Long story short: tell Brazil to reverse an Amazon-killing rail project, tell our Postal Service to use electric trucks, tell the Biden Administration to protect Chaco Canyon, tell UPS to treat its injured workers better, tell our EPA to get all the lead pipes out of our water, and tell big telecom corporations to stop carrying Fox News in their cable packages. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.
Sum of Us helps you tell the government of Brazil to reverse course on building the Ferrogrão railway project, which would cut through indigenous lands and destroy nearly a thousand kilometers of Amazon rain forest. Naturally Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro -- who, with Donald Trump out of power, may rank as the world's worst political leader -- doesn't care about indigenous peoples, or about the ancient that do more to fight climate change than perhaps any other spot on Earth, but we care, and frankly we matter more than he does. And, frankly, so do the indigenous people who have heroically fought the Bolsonaro government. At least, in a sane, decent, and moral society, that would be true. But we must work to create and preserve that society every day of our lives. Hence we do it here, regardless of what he or his corporate cronies want.
Penn PIRG helps you tell the Board of Governors of our U.S. Postal Service to change direction on their new fleet of mail trucks and make them all electric instead of gas-guzzling. That'll have a big effect on climate change, since these trucks go all over the country every day. Now some right-wingers will do a victory lap after saying all mail trucks use electricity from coal ha ha ha snort. But even the electric mail trucks that would run in West Virginia (the only state that gets nearly all its energy from coal) won't be pumping tailpipe carbon emissions into our air, and in states that use more renewables, of course, running those trucks will cause even fewer climate emissions. This is progress! Right-wingers want you to let the perfect to murder the good, so that you never do good. We've gotta fight that.
The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell our Department of the Interior to keep mining and drilling out of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park and its surroundings. By now you may be able to recite the reasons why we'd do that -- mining and drilling pollutes the water, pollution kills wildlife, Chaco has religious significance to nearby Native nations. The Biden Administration has proposed a 20-year ban on new gas and oil leases within a 10-mile radius of Chaco, but we'd like that to extend rather past that, ideally to "forever." I've said it before and I'll say it again: when you blow up land that folks lived on for thousands of years, that land is gone, forever -- and the fuel you'll make from it will be gone almost as quickly, as will the money you make from it. As far as renewable energy, the sun may set and the wind may die, but they always come back.
More Perfect Union helps you tell UPS to stop retaliating against injured workers and start doing right by them. UPS runs a lot of warehouses, as you know, and its workers handle a lot more heavy packages than you or I do, so they get hurt a lot -- and UPS tries to keep them on the job, or catch them in "lies" so they can fire them (if you get asked 50 times exactly what time you got hurt, you think you'll give exactly the same answer 50 times?), or send them to Concentra, a corporate clinic chain that apparently specializes in pushing workers back to work without giving them basic health care like X-rays or MRIs. Not for nothing, but Concentra has close to three dozen complaints on the Better Business Bureau website, where they're ranked one star out of five. UPS needs to do better.
Environmental Action helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to get all the lead pipes out of our water systems. There's money to do that now, thanks to the infrastructure bill Congress passed last year, but our EPA still has to mandate that the lead pipes be gone, or else we risk losing some of that money. There's literally no benefit to having lead pipes in our waterways -- lead leaches out of those pipes and into our water eventually, and there's no safe amount of lead one can imbibe, because any amount of lead can cause brain damage, which then leads to other intractable health problems. You know how you get preventive health care for no additional cost now? Well, we should also get clean water from our government at no additional cost.
Inequality Media helps you tell big cable corporations to take the Fox News Channel off the air. It's not censorship! Censorship is when our government takes something off the air; good Americans joining together to pressure private corporations to take something off the air is just the churn of civilization. And no, Fox doesn't have a First Amendment right to get carried by other big corporations! If folks really want to diddle their rage glands all day, they can go find Fox News on the internet, where big telecoms should deliver all files at the same speed (per net neutrality principles); needless to say, we'd fight algorithms that shove Fox News down your throat. We've got to win civilization every day.
Comments