“This administration is Making Emissions Great Again,” Moms’ Co-founder and Director Dominique Browning writes in a just-published guest essay for Newsday.
A series of executive orders and other actions by President Donald Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin have made it clear that their frequently repeated slogans, “Make America Great Again” and “Make America Healthy Again,” are hollow.
“There is one slogan that is becoming unfortunately quite real: “Make America Sick Again,” says Dominique, noting in particular one of four executive orders to bolster coal production that directs the Department of Energy to invoke emergency authority to save coal plants at risk of retirement. “Trump claimed that coal plants have been ‘held captive by Environmental Extremists, Lunatics, Radicals and Thugs,’” she notes.
Tell Administrator Zeldin: Cutting Climate Pollution Is One of EPA’s Most Important Jobs
This action came after Administrator Zeldin launched a website inviting the nation’s most toxic polluters, including coal plants, to apply for an exemption from nine hazardous air pollution rules. More galling, EPA offered to guide coal-fired power plants and petrochemical plant operators through the application process.
“Polluters wasted no time. The American Chemistry Council and American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers Association requested a two-year blanket exemption for more than 200 facilities—the country’s worst polluters—from stringent Biden-era rules that barred emissions of highly potent carcinogenic pollutants including asbestos, lead, chromium, cadmium, dioxin, benzene, and mercury,” writes Dominique.
Mercury is among the worst of coal plant pollutants; it gets into our water and food—and into our bodies when we eat mercury-contaminated fish. When pregnant women consume mercury, it can harm babies’ developing brains. “There is no safe amount of mercury for any person at any age,” writes Dominique.
While undoing working pollution protections is normally a lengthy process, EPA’s offer could take effect rapidly, without litigation. There is no reasonable case to be made for the presidential waiver or the harm that will come from it.
Dominique attempts to find any common ground with Trump and Zeldin in her Newsday essay but only manages to say that they’re all parents and grandparents. The overlap ends there: “My family is at the heart of who I am and what I do, fighting to secure a healthy future where our children and grandchildren are safe from environmental harms. Stewardship of our planet? Concern for children’s health? Not from them.”
Read the full essay in Newsday.
Tell Administrator Zeldin: Cutting Climate Pollution Is One of EPA’s Most Important Jobs