Help defend the environment from your couch!

Protecting the environment and our communities represents a 40 year old bipartisan consensus.  President Nixon signed into law the National Environmental Protection Act that formed the EPA as well as the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972.  President Jimmy Carter signed into law what became known as Superfund (that mandates and funds the cleanup of hazardous waste sites) as well as an update to the Clean water Act (1977).  President Reagan signed a law that requires the disclosure of how much companies pollute (EPCRA).  President George H.W. Bush signed the Clean Air Act of 1990 that mandated the successful use of a cap and trade system to address and solve the acid rain problem. Early in the Obama presidency, there was growing bipartisan consensus on climate change in the Senate. Protecting the environment is hardly a special-interest issue, or radical. It’s completely American and has enjoyed broad support for nearly half a century.

Action: Providing public comment to proposed rulemaking via Federal government website in order to defend the EPA and environmental protections.

Deadline: May 15, 2017.

The Trump administration has to answer your questions before it can touch current environmental protections pertaining to the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act which protect our water and air. If you comment at regulations.gov during the comment period for a proposed rule-change, law requires federal agencies such as the EPA to read and take into account your comment before they can change their rules.  See our backgrounder on rulemaking for details.

The docket that is currently accepting public comment concerns the (unreadable/nonsensical) Executive Order 13777, in which the Administration vaguely directs all agencies to examine the “burden” of their regulations; please look at the general guidelines for commenting and then go to and add your comments at this link on regulations.gov at https://www.regulations.gov/docket?D=EPA-HQ-OA-2017-0190, click on the Comment Now! button and then drop in your text as shown below.

This executive order is so vague that probably any comment applies. Perhaps you could point out that the direction to identify regulations that “create a serious inconsistency or otherwise interfere with regulatory reform initiatives and policies” is just a string of words put together to sound like policy. Or that there is no evidence that protecting the environment inhibits job creation.  We have a number of researched talking points that you can remix for your own comments.  Our colleagues in Seattle also have great (and very specific) comment ideas with specific rules even, see link.

But if you want to do more, sign up as a researcher to augment our current team or just get additional information about comment strategies, please sign up here and a volunteer coordinator will reach out to you.

Let’s get as many people involved as possible! Everyone has to breathe air and drink water, right?

Currently, there are only about 6600 comments on this docket. We can do much better! The power of 3.7 million citizens’ comments was able to overwhelm intense paid lobbying during the net neutrality fight.  Something as concrete as the air we breathe, the water we drink and bathe in, the health of our children, deserves as much if not more attention.

Update:

We’re over 41k comments as of May 2, 2017.  Let’s see if we can break 100k comments!  For yet more comment material, see script/comment ideas from our friends at Indivisible Berkeley: https://www.indivisibleberkeley.org/epa