MOMocrats™

Mom’s Clean Air Force Twitter Party

Thursday December 15th our friends at Clever Girls Collective will be hosting an historic twitter chat sponsored by the women at Mom’s Clean Air Force featuring EPA administrator Lisa P Jackson.

This is an amazing opportunity for MOMocrats readers to actually ask first questions about one of the issues that effects all of us, air quality.

Currently, there are no national limits on the amount of mercury and other toxic air pollution released from power plant smokestacks. The toxic air pollutants from the coal and oil fired plants have numerous and serious health effects, especially on children. Research has shown that Mercury harm’s children's developing brains, including effects on memory, attention, language, and fine motor and visual spatial skills.

The other toxic metals found such as arsenic, chromium and nickel are known to cause cancer. Not to mention the damage Mercury and many of the other toxic pollutants causes our nation's lakes, streams, and fish.

This is just a handful of the reasons why the EPA’s proposed Mercury and Air Toxics Standards rule will have a huge impact on our health, the air, the economy and even jobs.

The EPA estimates the value of the improvements to health alone total $59 billion to $140 billion by 2016 by preventing thousands of premature deaths and tens of thousands of heart attacks, bronchitis cases and asthma attacks. Meeting the standards created by the rule would also create new jobs such as building, installing and operating the equipment to reduce the harmful emissions of mercury and other toxics.

Got questions? Well join the Clever Girls Collective community Q & A session with Administrator Jackson where you can get your air quality-related questions by her! They’ll also be discussing clean air—how pollution has affected you and your family sharing tips for ways you can help ensure we leave a legacy of cleaner air to future generations. They’ll also be offering prizes throughout the hour — including Moms Clean Air Force prize packs and gifts.

Moms Clean Air Force Twitter Event ft. EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson on Thursday, Dec 15 at 12pm PT/3pm on Twitter! Use the Tweetgrid here: http://bit.ly/uJeZ26

Follow: @momsCAF, @lisapjackson, @clevergirlscoll—and hashtag #momsCAF

RSVP here to let us know you’re joining the event

Please spread the word with your networks by tweeting this out:

Join us! Moms Clean Air Force Twitter Event w/ EPA Admin @lisapjackson! 12/15 @ 12 P/ 3 ET! Fab prizes! #momsCAF RSVP http://bit.ly/mcafrsvp

This is a sponsored MOMocrats post written as part of the Clever Girls Collective campaign for greater awareness of Mom's Clean Air Force.

 

 

 

 

On Earth Day, Green Entrepreneurism is Alive and Well

In preparation for Earth Day on today's MOMocrats MOMochat radio show, Cynematic and I recounted our visit to last week's Go Green Expo in Los Angeles, and how encouraging it is to see the green sector of the economy beginning to flourish. We both were especially impressed with the range of green entrepreneurs represented there, especially those that were headed by women.

As promised, here are links to some of the businesses we mentioned on the show:

Linda Loudermilk Designs - Sustainable, organic, socially conscious... and fashionable, too.
Children's Clothes by Fuzzy Green Monster
Poster of Jersey Shore's "The Situation," endorser of The Green Garmento reusable dry cleaning bag.

One of favorite products - as moms - was Wrap-N-Mat - a nifty, reusable  food wrap that replaces plastic sandwich bags. Naturally, this product was invented by a mother of four, who is the company's CEO.

Designer LED Lights from Viribright.
Los Angeles area residents can hire Farmscape Gardens to design and maintain their own urban farms. The enterprise's staff of professional horticulturists also works with local schools.

There were more exciting products and services on display at the Go Green Expo, and we hope to focus on more of them on a future MOMochat show.

MOMocrats Interview: Jim Meffert

Last week MOMocrats writer Jaelithe Judy had the chance to speak with Jim Meffert, a Democrat running for Congress in Minnesota's Third District against incumbent Republican Erik Paulsen, who was elected in 2008.

A former president of the Minnesota State PTA Board, a member of the P-20 Partnership for Education, and the the executive director of the Minnesota Optometric Association, Jim Meffert is also a father of three. 

Listen to the interview below, or read the transcript. 

Meffert_Interview_MOMocrats

Jim Meffert: I'm going to get get my wife hooked up with you guys.

Jaelithe Judy: That's great.

