What's yet another outstanding legacy of our little adventure in Iraq? Increased incidences of cancer and birth defects due to depleted uranium shells, that's what! Scientists have found uranium in the urine and semen of 1991 Gulf War veterans, and since the half-life of depleted uranium is 4.1 billion years, Iraqi citizens stand a very good chance of experiencing the ill effects of depleted uranium for, basically, ever. The U.N. has tried to pass resolutions since 2007 aiming to discover where depleted uranium weapons have been used and find out more about what their long-term harmful effects will be -- but the U.S. belongs to the U.N. Security Council, composed of the five most powerful nations on Earth, and so the U.S. essentially has veto power over any such resolution, and hasn't been afraid to use it, whether its President was Mr. Accountability None or the Nobel Peace Prize winner who has actually outdone his predecessor in launching unconstitutional wars. Hence Roots Action helps you tell our government to stop opposing such resolutions and face up to at least some of the harm it's caused in its Iraq adventures.
Meanwhile, we've spoken a bit about organic food labeling lately -- specifically about the possibility that loopholes in organic food standards could allow genetically-modified vitamins into organic food -- but the organic food standards do have one pretty outsized loophole: they allow genetically-modified vaccines in livestock. And while the standards require the NOSB to review any proposed use of GMO vaccines and only approve such vaccines where non-GMO alternatives don't exist, and while the NOSB hasn't approved a single such vaccine for that use, no one has even submitted such a vaccine for review -- and yet the NOSB admits that GMO vaccines find their way into organic food! How could such a thing happen? If you answer "because the NOSB hasn't been doing its job," you win first prize. But you know what a better prize would be? A better prize would be to outlaw GMO vaccines in organic food entirely, and then get all up in the NOSB's grill to actually enforce the standard this time, and so the Organic Consumers Association helps you do that. It's a tough job, but so's anything worth doing.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the EPA's to propose the most vigorous carbon emissions standards possible, then Public Citizen helps you do that. But I warn you: if you use Public Citizen's tool, you'll be asking for more vigorous standards than the EPA has actually proposed. In what areas could the EPA's Clean Power Plan be improved? The Clean Power Plan could demand more renewable energy from states, it could stop pushing natural gas as an alternative to coal (especially since gas drilling leaks methane, which traps 80 times the heat that carbon dioxide does), and it could eliminate nuclear power, which does pollute less than coal or gas but which has never been economically viable without massive government handouts. And don't believe the hype that wind and solar "cost" more than coal. First, any new technology costs less as it's deployed more, and second, they only "cost" more to the corporations that would make them -- when you add in the health care savings and the climate change savings, they cost less to our civilization.
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