Bush's dumping of the Kyoto protocol in March of the same year: the vigil was expanded into a 60-strong protest just 3 days after the news, and this acted in turn as the catalyst for our bigger 'Kyoto Rally' a month or so later. The vigil/protest has always taken place at the US embassy, apart from 2 weeks after September 11th when we moved it to the ExxonMobil offices, on Aldwych.
You will not find a big crowd of people at the
vigil but will certainly be made welcome by those of us there to keep
it going. We would like there to be hundreds there every week - and
indeed to maintain a constant vigil 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We
have no doubt that something like that should happen, and that people
in the future will wonder why it did'nt and wish that it had. So our
little vigil is in a sense by way of token and reminder of the angry,
loud and sustained protest at US climate policy that we should be
hearing and that we need to hear.