Americans Against Fracking

Dear Friends,

I am excited to send the first update on Americans Against Fracking. We are at a unique point in the movement against fracking, and I am excited and humbled to be working with such an impressive and diverse group of organizations to stop this dangerous practice.  The work you do truly inspires me!  

In just over a month, there are over 150 organizations that are part of this coalition to ban fracking including national groups such as Food & Water Watch, CREDO Action, National Nurses United, 350, Democracy for America, Greenpeace USA, Center for Biological Diversity, and Breast Cancer Action.  In addition, this powerful coalition also includes leading regional, state and local groups including Berks Gas Truth, Delaware Riverkeeper, Frack Action, Our Longmont, Illinois People's Alliance, Catskill Mountainkeeper and Frack Free Stark among dozens of others across the country. Together we will be stronger and more unified than ever before. We will change the dynamic and the prevailing messages around fracking in this county.

We will work together, new friends and old, to build a more powerful, coordinated and strategic political movement to compel our elected officials to put the interests of our families, communities and planet above those of the big oil and gas companies that are poisoning our communities.

So, here's what's happening:

We will be hosting a conference call on January 16 to discuss the vision for the coalition, next steps and the structure/working groups. We wanted to do this after the holidays to maximize participation. We will send out more information on this in the new year.

But, before that, we wanted to announce a couple of exciting events that are coming soon.

1) We have created some materials around the new feature film on fracking, Promised Land.   Energy In Depth is launching a campaign to discredit the film, so it's critical that we mobilize our collective membership out to screenings and make our voices heard.  To that end, we have developed a downloadable flyer that uses Promised Land to highlight the need to ban fracking.  

The flyer has editable fields where you can type in the name of a targeted state or local official for phone calls. The flyer also has editable fields for you to insert the name of your organization and website. We are encouraging people to use the opening night on January 4 (or on December 28 in select locations) as an opportunity to inform the public and get some good publicity. We also hope that people will take photos in front of their local theaters with signs against fracking and post them on the Facebook page. Join and spread the word about the Facebook event page, which provides directions to get the flyer and a place to post photos from movie theater actions. Please share this page.

2) We will be facilitating a national call in day to President Obama on January 25. His so-called clean energy plan calls for greater shale gas production and more fracking. We need to push back and tell him not to pursue policies that facilitate fracking. He will be giving his state of the Union Address on January 29, when he is sure to talk about energy. He needs to get the message loud and clear that we need to ban fracking now! Here is the event page for this.

We are a new coalition, and we appreciate your patience as we get our systems up and running, but together we can build on the tremendous organizing that all of us have been doing and take the campaign to ban fracking to another level.  If you have any questions, please feel free to reply to this email.  

Have a great holiday! Let's have fun and make a difference around Promised Land, and hit the ground running in the new year.

Onwards!

David on behalf of Americans Against Fracking