Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to make rapid COVID-19 tests free, designate the Delaware Water Gap a National Park, restore protections for migratory birds, ban mining within the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, charge more money in public royalties for coal mining on public lands, and enact the most vigorous methane emissions regulations possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.
Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to make rapid COVID-19 tests free for all Americans. Last week he proposed requiring health insurance corporations to reimburse folks for the cost of these tests, but that's not really the same thing as "just make the tests free," and not just to folks who have no health insurance. If you're buying groceries and paying the bills, you might not also have $20 to plunk down for a COVID-19 test -- which would just be for you, of course; if you have children, you'd want to test them, too, so figure another $20 per child. Now it's adding up, and that's before we get to submitting forms to health insurance corporations! Many times I've had to call my insurer to get them to pay up after they wrongly rejected my claims, so we need to make this easy.
Penn Environment helps you tell the Biden Administration to designate the Delaware Water Gap as a National Park. The Delaware Water Gap is one of America's national treasures, a tribute to the success of the Land and Water Conservation Fund (now permanently authorized and funded thanks to 2020's Great Outdoors Act), and over 4.5 million folks visit the Gap every year. Incredibly, though, we have no national parks in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, or New York -- no, the right word is "incredibly," if you've seen the vast unspoiled lands each of these states have -- so I'd say it's overdue. And becoming a National Park (versus a National Recreation Area, as it is now) means tens of millions of dollars more in federal funding, which means we'll have something even better to leave to future generations.
Environmental Action helps you tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to protect migratory birds from corporate harm. Specifically, you'd ask the Service to roll back the notorious Trump Administration rule "freeing" corporations from facing any accountability for their bird-killing pollution. For such a "law and order" "conservative," Donald Trump sure was all about helping big corporations escape responsibility for their wrongdoing. And the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (which the rule enforces) is over a century old; apparently the Trumpian interpretation of conservatism has nothing to do with "treasuring things that have endured," either. I kid, of course -- the Trumpian interpretation of anything is "whatever induces the most rage in the most people." But that's no way to run a civilization.
The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to ban mining within the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness watershed for the next two decades. Because it would pollute the water, and for what? Not for jobs, that's for sure -- too many right-wingers justify any and every polluting project by saying it'll employ people, as if non-polluting projects don't employ people. This was, indeed, former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett's excuse for handing out billions of taxpayer money to an ethane cracker plant! But I digress. Our Forest Service concluded, in a 2016 study, that sulfide-ore copper mining would cause irreparable damage to the Boundary Waters; I bet you just can't guess what happened next: the "law and order" "conservative" President said to hell with it, we're leasing anyway. And so we reassert our will.
Penn Environment helps you tell our Interior Department to stop subsidizing coal mining. How does our Interior Department subsidize coal mining? By actually lowering the royalties corporations have to pay for drilling on public lands! You would think our Interior Department would raise those royalties, if for no other reason than to make the taxpayer more money, since royalties do belong to the taxpayer. But our government still doesn't understand the leverage we as taxpayers have. And coal corporations still account for some three-fifths of all carbon emissions, despite providing less than one-quarter of our energy; if they're that bad for America, giving them corporate welfare is even more foolish. If we really want to fight climate change, we need to stop giving out these handouts.
Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the strongest methane emissions standards possible. Just so happens that cutting methane emissions (which accompany every oil and gas drilling operation in America) would deal perhaps the most efficient blow to climate change, since methane packs an even bigger climate change punch than coal does. And since the methane mitigation industry has been around for at least a decade, brook no HOWZ WILLZ WEZ DOZ TEH THINGZ!!!!! malarkey from big fossil fuel corporations! They're awfully ready with excuses, aren't they? And right-wingers love pretending your actual obstacles are excuses and the excuses of corporations are obstacles. Well, good luck to all of them at the Pearly Gates!
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