She's a professional musician — clarinetist — and has extremely strong opinions, on everything! Which is fantastic. And frankly, about a year ago when we were looking at getting into this, she and I would gauge where we were at with getting into the race. She was at 70% on day one; I was at about 50%. And she said, you've got to get out and do this. So she would be great to connect with.

We definitely like opinionated women at MOMocrats.

And I tell you, I don't know if you know any of my background, but, being on the board of the state PTA, and I was chair of a group called the Minnesota Children's Platform Coalition, and worked with Every Child Matters, and so I have spent my entire, my volunteer career, around strong women trying to do the same that you're doing — trying to get families involved, trying to talk about how we help families and kids, talking about parents' involvement in schools. So, anything that I can do to help you guys also, to broaden the audience and broaden the discussion, let me know, because we've got to use campaigns to do that too.

Well thanks, I appreciate that! Well, I have some questions for you if you're ready.

Democrats, Independents, and Moderate Republicans: The Hard Right Wants You to Run for the Hills. Run to the Polling Booths Instead.

November 2010 is a referendum on Republican obstruction extremism.

Keep repeating this phrase when dangerous nonsense happens, like...

This weekend, when rodeo-clown Glenn Beck and his Neo-Westboro Baptist Church, sure to be given wall-to-wall coverage by the cable tv Nonstop Carnival of Evil/Stupid, arrive in Washington, DC. Last August, it was nonsensical "death panels" pushed by a cheeto-stained Facebooker that managed to get everyone into a stir. It's amazing the damage one mean person in her pajamas can do from the basement of her home in the outer reaches of Wasilla.

Let's face it, while August may be the "silly season," ever since about March, 2009, the hard right has done nothing but drag the GOP in a more conservative direction. Like bad cosmetic surgery that pulls too tight, any further right and the GOP's ears will meet behind its head like a clasp on a cheap purse--any further right, and Pol Pot will be wondering why he didn't think to burn some Qu'rans first.

Housing Policy Needs a Green Makeover (Sustainable Communities Are Part of the Work/Life Issue)

Several months ago, I wrote a lengthy post suggesting ways to use the mortgage crisis as an opportunity to help people facing foreclosure by helping them build and tap green equity in their homes. I also pointed out how to green housing policy by using tools like location efficient mortgages to reshape urban/suburban residential and commute patterns.

I'm excited to read that the Obama administration is holding a summit today to re-examine federal housing policy. Like the author of this Grist article that points out how housing policy can incorporate green climate/energy elements, I'm hopeful that the newly-launched Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities (headed by my new heroine, Shelley Poticha) can start to undo our unwieldy, car-dependent way of living and working. It really will take the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Transportation, and the Housing and Urban Development agencies working together to achieve this. Consider residential rehab the flip side of the climate/energy bill we never saw emerge from the Senate this Congressional session. Also consider the 70+ years of highway-centric city and regional planning we've had that needs to be reworked.

As someone who lives in Los Angeles, city that's the poster child for car-culture obsessed fossil-fuel dependency run amok, I think it's notable that we Californians voted to RAISE TAXES to fund high speed rail that would connect San Francisco and Los Angeles. Even we see the need for a new vision of working and living.

A small, practical step that builds on what's been done before would be to have Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, two of the biggest federal loan guarantors, prioritize location-efficient mortgages in the products they underwrite. A bigger challenge will be to get big banks on board. Convince them this is a new market, and the greedy pigs profit-seeking banks'll probably jump at the opportunity to revitalize the moribund real estate market.

Let's wean ourselves off foreign oil. And as the BP Gulf Oil spill disaster has shown us, domestic oil isn't the silver bullet solving our oil dependency problems either. Wouldn't you rather be able to take a high-speed train or light rail to work, instead of spending 2 or more hours a day in a car stuck in traffic (time out of your life you'll never get back to play with your kids or just relax)?

Greening our housing policy may just be the way to do it.

UPDATED TO ADD on August 20, 2010:

I'm loving the Grist folks for keeping their eye on this issue too--here's a post about energy efficient mortgages and a bill Senator Michael Bennet says he'll introduce after the August recess. Bennet is up for re-election, so let's make sure he's around to lead the effort to get the Sensible Accounting to Value Energy Act (pdf) passed. From the Grist post:

"Energy-efficient mortgages" have been available for years, running on the premise that borrowers who spend less on utility bills have more money available for mortgage payments. But they've been an underused niche product that few buyers or even lenders know about. The SAVE Act would take the concept and apply it to all government-sponsored mortgage enterprises, such as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Administration. Those three entities currently guarantee more than 90 percent of new loans, so the bill would have a profound effect on ramping up home efficiency.

