As sure as April brings showers and May brings flowers, June brings ozone pollution warnings. These alerts come to us by way of air quality reports in our local weather forecasts, and they let us know when ground-level ozone pollution, the primary component of smog, reaches a dangerous level in the air we breathe. We see the alerts almost exclusively in the summer because sunlight and hot weather spur chemical reactions between air pollutants, thereby forming ground-level ozone and, in turn, smog.

Smog, then, fills the air until it's hard for some of us to breathe, especially babies and children, whose lungs are more delicate and less developed. Babies, children, senior citizens, and people who suffer from asthma, allergies, breathing problems, and lung disease bear the brunt of the suffering from smog, but scientific research shows us that no matter how healthy, we all are vulnerable to this dangerous pollutant.

Anyone who spends time outdoors in the summer may be affected, and millions of Americans live in areas where the national ozone health standards are exceeded. (Conversely, ozone in the upper atmosphere -- the good kind of ozone -- forms a layer that protects life on earth from the sun's harmful rays.)

Today until midnight, March 22, is final day of the EPA's public comment period for this ozone pollution standard. Please join tens of thousands of others and take a moment to send EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson a message, urging her to adopt the strongest possible standards for ozone pollution.

Funny how it all comes full circle. My hard-working folks did everything they could to scrimp and save for my education, cutting corners wherever they could to make sure I could go to the college of my choice. No cable TV, no HoHos or Lunchables in my lunchbox, no turning up the heat of our frigid house even in the dead of the Midwest winter, and no, and I mean absolutely NO, leaving lights on around the house. This was my mom's pet peeve.

"Turn off the lights when you leave a room—we're not the Rockefellers!" she would proclaim, as if that meant something to a 7-year-old kid who couldn't discern her reference to the legendary Cleveland family of industrial-era oil magnates and philanthropists from a hole in the wall.

Fast forward twenty-some years to the three main points of my blog today:

The clock is running down on the final day of the largest national call-in campaign ever organized by climate and environmental groups. In the first 48 hours of this historic “72 Hours for Clean American Power” event, 200,000 Americans phoned their senators to demand a comprehensive, aggressive clean energy and climate change bill that fuels job growth, reduces emissions, and safeguards our future.

Earthjustice is among nearly 50 groups teamed up for this mass effort—and the impact is clear. Senate phone lines have been ringing off the hook with the message that America wants clean energy, America wants the certainty of future jobs, and America wants an economy that will lead the rest of the world into the 21st century.

Voters are at this very moment speaking out for clean air, clean water, preserved wilderness, and a safer land for future generations. They want the Senate to get to work on crafting and passing bill that ensures all this.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson

Today, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson came out swinging in EPA's battle to defend its December 2009 endangerment finding against the likes of Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Alaska's oil- and coal-embedded senator, and Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Congress' most notorious climate change denier.

The showdown took place in Jackson's testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee on EPA's 2011 budget proposal, which includes funds—chump change in relation to the agency's overall budget—to implement the endangerment finding.

In her opening remarks at today's hearing, EPW committee chair Barbara Boxer drove home just how behind the United States is on climate change legislation. "While the whole world is going green, the one place we can't seem to address climate change legislation is the Senate."

Even more potent were Bernie Sanders' comments on the validity of the science used to inform the EPA finding, a 200-page synthesis of major scientific assessments by all the leading U.S. scientific agencies: