The Council for a Livable World helps you tell Congress to reduce our nuclear weapons budget. Why? We should be reducing our defense spending, generally -- our defense spending has grown by 50% over the last dozen years, which doesn't even include the cost of two wars. And though you may have heard about our "need" to update our nuclear weapons capability, last I looked the planet didn't grow so big that we can't destroy it 200 times over anymore. And the world has changed in other ways: our enemies will more likely attack us with car bombs and weaponized household appliances than with nukes, because they're not out to destroy us, but to make us destroy ourselves. I don't call for an end to nuclear weapons or defense spending but an end to the mania surrounding them, a mania that prevents our elected leaders from cutting them when most Americans would.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to submit public comments about the EPA's proposed tailpipe emission standards, the Sierra Club still helps you do that. These standards, as we've previously discussed, would essentially implement California's tougher emissions standards nationally; most automakers are actually onboard with that plan, as it would mean they'd no longer have to make one version of a car for California and another for the rest of the country. But oil corporations, who stand on the wrong side of history more and more often these days, stand opposed to cleaner tailpipe emissions. I don't know how many flacks they'll get to send public comments screeching JOBZ!!!!, as if making cars cleaner somehow doesn't create jobs for the people who have to figure out how to comply with regulations. But one thing's for sure: we'd better outnumber them.