This petition urges President-elect Joe Biden to invite Barack Obama to head a commission to bring back pandemic readiness, as there existed in the Obama administration. During the Trump administration in 2018 John Bolton, as head of the White House National Security Council, disbanded Obama's team in charge of national response to a pandemic. As former President Obama said in 2014, “there may and likely will come a time in which we have an airborne disease that is deadly. And in order for us to deal with that effectively, we have to put in place an infrastructure -- not just here at home, but globally -- that allows us to see it quickly, isolate it quickly, respond to it quickly.”

This petition also urges President Biden to appoint former Vice-President Al Gore to head a task force, whose purpose would be to mobilize this country to address the current and future impacts of climate change, which could easily eclipse the devastation caused by the coronavirus in its deaths and  impacts to populations around the world and global disruption of economies. Al Gore, whose leadership on climate change and  whose books, Earth In the Balance and An Inconvenient Truth resulted in his sharing a Nobel Prize with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The former vice-president knows what it will take to accelerate needed action on climate change.

We have lost valuable time in addressing climate change these past several years, since the Obama Administration. Is it too late? Nobody really knows. What we do know is that we have a lot of catching up to do. Please sign the petition.

This petition will be brought to Joe Biden prior to his inauguration as President of the United States and to congressional leaders.