Protect Our Planet: Climate Action and Environmental Justice | March 17, 2026
March 17, 2026: War targets drinking water, oil nears $200, Maine lobsters vanish, and glaciers collapse. Protect Our Planet with People Power United.
The blueprint for climate destruction is written — and it’s already being executed. Wars are targeting the water supply. Oil prices are spiking toward levels that could tip the world into recession. Working waterfronts that have fed families for generations are going quiet. And in the Alps, glaciers that have existed for centuries are vanishing before our eyes. We have seen this playbook before. And we refuse to accept it.
We are a grassroots movement. Democracy has always been built not by billionaires or kings, but by everyday people who refused to give up. That tradition is ours. That power is ours. Courage. Education. Action. Let’s go.
🌿 Protect Our Planet: This Week's Environmental Warnings
The climate crisis generates noise every week. Here is what the noise is actually telling us — and why it matters to our movement.
💧 The Iran War Is Now Targeting Drinking Water
Both the U.S. and Iran have been accused of striking freshwater desalination plants in the ongoing war — facilities that supply drinking water to millions of people across the Persian Gulf. The Gulf states get up to 90% of their drinking water from desalination, and the region’s roughly 400 plants are powered almost entirely by fossil fuels. Attacking them violates the Geneva Conventions. Experts warn that a sustained assault on these facilities would be nothing short of existential for countries like Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Climate change is already making the region more water-scarce — the war is now threatening the last lifeline. Mother Jones
Why It Matters: This is what fossil fuel dependence looks like at its most brutal — a region so parched it built its civilization on machine-made water, now watching those machines become military targets. Water is life. When it becomes a weapon, everyone loses.
🛢️ Oil Is Approaching $100 a Barrel — and $200 Is on the Table
With Iran blocking the Strait of Hormuz — through which 20% of the world’s oil flows — Brent crude has already crossed $100 a barrel, and Iran’s military has threatened to push it to $200. That threshold, economists warn, would tip the global economy into recession. The IEA has authorized the largest emergency reserve release in history, yet prices keep rising. This is fossil fuel dependence in real time: one war, one chokepoint, and the entire global economy holds its breath. The Atlantic
Why It Matters: Every time the world suffers an oil shock, the case for clean, domestic renewable energy becomes undeniable. Wind and solar cannot be blockaded. They cannot be held hostage. The exit ramp exists. We just need the political will to take it — before the next war, the next spike, the next preventable catastrophe.
🦞 Maine’s Lobster Catch Falls for the Fourth Straight Year
Maine’s lobster haul dropped to its lowest level since 2008 — 78.8 million pounds in 2025, down from 110 million in 2021 — as warming oceans push lobsters north toward Canadian waters. The industry lost more than $75 million in value in a single year. Scientists have warned for years that the warming trend devastating lobster populations off Rhode Island and Massachusetts is now repeating off Maine. For generations of fishing families, this is not a statistic. It is a way of life disappearing beneath the surface of a hotter sea. Seattle Times
Why It Matters: Maine’s lobstermen didn’t cause the climate crisis. But they are paying for it — in empty traps, canceled fishing trips, and a future that looks nothing like the past. Working waterfront communities are on the frontlines, and they deserve a government that fights for them, not for the fossil fuel industry that is cooking their ocean.
🏔️ Austria’s Glaciers Are Vanishing — 94 Out of 96 Are Retreating
A new report from the Austrian Alpine Club confirms that 94 of Austria’s 96 glaciers retreated over the past two years, with some losing more than 100 meters in length. The average retreat was over 20 meters — the eighth-largest on record in 135 years of measurement. Austria’s largest glacier, the Pasterze, is actively disintegrating. The club’s vice president put it plainly: it is no longer a question of saving the glaciers as they were — it is about mitigating the consequences for the people who depend on them for water, power, and agriculture. Seattle Times
Why It Matters: Glaciers are not just beautiful. They are freshwater reserves, power sources, and the foundation of entire regional economies. When they go, the consequences cascade — and what is happening in Austria is happening everywhere. This is the long-term cost of fossil fuel politics made visible in ice.
Why the Grassroots Resistance Can’t Wait
💥Your Power in Action: What You Can Do Today
🛢️ Take action: No oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
🚄 Take action: Sign the petition to support high-speed rail projects
🧪 Take action: Tell the EPA to stop promoting forever-chemical fertilizer
🛑 Take action: Stop Trump’s attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency
🚫 Take action: Stop approving gas export terminals
👑 Bonus action: Sign up for the next national No Kings Day of Action and show up in solidarity with everyone whose rights are under attack.
🗳️ Bonus action: Register to vote, vote in every election, and help your community do the same. Our freedoms are won and lost at the ballot box.
The movement for grassroots climate action starts here.
💔 Why These Stories Matter
The cost of choosing fossil fuels over a livable future is no longer hypothetical. It’s in the drinking water being targeted in the Persian Gulf. It’s in the oil shock rippling through every gas pump and grocery store. It’s in the Maine fishing families hauling fewer traps every year. It’s written in the retreating glaciers of the Alps. The people who caused this crisis are not the ones absorbing the costs. Workers, fishing communities, and frontline populations are.
And yet the numbers have never been clearer: clean, domestic renewable energy cannot be bombed, blockaded, or held hostage. The Protect Our Planet movement has the facts on its side. Now we need the organized people power to turn those facts into policy — before another war, another shock, another glacier is gone.
🌱 What Comes Next: This Is How We Win
🛢️ DEMAND CLEAN ENERGY — Tell your representatives: the answer to oil shocks is wind, solar, and batteries — not more drilling.
💧 PROTECT WATER AS A HUMAN RIGHT — Support organizations defending water access as civilian infrastructure globally. War on water is war on life.
🦞 STAND WITH FISHING COMMUNITIES — Demand climate accountability for the coastal working families losing their livelihoods to warming oceans.
🏔️ BEAR WITNESS TO THE GLACIERS — Share the Austria story. When people understand what is already lost, they fight harder for what remains.
🗳️ VOTE LIKE THE PLANET DEPENDS ON IT — Because it does. Clean air, clean water, and a livable climate all live and die at the ballot box.
👑🚫 BUILD PEOPLE POWER — Organize. Show up. Bring your neighbors. Every new person in this movement is one more voice fossil fuel billionaires cannot buy.
The climate crisis is playing out in your paycheck, on your power grid, and in our communities. We must rise to meet this moment. Together, we can protect our planet and build a just, sustainable future for generations to come.
Together, we can champion our rights, freedoms, and democracy, hold our leaders accountable to the people’s will, and inspire voters to make a meaningful difference.
Laurie Woodward Garcia (paid with hugs and kisses, not bought by special interests) Leader, People Power United
People Power United champions freedom over fascism, progress, and power to the people-and we do the work to make it happen. In this community, we will always speak out against racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, homophobia, misogyny, sexism, ageism, ableism, sizeism, elitism, transphobia, misogynoir, and bigotry!
This is our moment to rise, resist, and reclaim our rights, freedoms, rule of law, and democracy. Millions of Americans are already refusing to back down — in the streets, at the ballot box, and in their communities.
Every movement that was ever won started with people who refused to quit. We are those people.
The future is not lost. It is being built — by us, right now.