"The big news is that this would become a part of every federally backed mortgage," said Cliff Majersik of the Institute for Market Transformation, an efficiency advocacy group that helped draft the bill.

Energy efficient homes would cost less to run, and thus affect how big or small a mortgage a borrower would need. Both energy efficient mortgages and location efficient mortgages (that value proximity to public transit), are tools for reshaping society and could really change how we live and work in positive, and sweeping, ways. Pay less for an environmentally-friendly house that has better transit options for getting around your community? Sounds great to me.

Cynematic blogs at P i l l o w b o o k. She tweets advice to DNC politicos at @cyn3matic and tends the MOMocrats Facebook page.

BP Oil Spill -- Where Do We Go From Here? Where Do I Go From Here? A List of Proactive Steps

My kid ADORES Legos. And yet--

Eleven people dead from the Deepwater Horizon explosion in addition to 41 oil-industry related deaths and 302 injuries between 2001-2007. Oil-covered pelicans. Dolphin carcasses choked with oil.

Legos are made with plastic, a product that requires petroleum in its manufacture.

And there, in a nutshell, is everyone's addiction to oil. It's woven so completely in our lives, in our kids' favorite toys, the convenient sandwich bags we use, the useful stain-free fabric in our upholstered car seats, in our prettifying makeup. To divest ourselves of these things feels like removing joy, ease, or what's surely a minor, harmless, and pleasing indulgence from our lives. No wonder we resist.

What this devastating disaster for the Gulf has made us do is look at ourselves. Both to see what we can do to help, and to see how we're part of the problem.

Michele Bachmann, Corporate Avenger. And She's Not Alone.

Never one to miss a good media moment, Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann made it clear at a Heritage Foundation Luncheon that she was there to lead the way in protecting BP from getting "fleeced" in connection with damages claims as a result of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy.  That's right, a company who was able to pay its CEO 3 times in salary what it spent on safety and compliance needs someone to stand up and protect it from the "illegitimate" claims of fishermen who are out of work, probably permanently, as a result of corporate recklessness and negligence.

By now we are used to nonsense flowing from Rep. Bachmann at about an equivalent rate to the oil currently spewing out from the blown Deepwater rig.  But the thing is, Rep. Bachmann is not alone in this sentiment, and may just be playing smart politics from the right's perspective.  And that should make us all take notice.

At the start of today's House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing on the spill, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) issued his own apology.  But this apology was not aimed at the American public, or even the "small people" harmed by this disaster.  This apology was issued directly to BP CEO Tony Hayward for the tragedy of his company being subject to the $20 billion "shakedown" announced by the Obama administration and BP yesterday.

Listen carefully and you will hear a common narrative emerge from both Rep. Bachmann and Rep. Barton, and that is a narrative proclaiming a willingness to pay only "legitimate" claims.  The thing is, there is no reason to believe that the claims made so far by anyone effected by this country's greatest environmental disaster in the Gulf have been anything but legitimate.  It's just that Bachmann and Barton would like BP and its insurers to be the primary authority for what is and is not a "legitimate" claim.

And if I was protecting corporate interests, so would I.  Over ten years have passed and claims related to the Exxon Valdez spill are still winding their way through the courts.  Just recently the Supreme Court knocked down a significant portion of those damages claims, which now sit at less than $550 million.  Under the guise of Chief Justice Roberts the Court has shown a growing hostility toward the rights of individuals when matched with the "rights" of corporations. 

This "shakedown" by the Obama administration results in an independent arbitrator deciding victim compensation, thereby circumventing the kind of judicial manipulation made possible by battalions of lawyers and infinite resources.  It reflects the kind of pragmatism that usually gets the president considerable criticism by the left.  But in this case, that kind of pragmatism might just be brilliant.

Planes, Trains Automobiles & BP Boycott: All a Red Herring

This is what I've heard about the BP oil spill in the Gulf from a variety of sources, and like me, I'm sure you've noticed everyone is taking every chance they have to say something (now, including me):

On June 14, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) sent a message that read:

While the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico gets worse by the minute, BP continues to dodge the tough questions about what went wrong and what they're doing to fix it.    

