Sen. Casey's bill to force disclosure of fracking chemicals might be dead in the water, so to speak, but we can still pressure Interior Secretary Salazar to force gas drillers to disclose the chemicals they use to drill for gas and set our tap water on fire. I didn't know the Secretary of the Interior had that authority, but apparently he does, probably because gas drillers drill on public lands. Mr. Salazar has actually been pretty good on issues close to his home state of Colorado, and plenty of gas drillers operate there, enough that even Democratic Gov. Hickenlooper, who thinks concerns over fracking are "overblown," has called for fracking chemical disclosure rules. Firedoglake helps you tell Mr. Salazar to force fracking chemical disclosure.
Meanwhile, Senators Wyden (D-OR) and Udall (D-CO) have publicly questioned our government's interpretation of the PATRIOT Act. That's right, our government might well have decided that the PATRIOT Act gives them even more power than it actually does -- and, apparently, not even for collecting information on terrorism suspects, but for collecting information on folks with no connection to espionage/terrorism cases. Who could have predicted that our government, having been given too much power, would then abuse it? And our government has been relying on secret interpretations issued by secret courts to do what it's doing, which doesn't sound a whole lot like democracy as we understand it, does it? CREDO helps you tell Attorney General Holder to shine some light on what our government is doing.
Finally, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell Mr. Obama to stop TransCanada's Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. What is the tar sands pipeline? It's a pipeline that would carry crude oil, extracted from tar sands, from Canada through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma down to Texas, where the oil would be refined. And what's the problem with this? Well, pipelines break. And this pipeline happens to run over the Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies almost a third of America's agricultural water, not to mention drinking water for millions of Americans. Worse, TransCanada's pipelines break more -- they had a dozen pipe leaks last year, and had to shut down pipelines twice this past May because of oil spills. And one of them occurred in Kansas, through which the XL pipeline would travel. As we learned in the Gulf last year, it only takes one accident to create a disaster.