As you likely know, President Trump has announced his intention to reduce the boundaries of the Bears' Ears National Monument by 85% and reduce the boundaries of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by about half. And he even went to Utah to make these announcements, perhaps figuring that everyone in Utah believes exactly as big mining corporations executives do -- that public lands should be drilled and mined as much as humanly possible. And here, you might have been thinking, like me, that Utah's a damn gorgeous state and the people there probably want to keep it that way. There's some question as to whether the President actually has any authority in law to shrink the size of national monuments, but Mr. Trump loves doing crap first and trying to use the consequences of his actions against us later, so let's engage in a little pre-emption, as it were, by letting the Wilderness Society help us tell President Trump to abandon his plan to give up large swaths of these national monuments to mining and drilling corporations. Did I mention that five Native American tribes consider Bears Ears' land holy? Think maybe that's just another reason for President Trump to hate it?
Meanwhile, as you may recall, the Trump Administration wants to delay implementing the EPA's new methane emissions standards for two years, presumably so they can gut them after that (though saying so out loud, as they've done, won't help them win the inevitable lawsuits against them). Of course you already know why this is a crappy idea: not just because methane pollutes the air, not just because methane packs a much larger climate-change punch than coal, but because allowing gas drilling corporations to vent methane into the air wastes energy -- methane being, you know, an energy source -- and when gas drilling corporations vent methane on public lands, they're also cheating the American taxpayer out of well-deserved royalties. Of course, President Trump doesn't care about any of that, as long as some executive, somewhere, is raking in money he hasn't earned through hard work and good leadership. And "delaying" the rule for two years does what, exactly? Besides give more children asthma attacks and make more good Americans sick from carcinogens, I mean. So the Sierra Club helps you tell our government to put people ahead of polluters and stop trying to delay methane emissions regulations.
Finally, CREDO helps you tell the CEO of UPS to stop funding the radical right-wing legislative agenda of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. I've found that the corporations that still associate with ALEC think it's perfectly OK to say that they don't agree with ALEC on voting rights or climate change or gun rights, but they support ALEC because of their work on economic issues. If there was ever an argument tailor-made to repel me, that's the one. Of course, everyone doesn't think the same way I do (a matter about which many people are thankful, I'm sure), and plenty of corporations have abandoned ALEC for reasons that seem (to me, at least) to be of secondary importance to the fact that ALEC's main reason to exist is to keep corporations far more powerful than people. But if "ALEC is a bunch of climate change-deniers and I know you care about passing on an inhabitable planet to your posterity, don't you?" gets more corporations to abandon ALEC, I'm on board. I'm a demanding bastard, but I don't let the perfect murder the good. And depriving ALEC of the funding it uses to let corporations run roughshod over people? Doing that seems to me almost a textbook definition of "good."
Comments