Alumni Action Alert: End Offshore Drilling
Many alumni asked us over the years for more opportunities to get engaged in important issues. Now we send an Alumni Action Alert each month on a particular issue or campaign The Public Interest Network is working on, along with some actions that you can take to help protect the environment, public health or the public interest.
Quick action: Oil is once again gushing onto California's beaches. When we drill, we spill. Sign Environment America’s petition calling on Congress to end offshore drilling. Will you join the call?
Context: In an age of remarkable advances in energy conservation and renewable energy technologies, at a time when global warming poses an existential threat to future generations, sacrificing our beaches and ocean wildlife is no longer -- if it ever was -- the price we must pay for progress. That’s not a world we have to live in anymore. Nor is it the future our children deserve.
After the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, Environment America urged President Obama to ban all new offshore drilling off America’s coast. In 2016, he shelved his own plan to expand drilling, and banned drilling in parts of the Arctic, and the Atlantic.
Environment America also opposed a plan by President Trump to allow drilling in nearly all of America’s coastal waters—even in areas where oil companies have expressed zero interest.
And it’s why Environment America is working now to stop new leases and drilling in coastal waters, as well as to end existing drilling operations. Additionally, we’re working to set aside more of our oceans from all destructive activities, essentially creating ‘wildlife refuges,’ places where life can gain a foothold on survival.
Especially with the recent California oil spill that closed beaches for a week and had an enormous impact on the marine environment, it is now more important than ever for us to take action and end offshore drilling.
Actions:
Sign Environment America’s petition calling on Congress to end offshore drilling.
Call your U.S. representatives and senators, your state legislators and your local elected officials and ask them to end offshore drilling.
Write a letter to the editor (LTE) of your local paper. In case you need a refresher, here’s a how-to on LTE writing on page 51 of the Student PIRG’s Activist Toolkit. And if your LTE gets published, please be sure to let us know!
Read and share on social media an op-ed that was published by the San Diego Union-Tribune written by Environment California State Director Laura Deehan and Public Interest Network Director of Media Relations Mark Morgenstein.
