Note: both Harkin and Grassley voted for this energy
bill in November. Harkin especially needs to hear from
a lot of us now.
Best,
Laurie Belin
Dear NRDC BioGems Defender,
Over the next few weeks, President Bush and his
congressional allies will try once again to ram their
disastrous energy bill through the U.S. Senate. They
fell only two votes short in November and they've
vowed to make passage of the bill their top priority
now that Congress has returned from recess.
This bill may be the worst piece of legislation you
and I will see in our lifetimes. It would pick your
pocket, despoil your natural heritage, endanger your
family's health and smother your hope for a more
secure energy future. We ignore this bill at our own
peril.
Let me tell you our simple plan for thwarting this
shameless attack on our environment and pocketbooks.
If millions of Americans each took one minute to
protest this bill, it would cause every senator who is
tempted to vote for it to think twice about doing
so.
You can make this happen within the next few hours by
doing two things:
First, go to
http://www.savebiogems.org/takeaction.asp?src=RR0401
and send your two senators an email or fax, telling
them to vote against this pro-polluter energy bill.
Then, forward my email to at least four of your
friends, family members or colleagues.
I am emailing this message to 500,000 BioGems
Defenders and other NRDC activists. If each one
forwards this message to just four more people, we
will generate a national tidal wave of opposition
before this day is over.
And that won't be a moment too soon. This disgraceful
bill would pick our pockets to hand out billions of
dollars in taxpayer subsidies to the oil, coal and
nuclear industries. That's their long-awaited reward
for making big-time contributions to the Bush-Cheney
campaign. They profit while the rest of us pay the
price -- in tax dollars and environmental degradation.
This bill gives the energy giants a free pass to
drill their way through our last wild places, burn
more dirty coal, build a new generation of risky
nuclear power plants and dramatically increase air
pollution that would sicken the vulnerable --
especially children and seniors -- for decades to
come.
It would establish oil and gas development as the
dominant use of our federal public lands, open
national parks to the construction of electricity
transmission lines, exempt polluters from core
provisions of our clean air and water laws and waive
liability for the producers of the toxic gasoline
additive MTBE -- even though it has contaminated at
least 1,500 public water supplies in all 50 American
states.
You'd be hard-pressed to come up with a more
backward-looking, wasteful and self-defeating energy
"plan" than this one. At a time when the federal
deficit is soaring and we're going to war in the
Persian Gulf oilfields, the White House wants to stick
us with the tab for prolonging our destructive
dependence on fossil fuels, foreign oil and dangerous
nuclear technology.
This is not a national energy policy. This is
corporate welfare, pure and simple. Estimates of the
bill's corporate tax breaks range from $23 billion to
well over $100 billion with loan guarantees included.
No surprise there. Big energy companies cooked up this
raid on the federal treasury during hundreds of
secret meetings with Vice President Cheney's energy
task force and their allies on Capitol Hill.
It's one thing to gouge taxpayers. But to claim this
rip-off is in the national
interest, as the White House would have us believe,
is a slap in the
face to
every working American.
Poll after poll shows that the vast majority of
voters -- of both
parties --
understand that we simply must reduce our
out-of-control appetite for
fossil
fuels if we ever are to secure energy independence.
That means turning
American
rooftops into the Persian Gulf of solar energy. It
means producing cars
that
get 40 miles per gallon. It means constructing
efficient buildings that
use
half the energy of the average American office
without sacrificing
comfort.
Making this transformation to a super-efficient,
low-pollution economy
would
save consumers upwards of a trillion dollars, spare
our last wild
places from
destruction, improve our health, slow global warming
and reduce our
dependence
on undemocratic regimes overseas. It's a no-brainer
to anyone living
outside
the White House.
But unless millions of Americans speak out right
now, the enactment of
the
president's energy bill will doom us to an
apocalyptic future of
blighted
wilderness, poisonous air pollution, devastating
climate change and
endless
wars over fossil fuels.
Please make your voice heard. Go to
http://www.savebiogems.org/takeaction.asp?src=RR0401
and tell your senators to obey the will of the
American people, *not*
the
dictates of giant energy corporations! Call on
Congress to create a
sustainable
and affordable energy path.
And please be sure to forward this message to at
least four other
people.
Believe me, millions of Americans are just waiting
for a simple way to
stop
this madness and lend their support to a sane and
hopeful energy
future.
Sincerely yours,
Robert Redford
Board of Trustees
Natural Resources Defense Council
. . .
BioGems: Saving Endangered Wild Places
A project of the Natural Resources Defense Council
http://www.savebiogems.org
Note: We appreciate the opportunity to communicate
with you and other
NRDC
BioGems Defenders, but if you would prefer not to
receive BioGems
updates or
hear from BioGems activists in the field, you can
send an email message
to
[log in to unmask] with "Please remove
my name" in the
subject
line.
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