Dear John,
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Help stop the Trump administration and their Big Oil cronies from permanently scarring our precious public lands: Donate $10 or more to Friends of the Earth today.
If you've saved your payment information with ActBlue Express, your donation will go through immediately:
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Right now, the Trump administration is speeding up approvals for Big Oil to drill near Chaco Culture National Historical Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site with irreplaceable archaeological treasures that are sacred for Southwest Indigenous nations. Donate now so we can protect our public lands from this reckless plundering.
The U.S. Department of the Interior was set up to protect our public lands and national monuments, preserving our environment and natural heritage for future generations. But now, Trump’s corrupt administration is helping their Big Polluters buddies to drill and mine hundreds of thousands of acres across the western U.S. at rock-bottom prices.
Pushing forward lease sales and speeding up oil production on public lands isn’t just destructive; it makes absolutely no sense right now, during an oil glut that has led to a massive storage problem. In fact, oil tankers with nowhere to go have been carrying 20 million barrels of crude oil all along California's coast for weeks on end -- an oil spill waiting to happen!
With your help, we can fight this absurd greed and protect our public lands.
Don’t let the fossil fuel industry and Trump destroy our public lands: Donate $10 or more to Friends of the Earth today.
If you've saved your payment information with ActBlue Express, your donation will go through immediately:
Trump’s Department of the Interior (DOI) and fossil fuel corporations are working hand-in-hand to try to drill in or near treasured landscapes like Chaco Culture National Historical Park and Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico, Arches and Canyonlands National Parks in Utah, Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, and Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments in Utah.
These are all iconic landscapes held in the public trust, upon which threatened species rely.
In addition to irreversibly devastating ecosystems and endangering wildlife, drilling and mining in our public lands leads to:
- Radioactive wastewater that poisons local communities’ drinking water.
- Public health issues for local Indigenous communities -- including cancer and air-pollution-related respiratory illnesses, which increase the risk of getting and dying from COVID-19.
- Increased greenhouse gas emissions, which will hurtle us to the brink of climate disaster. (Already the extraction and burning of fossil fuels on our public lands accounts for nearly a quarter of all U.S. climate emissions, which are increasing under Trump.)
We can’t let the fossil fuel industry or the Trump administration get away with this. But we’re up against powerful foes, so we can only win if we fight together. We need your support, John.
We urgently need your help to fight back against these attacks, John: Please donate $10 or more to Friends of the Earth today.
If you've saved your payment information with ActBlue Express, your donation will go through immediately:
To make matters worse, by speeding up lease sales during the pandemic, the DOI is cutting out local communities -- who will be most impacted -- from the decision-making process.
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) says that the public must have enough time to analyze and comment on these projects in detail. But under current stay-at-home orders, people have no choice but to comment online if they want to speak up in opposition to the proposed lease sales. This effectively silences many people in the rural West, particularly Indigenous communities, who lack broadband internet access. In fact, New Mexico ranks 49th among our 50 states in terms of internet access.
In addition to internet issues, people are scrambling to figure out how to stay healthy and pay their bills amidst record unemployment. So Friends of the Earth is fighting for a moratorium on fossil fuel leasing in public lands and waters during the pandemic.
Earlier this month, we had a big victory: A federal judge voided over 285 oil and gas leases on almost 150,000 acres of land in Montana, because Trump's DOI failed to account for the massive environmental impact of drilling.
But NEPA, the bedrock environmental law the judge used to hold the Trump administration accountable, is now under threat. Trump is proposing weakening NEPA to make it even easier for the fossil fuel industry to push through projects without completing a thorough environmental review of their impacts. With your help, we’re working around-the-clock to make sure that doesn’t happen. But we’re running out of time.
Before it’s too late, please help protect our public lands from the reckless fossil fuel industry and Trump’s corrupt administration: Donate $10 or more to Friends of the Earth today.
If you've saved your payment information with ActBlue Express, your donation will go through immediately:
We just released a new report that reveals the extent of Big Oil’s lobbying for coronavirus aid. A review of over 130 lobby filings from the first quarter of 2020 shows significant lobbying for tax cuts, royalty relief, and stimulus aid -- they’re trying to snatch up more and more taxpayer money to destroy our planet.
But oil and gas CEOs don’t deserve a bailout; workers and communities on the frontlines of the crisis do.
Unfortunately, their lobbyists’ tactics seem to be working, including by:
- Expediting the process to further subsidize fossil fuel extraction on our public lands and waters, by waiving royalty fees for oil firms. Oil and gas companies are normally required to pay royalties owed to American taxpayers, which provide vital resources for state government budgets. The DOI’s plan to reduce or eliminate royalties, at the request of Big Oil & Gas, would gut states’ budgets -- at a time when they desperately need more support to provide essential services to combat the pandemic like emergency response, education, and worker safety.
- Pushing to stockpile oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is especially absurd given the current oil glut. We’ve been fighting Republicans’ attempts to use this to bail out Big Oil, but now we really have our work cut out for us: Steny Hoyer, the second-highest ranking Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives, just came out in favor of the idea, unbelievably comparing stockpiling oil (to help the world’s biggest polluters who are driving our climate crisis and worsening the pandemic) with stockpiling personal protective equipment for frontline health workers (to help the people who are risking their lives to protect us right now).
- Getting over $100 billion in tax cuts, in addition to the annual $16 billion in direct subsidies for oil and gas.
We’re fighting to make sure that struggling Americans, not Big Oil executives, get support during this crisis. Right now, Friends of the Earth is supporting legislation like the ReWIND Act, which would prohibit the use of COVID-19 stimulus funds to bail out the fossil fuel industry, and would halt oil and gas leasing until after the pandemic is over.
Here at Friends of the Earth, we’re also continuing to expose the corruption of Interior Secretary Bernhardt, who has violated ethics rules by using his position to help his former fossil fuel industry clients, including handing them taxpayer money during the pandemic. And we’re pushing for important democratic reforms to stop fossil fuel executives from dictating public policy at our expense.
We can’t let the fossil fuel industry drown out our grassroots voices. Will you help us in this fight?
Don’t let the fossil fuel industry and Trump’s administration plunder our public lands and destroy our environment: Please donate $10 or more to Friends of the Earth today.
If you've saved your payment information with ActBlue Express, your donation will go through immediately:
Thank you,
Nicole Ghio,
Senior fossil fuels program manager,
Friends of the Earth
