Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden blamed industrial nations for global warming, and urged a boycott of the US dollar to end "slavery," in an audio tape aired by Al-Jazeera television on Friday. "All industrial nations, mainly the big ones, are responsible for the crisis of global warming," bin Laden said in the message attributed to him by the pan-Arab news channel based in Doha.
In an unusual message possibly timed to coincide with the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, he warned of the impact of global warming by saying that "discussing climate change is not an intellectual luxury, but a reality." "This is a message to the whole world about those who are causing climate change, whether deliberately or not, and what we should do about that," he said.
The al Qaeda leader then slammed the US administration under former President George W. Bush for not signing the Kyoto protocol on combating climate change. "Bush the son, and the (US) Congress before him, rejected this agreement, only to satisfy the big companies," he said.
Bin Laden then went on to urge a boycott of the US dollar. "We should stop using the dollar and get rid of it... I know that there would huge repercussions for that, but this would be the only way to free humankind from slavery... to America and its companies," he added.
The broadcast came less than a week after bin Laden praised as a "hero" Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who allegedly tried to detonate explosives on a US plane approaching Detroit on Christmas Day, in another audio message. "The message that was conveyed through the (attack on the) plane... is that America should not dream of security until we enjoy it as a reality in Palestine," he said in the message aired on Sunday by Al-Jazeera.