CREDO action

Dear DeeVon,

Wow. Last week, CREDO and 275 allied organizations delivered more than 600,000 public comments—including yours and more than 120,000 others from CREDO activists—telling the Obama administration to ban fracking on federal lands.

You may not have known it when you submitted your comment (I certainly didn’t!), but you were participating in what may be the single largest display of opposition to fracking ever to take place in the United States.

This huge push to tell President Obama not to frack America couldn’t come at a more important time. Since he unveiled his Climate Action Plan, President Obama has bravely spoken out about the need to confront climate change. But, as admirable as many parts of his plan are, President Obama has continued to endorse fracking for oil and gas as part of his Climate Action Plan, even though fracking is a major threat to the climate and to countless American communities.

We don’t know how the Obama administration will respond to our comments. What we do know is that what has worked so far to stop fracking is relentless grassroots pressure.

In the last few years, grassroots activists from New York to California have waged and won campaigns to protect their communities from fracking. The hundreds of thousands of comments we delivered to President Obama are the direct result of that local and statewide organizing, which has drawn huge numbers of ordinary people into the anti-fracking movement.

We need to keep building momentum to ban fracking at the local level if we want to ever see change in Washington, D.C. And there’s an easy way to do it. CREDO recently launched CREDO Mobilize, which allows activists like you to start petitions to make progressive change in your community. Already, dozens of local campaigns have been started to ban fracking.

Click here to find and sign the petition to ban fracking where you live. Or if one hasn’t been started where you live, start your own. We’ll support you every step of the way and, if your petition takes off, we’ll send it to other CREDO activists to help you get more signatures.

If you’re starting your own petition, the more local your petition is the better. For example, it’s often easier to pressure your city council to act than it is to pressure your governor. Here are a few ideas to get you thinking:

Tell your local elected officials to ban fracking in your city or county.
Tell your state legislator or your member of Congress to publicly endorse a ban on fracking.
Start a petition opposing a proposed fracking infrastructure project—a pipeline, a compressor station, a natural gas power plant, water withdrawal permits, a silica sand mine, a wastewater injection well, etc.

We have a hard fight ahead of us and the way forward won’t always be clear. The fracking industry has an awful lot of money and influence, and many of the most powerful people in the country—including President Obama—continue to claim that fracking is necessary.

But, as last week’s comment delivery shows, there are also an awful lot of us fighting to stop the fracking industry from poisoning our water and air. And, as the successful fights to keep fracking out of New York, Maryland, and dozens of communities on the frontlines of the fracking boom show, we are increasingly winning the fights we pick.

Thank you for everything you do.

Zack Malitz, Campaign Manager
CREDO Action from Working Assets