Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn PIRG helps you tell Gov. Wolf to do his damnedest to keep lead out of our drinking water. Finding lead in your drinking water isn't something that only happens to "those people" in Flint, Michigan -- Detroit's public schools just shut off their drinking water after they found lead in it, and our Government Accountability Office (or GAO) found over one-third of school districts that had tested for lead found elevated levels of lead in their water. And remember: there is no safe level of lead consumption -- any amount of lead can cause brain damage and can stunt a child's growth and/or brain development. This is one of those things we actually need to be zero-tolerance about, but too many of our leaders act like they can do nothing about it. But that sure in hell ain't the American can-do spirit in action. And it's well past time our leaders get right with the American can-do spirit.
Meanwhile, Facebook's Messenger Kids app isn't just an app that exposes our youngest children to all the problems older kids already have with social media, like depression and bad body image -- it's an app that apparently breaks the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act! Nobody could have predicted! Apparently Messenger Kids lets folks approve children's accounts without actually proving they're the parents and also lets Facebook disclose children's data to members of the "Facebook Family of Companies," both of which would contravene COPPA protections. Of course this is the sort of thing our President talks about as being "in the way of companies making money and trying to serve people," but when you hear such a thing in the context of protecting children's private information, I hope that kind of statement sounds like the lame excuse it absolutely is. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell Facebook to abandon its Messenger Kids app.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to continue to require strong methane leak rules, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. Hey, weren't we just talking about those pesky regulations stunting our economy and forcing corporations to follow a lot of rules boo-hoo? Well, those "pesky" regulations forcing gas and oil drilling corporations to emit less methane not only protect us from pollution and climate change, they also keep usable energy from leaking into the atmosphere -- usable energy, I should add, that means royalties for the American people when it occurs on public lands. But our Administration just wants you to think it's thrown up its hands, what with the NHTSA's assessment that global temperatures would go up a staggering seven degrees by the end of the 21st century. But perhaps our Administration also needs to get right with the American can-do spirit.
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