If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Pennsylvania House Rep to reject HB 542, which has mutated from a bill about internet sales into a bill that would gut clean air and clean water protections in the Commonwealth, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. HB 542 would start privatizing the entire gas and oil permitting process -- in spite of the fact that you generally don't want unaccountable private corporations regulating matters pertaining to clean air and clean water -- and would also let the state legislature veto clean air and clean water regulations issued by the state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP), for those times when the legislature can't get its act together enough to simply pass laws dirtying our air and water, I guess. Don't legislators work for people? And don't people breathe air and use water? And aren't people the real job creators anyway? Without us, no one could sell a damn thing. Not even fuel!
Meanwhile, the EPA, which has shown a stunning reluctance to do any work on the American people's behalf since President Trump took over and put pro-pollution politician Scott Pruitt in charge, skirted yet another responsibility to government's owners last month, by failing to respond to the state of Maryland's petition that the EPA require upwind power plants to actually run the already-installed pollution-controlling equipment during the summer season. Why summer? Because summer is premium smog season, that's why -- heat and sunlight are like steroids to all the pollutants power plants put in the air, which means more asthma and more heart disease for us poor schmucks who don't run fossil fuel-fired power plants. (Well, fossil fuel CEOs also breathe air, as far as I know, but they sure act like they don't.) Hence the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell the EPA to do its job and make power plants use their pollution-control equipment when people need it the most.
Finally, the Trump Administration still plans to roll back automobile fuel efficiency standards, because what is more popular than making people pay more for gas? That is, after all, the most obvious result of freezing fuel efficiency standards between 2021 and 2025 (instead of raising them every year, as our government is currently mandated to do). Of course, the worse result -- more pollution in our air -- may not be as obvious to us as the hit to our pocketbooks, but it's just as real. Why would the Trump Administration do such a thing? Besides, you know, we won fuck Obama? Because the Trump Administration believes big auto executives and big fossil fuel executives have more rights than the rest of us. But if you could "earn" more rights because you make more money, then they're not really rights, are they? The Sierra Club helps you tell the Trump Administration to keep fuel efficiency standards right were they are, so good Americans can breathe easier and save more at the pump.
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