It's time we got some straight answers. If BP won't give them of their own free will, we must compel them to do so. This week, 18 of my colleagues and I introduced legislation to grant President Obama's bipartisan investigative commission subpoena power that will allow it to uncover the unvarnished truth.  

. . .

As the slick approaches more than a hundred miles in either direction, the economic and environmental costs are seemingly immeasurable. Thousands of Gulf Coast residents have already had their livelihoods stolen from them and the region is losing billions in economic productivity. Equally heartbreaking is millions of acres of wetlands -- forty percent of all the wetlands in the country -- that are at risk in the Gulf of Mexico and the hundreds of species threatened by the spill, some possibly with extinction. 

This bipartisan commission is our best chance to determine what really happened and to protect us from future disasters. I hope you will stand with me today and send a message to Washington that New York and the nation expect us to act. 

I know you share my empathy with the citizens of the Gulf Coast and the concern for the workers that are helping lead the clean-up. Thank you for standing with me as we search for the truth about what caused this tragedy and to help heal the region. 

On June 15, President Barack Obama gave a speech about the oil spill and our the "battle plan" for making this right:

On April 20th, an explosion ripped through BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, about forty miles off the coast of Louisiana.  Eleven workers lost their lives.  Seventeen others were injured.  And soon, nearly a mile beneath the surface of the ocean, oil began spewing into the water.

. . .

Already, this oil spill is the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced.  And unlike an earthquake or a hurricane, it is not a single event that does its damage in a matter of minutes or days.  The millions of gallons of oil that have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico are more like an epidemic, one that we will be fighting for months and even years. 

But make no mistake:  we will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long it takes.  We will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused.  And we will do whatever’s necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy. 

Tonight I’d like to lay out for you what our battle plan is going forward:  what we’re doing to clean up the oil, what we’re doing to help our neighbors in the Gulf, and what we’re doing to make sure that a catastrophe like this never happens again. 

(Go read the battle plan here.)

Daily, I get entreaties from friends via a variety of mediums (largely social media sites) to boycott BP.

I'm not going to do that.

Where Do We Go from Here? Baby, You Can Drive My Car.

This post by Karoli is the first of the MOMocrats series, Where Do We Go from Here? about the lessons of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf.

As I write this, I'm watching the oil industry undergo the requisite drilling grilling by appropriately outraged Congressional Democrats and laughably sympathetic Congressional Republicans. Thoughts race through my mind, criss-crossing the dialogue. As industry executives flatly declare that all is being done which can be done, thoughts fly.  "Do these people live in the real world? Do they understand what has happened here? Are they so wanton, so craven, that they can shrug off what they have done?"

Do they understand that we are close to turning the Gulf of Mexico into a dead zone? Do they? REALLY?

If they did, you'd think no one would be trying to lift the President's six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling.

If they did, you'd think they'd hammer down that moratorium and forbid any more fracking and cracking of the delicate sea surface until they figured this out.

If they did, they'd be scrambling to make investments in something other than oil.

In the Wake of the Gulf Oil Disaster: Where Do We Go from Here?

As devastating pictures of sullied waters, ruined beaches and oil-drenched wildlife continue to inundate our television and computer screens; as the idea sinks in that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill devastation is not over, and will not be over next week, or next month, or next year, or this decade, not even if some new feat of technological acrobatics finally succeeds in fully stopping the still-flowing leak; as we realize that the damage from this unprecedented ecological disaster may well permanently alter not only the vital ocean and wetland ecosystems of the Gulf, but also the lives of millions of people who depend, in one way or another, upon those ecosystems for their livelihoods and lifestyle, here at MOMocrats, we ask ourselves: where do we go from here?

BP's deliberate, mindful neglect of safety procedures in the name of speed and profit appears to have been the most immediate cause of the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The federal government's lax enforcement of its own oil drilling regulations allowed BP to get away with such negligence, on a far too regular basis, for far too long. When it comes to casting blame in this crisis, there are real people we can point our fingers at, people we, the victims of this disaster, can accuse by name, who committed real and terrible mistakes in their reckless desire to profit from our nation's hunger for oil. And those people should be punished for their selfish negligence.