Long story short: tell our government to reject the "no-fly zone" route in Ukraine, tell our EPA to reject the Pebble Mine project, regulate factory farm pollution, and regulate chemical safety and truck pollution more vigorously, and tell President Biden to forgive student loan debt. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.
Roots Action helps you tell our government not to enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine. It won't do what a lot of good Americans hope it will do (i.e., slow, or even stop, the Russian invasion), because it will then make the Russia-Ukraine war about Russia and America, which is what Russia wants. And hopefully the lessons of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Syria, etc., haven't been lost on us -- great power is more often a curse than a boon, at least when you use it. And, seriously, if we're going to oppose war, as I think most Americans now do, we're going to have to accept the fact that our opposition won't always give us the results we want. Of course I'd love to see Ukraine prevail over Russia! But I'm not willing to blow up the world to do it, and no-fly zones will take us there pretty quickly.
The National Resources Defense Council helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to permanently reject the proposed Pebble Mine project in Alaska's Bristol Bay area. Our Army Corps of Engineers rejected permits for Pebble Mine (finding its mine waste discharge proposal specifically wanting) late in 2020, but that's not a death blow for those who'd build a damn copper mine in Alaska's Bristol Bay, and thus risk not just polluting all the water around it but destroying the fishing industry, a business at least three Native American nations help conduct. It's true this project has been on life support for a long time, but in America, zombies have a way of coming back to life -- unless they get the head shot from our EPA, one supported by our communicated will as citizens. And we gotta speak out for that to happen.
Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to regulate factory farm pollution. Not just report on it, which they've been loathe to do, so we might as well play hardball. Of course "playing hardball" here is also synonymous with "doing a very necessary good work," since it ain't just animal waste polluting our clean water because of factory farms, but chemicals and drug residues which we really ought to be keeping out of our water in the first place. Not to mention methane! And factory farms have now become the biggest polluters of our water table, so we should tolerate no amount of corporate hostage-taking over "lower prices for meat." If you can't drink the water, saving a few pennies on chicken tenders ain't that important. And if they force us to choose, I'll just have to become a vegetarian.
The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our EPA to evaluate chemical safety issues more vigorously than they've done or proposed so far. Again, the risk of good Americans getting routinely poisoned by chemicals and burdened with the resulting health care problems should outweigh "the damage we might do to chemical corporations." Why would a civilized person say differently? All of us, not just conservatives, accept that solutions shouldn't be worse than problems, and that change can go too quickly and hurt too many people. These aren't controversial ideas, until they become manias -- until, for example, Republican politicians oppose all environmental regulations because of the "harm" they do to corporations. Hey, corporations are pretty rich! Then can stand to give up a little of their ill-earned largesse so we can all be a lot healthier!
The Climate Reality Project helps you tell our EPA to enact more vigorous truck pollution rules than they have proposed. Admittedly, their proposal isn't bad; it would make new trucks cut carbon emissions and nitrous oxide emissions by 90% over the next decade. Trouble is, corporations won't all be buying new trucks right away! They'll do what anyone would do, which is try to make the ones they've got work as long as they can -- in fact, it'll make some corporations stick with them a lot longer than they should, a habit you certainly don't want to encourage if you're an Executive branch agency. "Punishing thrift," in this case, isn't as bad an evil as "letting pollution kill or hurt people." And again, corporations are rich, and can bear to make their trucks pollute less more easily than any of us can bear cancer.
Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to release the memo concerning his power to cancel student debt, and then cancel student debt. If the memo said he could do nothing with his existing powers under the law, he'd have already released it, and ended this conversation! So we must assume the memo told him, ah, something different, and he doesn't want to release it because he doesn't want to do it. He campaigned on forgiving $10,000 in student debt per borrower, which won't be much in the context of the six-figure debts students take on now just to get the B.A. everyone says they need to compete in the world, until they want to sell a lot of M.A.s. So, yeah, our President needs to do more, and delaying the restart of federal student loan payments won't be enough.
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