The California Air Resources Board has developed the Advanced Clean Cars program, which aims to reduce smog emitters by three-quarters and increase sales of zero emission and plug-in hybrid cars to 15% of the market by 2025. Predictably, its opponents scream FREE MARKETZ!!! and CARZ WILL BEEZ TOO EXZPENZIVE!!!!! But reducing air pollution from cars in a state where some 37 million people drive everywhere will actually reduce health care costs, and increased fuel efficiency reduces long-term fuel costs -- and healthier, wealthier people are freer people, who can more easily participate in a free market. California needs a waiver from the EPA (which implemented its own auto emissions standards not very long ago) to press forward with its program, so the Sierra Club helps you encourage the EPA to grant California its waiver.
Meanwhile, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the Production Tax Credit (PTC) for developers generating electricity from wind. I'm not all that sanguine about tax credits for businesses, generally -- after all, all those subsidies for oil companies wound up embedded in the tax code! -- but presumably that's why we let such things sunset, and then renew them if we need to. In the short term I'd certainly rather invest in wind power (which could use the hand up) than oil (which doesn't need it). Wind power works, and the only reason we're not using more of it is that no one can own the wind -- although plenty of folks can, in fact, own the means of converting wind to electricity. And, ah, don't believe the hype about wind turbine noise. That only comes from people who never lived in New Jersey.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FTC to update its regulations pertaining to children's privacy on the internet, Public Citizen still helps you do that. Congress passed the Children's Online Privacy Act in 1998, but that was before smartphones, iPads, and XBoxes (or widely-available broadband!), and thus corporations have many more paths to a child's personal info than they used to. But a parent can't stand in every path at every moment, so the FTC has proposed, among other things, counting "cookies" as "personal information" that parents can tell websites they can't access. Of course, corporations oppose the changes because it might cost them money. But it's not just the children who need a break from all that incessant marketing -- the parents do, too.
Comments