
Save Our Environment Action Fund
Save Our Environment Action Fund launches a multi-platform, multi-state campaign today highlighting the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation’s pending fuel efficiency and carbon pollution standards for cars and small trucks.
The campaign includes a six figure multi-state (Michigan, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Wisconsin) online ad buy, a first-of-its kind Twitter advocacy campaign, a radio tour and one of the largest teletown halls in history. Watch the ad below and see why the family dog is the only one who opposes the pending standards:
The campaign will be using a promoted Twitter trend and promoted tweets for 24 hours on Sunday, encouraging people to tweet using the #Fuel4Change hashtag to talk about the new standards. This is the first time an advocacy organization has used Twitter in this manner to educate people about an issue and drive people to participate in the online conversation.
“Combined with the first phase, this effort is the largest action to tackle climate change in history, and we want to spread the great news to every corner of the country,” said Mike Town of Save Our Environment Action Fund. “This is about putting more money in consumers’ pockets from the first day they buy a car, creating hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and reducing more than 2 billion metric tons of pollution. We all win when consumers, job-seekers and our environment come out on top.”
Under the new standards, all passenger vehicles on average will get the equivalent of 54.5 mpg by 2025—which means more gas in the tank and more money in the bank for U.S. consumers. This improvement will mean immediate savings from the time consumers buy a car, totaling more than $8,000 over the life of a single vehicle. Moreover, the standards will create more than 570,000 American jobs, reduce oil imports, and curb climate disrupting pollution.
“The administration deserves huge credit for providing the country’s consumers real solutions to high prices at the pump. Consumers can thank this effort for cutting future gas bills in half and keeping more money in the bank,” said Town. “By helping to break our dependency on foreign oil, fuel efficiency is as American as apple pie and baseball.”
The new fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas standards will:
• Double the average fuel efficiency of new vehicles and cut carbon pollution from new vehicles in half by 2025
• Save the average consumer an estimated $8,000 in fuel savings over the lifetime of a new vehicle
• Save Americans $140 billion in 2030 alone
• Create up to 570,000 jobs by 2030
• Reduce more than 2 billion metric tons of pollution over the life of the 2017-2025 vehicles
Visit EcoWatch’s ENERGY page for more related news on this topic.
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Save Our Environment Action Fund is a coalition of some of the nation’s most powerful environmental organizations focused on reversing climate disruption, reducing pollution and creating a clean energy future for America.
At first glance, you wouldn't think avocados and almonds could harm bees; but a closer look at how these popular crops are produced reveals their potentially detrimental effect on pollinators.
Migratory beekeeping involves trucking millions of bees across the U.S. to pollinate different crops, including avocados and almonds. Timothy Paule II / Pexels / CC0
<p>According to <a href="https://www.fromthegrapevine.com/israeli-kitchen/beekeeping-how-to-keep-bees" target="_blank">From the Grapevine</a>, American avocados also fully depend on bees' pollination to produce fruit, so farmers have turned to migratory beekeeping as well to fill the void left by wild populations.</p><p>U.S. farmers have become reliant upon the practice, but migratory beekeeping has been called exploitative and harmful to bees. <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/10/health/avocado-almond-vegan-partner/index.html" target="_blank">CNN</a> reported that commercial beekeeping may injure or kill bees and that transporting them to pollinate crops appears to negatively affect their health and lifespan. Because the honeybees are forced to gather pollen and nectar from a single, monoculture crop — the one they've been brought in to pollinate — they are deprived of their normal diet, which is more diverse and nourishing as it's comprised of a variety of pollens and nectars, Scientific American reported.</p><p>Scientific American added how getting shuttled from crop to crop and field to field across the country boomerangs the bees between feast and famine, especially once the blooms they were brought in to fertilize end.</p><p>Plus, the artificial mass influx of bees guarantees spreading viruses, mites and fungi between the insects as they collide in midair and crawl over each other in their hives, Scientific American reported. According to CNN, some researchers argue that this explains why so many bees die each winter, and even why entire hives suddenly die off in a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder.</p>Avocado and almond crops depend on bees for proper pollination. FRANK MERIÑO / Pexels / CC0
<p>Salazar and other Columbian beekeepers described "scooping up piles of dead bees" year after year since the avocado and citrus booms began, according to Phys.org. Many have opted to salvage what partial colonies survive and move away from agricultural areas.</p><p>The future of pollinators and the crops they help create is uncertain. According to the United Nations, nearly half of insect pollinators, particularly bees and butterflies, risk global extinction, Phys.org reported. Their decline already has cascading consequences for the economy and beyond. Roughly 1.4 billion jobs and three-quarters of all crops around the world depend on bees and other pollinators for free fertilization services worth billions of dollars, Phys.org noted. Losing wild and native bees could <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/wild-bees-crop-shortage-2646849232.html" target="_self">trigger food security issues</a>.</p><p>Salazar, the beekeeper, warned Phys.org, "The bee is a bioindicator. If bees are dying, what other insects beneficial to the environment... are dying?"</p>EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
Australia is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world. It is home to more than 7% of all the world's plant and animal species, many of which are endemic. One such species, the Pharohylaeus lactiferus bee, was recently rediscovered after spending nearly 100 years out of sight from humans.
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