Question: You're spearheading a cross-party campaign on climate change - what do you hope to achieve?

Joan Ruddock: What we hope to do is to engage members of the American Congress. In the UK climate change is something in which ordinary MPs are very much engaged and their constituents are familiar with the terms and we have given our support by and large across party lines to successive governments on climate change. But we understand that in the US this is not something that is gaining a lot of attention at the level of members of the Senate and/or the House of Representatives. People in the US are much less likely to be involved or engaged and as we know public opinion in the United States has not been pressing for the political agenda of climate change.

Now we have a collapse of the talks the question I ask myself and I know many colleagues ask, is what can we do at this stage to try to re-engage the Americans - or engage some for the first time - and then ensure they come back to the next stage of the climate change talks with a different perspective. We hope as European parliamentarians that we can actually put some pressure on them.

Question: Which MPs are involved in this campaign?

Joan Ruddock: On the Labour side we have: David Chaytor, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Walley, Tony Colman, Gareth Thomas, Alan Simpson and myself. On the Lib Dems side we've got: Tom Brake, Andrew Stunnell and from the Tories Peter Bottomley and Simon Thomas from Plaid Cymru.

Question: Are you trying to shame US politicians into action over climate change?

Joan Ruddock: I don't want to use that emotive language because I think where people may be hostile or completely disinterested, if we set out with the hard-hitting accusatory campaign then they are very unlikely to hear us. So the letter I've drafted for the purposes of this campaign, and of course anyone who wants to get involved can amend the letter, takes a rather soft approach.

It refers to the fact that we've got our problems here, we've got freak storms, the heaviest rainfall in more than 200 years, we've had persistent flooding. All these things we attribute to global warming and I know that in the US they have very many freak weather patterns as well so we are trying to engage them into thinking about what has happened there and what's happened here and then saying that the scientists in both our countries are right when they say that this is a result of a man-made phenomenon of global warming. We then want to point to the logo of this campaign "T-5-20". We are targeting in this campaign the five per cent of the world's population, i.e. the United States population, who produce 20 per cent of the greenhouse gases of the whole world. That is a huge responsibility and we're saying - we in this country have made our commitment to reducing greenhouse gases, now make yours.

Question: What should the UK government be doing?

Joan Ruddock: The UK government has led on this issue. I'm very proud of it. I was the shadow environmental protection minister at the time when we drew up our promises on climate change for the manifesto and we of course have a target of 20 per cent reduction in CO2 which is probably the biggest target that any country has made. In terms of the European promises made at Kyoto our target is 12.5 per cent and we are very confident that will be achieved and that more indeed will actually be done. So the UK Government has been a leader and has certainly tried to set an example and as we know John Prescott was very effective in Kyoto at getting an agreement at the last minute.

Question: EU Ministers rejected John Prescott's compromise deal with the US in the recent climate change conference because they said it conceded too much to the US - were they right?

Joan Ruddock: One or two people said that the compromise conceded too much. As I understand it the bulk of the objections were on the grounds that they didn't have the time as the conference was running out of time to absorb all of the detail with proper consideration.

Wherever a compromise is proposed and this clearly was a compromise then of course people will really want to study the detail because they fear, quite rightly, the compromise that is being offered might allow the US to do too much in terms of trading and not actually reducing its domestic emissions. So I understand the reasons but I do believe that this compromise proposal would have got consent if there had been time.

A very important element in the compromise was that the developed countries should not as a clean development mechanism be allowed to plant forests in developing countries. This had been in the Kyoto protocols and it is extremely important to remove it as a path the US could go down. I hope that compromise remains on the table.

Question: What can members of the public do to join this campaign?

Joan Ruddock: I'm hoping that a lot of people who have web sites will put this campaign on their web site, so for example, members of the public could find out if their MP has a web site - that would be a useful exercise in itself - then they should find out if they can access this whole campaign through their MP's web site. They can certainly access this campaign through my web site at http://www.joanruddock.org.uk. where they can join the campaign and they will receive details about how to send an email to members of the US Congress.

I would like this to become an e-campaign and so my hope is that as many people as possible will access it through the net and will be e-mailing and making the whole campaign run by itself. If we can manage it and manage it quite quickly then of course we will set up a web site specifically for the campaign.

Question: Do you see electronic campaigning as the way ahead for political campaigning?

Joan Ruddock: I think it is. Electronic campaigning is particularly suited to an international campaign. Where you have a domestic campaign there is a lot of value in face-to-face lobbying and of course it is important that MPs are there to meet their constituents.

Electronic campaigning is a very useful communication tool and there is no way it would have been possible to launch a campaign of this nature, which is aimed at the United States, without doing it on the internet.