Leap into the Future with a Bold, Ambitious Plan
to Cut Climate and Air Pollution

Biden’s Day-One Climate Leadership Commitment

With John Kerry serving as the first presidential climate envoy, the incoming Biden administration can commit to climate leadership domestically and globally. On Day One, Moms want the Biden Administration to:

• Re-join the international Paris Climate Agreement.
• Commit to ambitious and swift reduction in carbon and methane emissions.
• Commit to the rapid deployment of clean electricity.
• Commit to eliminate climate pollution from cars and trucks by transitioning to 100% electric vehicles by 2040. The president, and EPA, must make clear that this transition will happen quickly.
• Commit to investments in building out infrastructure to support electric vehicles.
• Restore longstanding state authority to set strong greenhouse gas emissions standards from cars, something the Trump administration tried to strip away.

Biden’s First 100 Days: Restoring Our Right to Clean Air

WE DEMAND BOLD AND AMBITIOUS ACTION FROM A STRONG EPA THAT HONORS THE CLEAN AIR ACT

The Trump Administration has unleashed an unprecedented series of climate and clean air regulatory rollbacks that have dragged us backwards as a nation and threaten our right to clean air. The Biden administration must not only fix these rollbacks, but achieve a bold new approach to pollution that prioritizes public health and environmental justice.

Our top priorities in the next administration are:

• Restore science as the foundation for health-protective standards that keep our air clean;
• Fix the dozens of Trump rollbacks that threaten our air quality and make climate change worse;
• Cut pollution from cars, trucks, and buses;
• Cut pollution from the ways in which we generate our power;
• Cut methane emissions from oil and gas development, including from new and existing wells;
• Restore the proper implementation of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), the only major piece of environmental law to pass, with significant bipartisan support, and signed by President Barack Obama, in decades;
• Reopen the assessment of the brain-harming pesticide Chlorpyrifos;
• Tighten and enforce the regulation of petrochemical refineries and cracker plants, as the gas industry seeks to transition the bulk of its revenues into plastics.

All of these must be crafted within a framework of environmental justice, explicitly addressing and wiping out historic disparities in pollution exposure and health impacts.

WE DEMAND BOLD AND AMBITIOUS CLIMATE LEGISLATION

• For the rapid deployment of renewable and clean energy sources;
• For the creation of American jobs to build out a 21st century infrastructure of supercharging stations for electric cars, buses and trucks, on the scale of the interstate highway system of the fifties

REPAIRING THE DAMAGE IS JUST THE BEGINNING

Our communities are counting on the incoming Biden administration to repair the damage left behind by the EPA. Fixing these Trump-era rollbacks is just the beginning of building a healthy, safe, pollution-free future:

• Censored Science—The EPA has restricted the public health studies that the agency can consider when setting public health protections. The proposal aims to prevent the EPA from using studies that use private data, blocking the agency from considering landmark epidemiological research that relies on confidential health data. Excluding these studies during rulemaking could result in major health risks.
• Ozone Standards—The EPA has refused to strengthen the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for ground-level ozone, or smog, despite clear scientific evidence that more stringent standards are necessary to protect Americans from asthma, lung problems, and other health issues. Smog is linked to premature deaths, thousands of emergency room visits, and tens of thousands of asthma attacks every year.
• Particle Pollution Standards—The EPA has refused to strengthen the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for deadly particle pollution, or soot, which causes tens of thousands of deaths per year. The decision ignores the considerable science showing grave health harms at levels below the current standards, as well as ignoring new evidence linking particle pollution to increased risk of COVID illness and death.
• Clean Air Act Cost-Benefit Analysis—Cost-benefit analysis is used by policymakers to evaluate the impacts of different policy strategies. The EPA has finalized arbitrary and deceptive changes to this formula for Clean Air Act protections that would falsely inflate costs, while underestimating the health benefits of pollution protections.
• Mercury and Air Toxics Standards—EPA rescinded the “appropriate and necessary” finding of the MATS rule, weakening its foundation. Mercury is a potent brain toxin for babies and children that comes from coal plants.
• Clean Car Standards—The Trump administration weakened greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars, the largest source of climate pollution in the US. Trump also withdrew the longstanding authority of California and other states to set greenhouse gas tailpipe emissions standards that are more protective than EPA standards.
• Methane Standards—EPA lifted regulations that limit methane emissions from oil and gas operations. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that is leaked and vented from well pads, compressor stations, and pipelines. Other toxins leak from oil and gas development along with methane.
• Power Sector Standards—EPA rescinded America’s Clean Power Plan, which was the most significant climate-fighting policy on the books, replacing it with a much weaker plan that does not meaningfully address carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.
• Air Toxics Loophole—The new loophole in the Clean Air Act allows large industrial facilities nationwide to avoid complying with rigorous limits on hazardous air pollutants such as benzene.