PHOTOsynthesis: US Climate Change Legislation, One Picture at a Time

The main picture for the campaign. It does make me look a bit like God, cradling the world in my hand... perhaps a bit arrogant!

PHOTOsynthesis is a campaign I’ve made with a friend from the US delegation to the Children’s Climate Forum, Becca. In the US, a bill that will reduce America’s emissions is trying to make its way through Congress. The US is one of the biggest emitters in the world, so urgent action is required to reduce its impact on the environment.

The idea of the PHOTOsynthesis campaign is to unite people around the world in expressing their wish for a strong climate bill in the US this year. There is a very real danger that it won’t even be debated in the Senate this year, let alone be passed as a strong first step on the road to decarbonisation.

All too often, countries act in response to climate change in terms of their own national interests. It is the aim of this campaign to give people the world over a voice in the US political system, so that we can perhaps remind one US senator that his or her vote is about more than just their citizens, but that this bill has far-reaching consequences for children and communities around the world.

At the moment, the campaign is based upon facebook (http://photopetition.notlong.com), which gives us a broad reach and should allow us to access large numbers of people across the world. The name ‘PHOTOsynthesis’ comes from the idea of bringing people together and using their photos as a more meaningful and emotive petition which we can then use in the US to lobby senators and decision-makers. On facebook, therefore, we are collecting all the ‘profile pictures’ of all the members of our group. The photos needn’t be climate-specific – they are just intended to give each and every signatory of our petition a unique and individual mark upon the campaign. They will then be collated into a (hopefully!) massive ‘photo petition’, a collage or a video which we can then spread around the world and send to loads of senators in the US.

Taking the fight to the US Senate

So the first stage is to gather as many members as possible – so join up and get loads of your friends to join too! Once we’ve shown that we’re serious with a large number of members, we will then (as we are already beginning to do) raise the profile of the group, and try to attract as much attention as possible on the campaign. We are also working on bringing it off facebook and giving it a dedicated web page - so look out for more news of it on Tagd! Once we have a date for a Senate debate, we’ll then mobilise our friends in the US to push it to their senators and their contacts to try to remind America that climate change is a global phenomenon, and therefore they have a responsibility to the global community to limit their impact upon it!

Thanks for reading and JOIN UP AND INVITE!!!

Luke