At the time of writing, protestors in scores of cities across the country are speaking out against police brutality and systemic racism. At Moms Clean Air Force, we stand with the Black Lives Matter movement against injustice, brutality, and racism. This week, our founder and senior director Dominique Browning stated that the country’s radical environmental deregulatory agenda is a racist agenda. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is working overtime to deregulate industry in ways that increase air pollution, which hits communities of color and low-income communities where COVID-19 is disproportionately killing Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color. Environmental justice and racial justice are inseparable; we cannot advance one without the other. It’s why we find even more meaning in this essay pulsing with relevance and moral clarity by our national field director, Heather McTeer Toney. Acknowledging the profound burden facing our racially divided country, Heather responds powerfully to the current crisis: “We will register and vote, reminding those in power that our voices cannot be silenced or suppressed.”
EXPOSING INEQUITIES IN HOUSTON
Writing in The Houston Chronicle, our Texas field organizer Catherine Flowers responded to the paper’s coverage of a Rice University study on the shifting mindset of Houston residents. Lamenting the number of survey respondents who said that they had issues accessing health care, adequate food, and economic advancement, Catherine points out how existing inequities are made worse by the coronavirus and unchecked air pollution: “We know Houston’s black and Latino communities are hardest hit by these inequities, and that has to change. Sure enough, these communities are suffering the most during the coronavirus pandemic and also bear the highest burden of air pollution because Latino and black families are most likely to live near oil refineries, chemical facilities, concrete batch plants, salvage yards and freeways in a city without zoning. The sad truth is that your ZIP code says a lot about your health. […] Families deserve effective government action to protect health. We need the city, county and state to work together to lead based on the latest science, implement and enforce environmental safeguards that will clean the air for everyone who calls Houston home, especially our most vulnerable residents.”
ROLLBACKS MAKE US SICKER
As our loved ones struggle to breathe due to the coronavirus, the Trump’s EPA is rolling back pollution standards for tailpipe emissions. Our Michigan field organizer Elizabeth Hauptman has a personal take on this rollback: As the rollback was being announced, her mother was recovering from COVID-19, and her asthmatic son was being closely monitored due to his increased risk of coronavirus complications. Elizabeth’s opinion in the Lansing State Journal highlights her concerns: “Pandemic or not, Michigan moms understand that weakening these standards will make our air dirtier — and dirty air weakens our lungs. […] The rollback of these essential standards will have real consequences for my family —and the millions of other Americans who suffer from asthma — especially our children….With the rollback, the Trump administration is telling American automakers, which pride themselves on innovation, that they do not need to invest in pollution-cutting technology, even though it would save families money at the pump and protect my son’s health.… I am thankful that my mother has turned a corner in her battle with the deadly coronavirus. I feel deep sorrow for the families who have not been as fortunate. I worry that without strong clean air protections, more Americans will lose their loved ones needlessly. EPA does not need to be making us sicker.”
LATINOS ON FRONTLINES
Las Vegas-based field organizer Cinthia Moore wrote an opinion in Hispanic LA about the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Latinos. Cinthia offers some explanations to help readers better understand why Latinos are so hard hit: “One reason the Latino community is at higher risk from the Coronavirus is because options for remote work are limited, the majority of jobs filled by Latinos are in the service sector. We also tend to live in multigenerational homes, which increases the risk of contracting the virus, especially among older people. In addition to this precarious health situation, the 21st Annual State of the Air Report—presented by the American Lung Association — lists the city of Las Vegas as among the top 10 worst polluted cities in the country as measured by ozone.” (translated from the original Spanish)
ADDRESSING the MENACE of METHANE
Two members of Moms Clean Air Force in Pennsylvania responded with letters to news coverage in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about greenhouse gas methane leaks from the state’s oil and gas companies. Joan Vondra and Rajani Vaidyanathan cite a new study showing how much worse methane leaks are than previously thought. Natural gas drillers in PA leaked more than 1.1 million tons of methane into the air in 2017 — 16 times the amount that they reported. Joan and Rajani commend Governor Tom Wolf for moving ahead with measures to cut methane pollution at a time when the federal government is mired in inaction. Joan shares why the new study is so troubling: “[W]hen methane leaks into the atmosphere, it contributes to the kind of planetary warming that leads to strange and severe weather events and increases vector-borne diseases such as Lyme disease and West Nile virus. That’s not what we want to hear heading into summer. [W]armer temperatures degrade air quality and worsen smog. This should be an urgent call to action as we confront a global pandemic in COVID-19 that is at its core a respiratory virus.” Rajani reminds readers that we advocates must persevere in the face of federal inaction and misinformation: “To the drillers that keep insisting methane emissions are on the decline with no facts to back it up, I say spare us — literally — and read the science. Let’s all get to work and ensure strong final rules are adopted.”