Daily Kos and the National Resources Defense Council help you tell President Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline. You recall he said he'd reject it if it helped worsen climate change, as almost everyone in the world not making money from ignoring climate change thinks it will -- almost everyone, that is, except the U.S. State Department, upon whom Mr. Obama will rely for advice and/or cover. Can you imagine the day when Mr. Obama announces that "it was a hard decision" but he gave the go-ahead for the pipeline, because jobs and cheaper fuel? You may want to mention to Mr. Obama that supporting growing energy sectors, like the renewable energy sector, actually creates jobs, whereas supporting established energy sectors, like the fossil fuel sector, just lets CEOs slash jobs and steal money. You may also want to mention that Consumer Watchdog tells us that Keystone XL approval will actually raise gas prices, simply because the current lack of markets for Alberta tar sands oil keeps tar sands oil prices relatively low. Still, make the climate change argument, too, since he promised us.

Meanwhile, Kentucky's Division of Water recently proposed a Clean Water Act adjustment, which would permit more selenium to flow through the Appalachian River. Why? Because selenium just so happens to be a by-product of mountaintop removal mining, still an influential industry in Kentucky. Scientists have found that selenium does serious damage to the river's fish -- including deformities, reproductive issues, and death -- and thus also to the wildlife that feed on fish; we're not talking high enough levels of selenium to do damage to people, but given how much other toxic-to-people crap mountaintop removal mining puts in the water, do we really want to give them a handout? And so the Sierra Club helps you tell the EPA Administrator to overrule Kentucky's wish to put more pollutants in their water. The EPA requires comments by two weeks from now; with any luck, we'll have an actual EPA Administrator by then (since Senate Republicans were holding up Gina McCarthy's appointment, but aren't now, because Harry Reid threatened to take their filibuster away for Presidential appointments).

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Mr. Obama to keep big oil corporations from drilling in the Arctic Ocean, Alaska Wild still helps you do that. You may remember that Shell had an oil rig crash near an island earlier this year, but, ever the optimists, Shell plans to try again next year, hoping, or hoping you hope, that they'll avoid screwing up again. They won't, and we already know why: we don't know enough about the Arctic ecosystem to know what effects our oil drilling will have, and we also can't clean up a spill in the Arctic Ocean anywhere near as well as we could in the much more temperate Gulf of Mexico (at least in theory, amirite, BP?). But we've got a bigger problem with drilling in the Arctic -- namely, that climate change seems to be proceeding faster there than anywhere else, and, ah, do you want to drill there if that's happening? Seems to me everything I've said in this paragraph is fairly conservative -- we shouldn't mess with things we don't understand, and we shouldn't make our solutions worse than our problems. Yet our nominal "conservatives" seem to want to drill everywhere. Could worship of mammon have something to do with that?