Remember a few years ago, when our Supreme Court ruled that you couldn't patent human genes because, well, you didn't make them? Congress may undo that good work with legislation that would nullify the ruling and allow big corporations to patent human genes again, so Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep big corporations from patenting our genes. Some Congressfolk will claim that this legislation doesn't do that, but all you need do to refute them is attend the discussion in paragraphs 8 through 11 of this article. Trigger warning: a lawyer claims the ruling has caused "a dead stop in research in the United States on isolated natural products." You'll recognize that as a hostage crisis -- give me monopoly power over human genes, or the science gets it! You'll also recognize it as absurd, since we're more likely to do good work about "isolated natural products" if many entities can research them, rather than one corporation valuing money more than science.
Meanwhile, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned our EPA's 2015 coal ash rule last year, ruling that it did not adequately protect good Americans from the water pollution caused by coal ash leaking into groundwater -- as mandated to do by the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which grants our EPA rule-making power in this matter. Yes, I totally put that last clause in there to forestall complaints about BIG GUMMINT!!!! But even though the coal ash rule dates from the Obama Administration, now this Administration must fix it -- again, as mandated by our laws and our courts -- and you can probably guess their enthusiasm for that task. Still: it doesn't matter what they want; it matters what we want -- if we speak out loudly enough. Hence Environmental Action helps you tell our EPA to comply with our courts and write a strong coal ash rule. That would be the law and order thing to do, after all.
Finally, H.R. 2156, the RECLAIM Act, would help states clean up air and water polluted by abandoned coal mines Reclaiming abandoned coal mines -- which put a lot of filth into our air and water, particularly in Pennsylvania and Kentucky, from which (perhaps not coincidentally!) many of H.R. 2156's sponsors hail -- would not only make our air and water cleaner, but would create jobs for workers abandoned by a dying coal industry. And H.R. 2156 actually has almost a dozen Republican co-sponsors and just passed out of the House National Resources Committee by a 26-10 vote; with Senate Majority Leader Mitch "I decide what we vote on" McConnell also hailing from Kentucky, maybe H.R. 2156 can pass both houses of Congress! But we've still got to stay on our Congressfolk, so Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to cut pollution and help out depressed areas of our country by passing the RECLAIM Act.
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