CONTACT: DKC News, [email protected]
WASHINGTON, DC– Today, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is expected to announce that his agency plans to stop limiting dangerous, climate-heating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. Fossil fuel power plants are responsible for about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., contributing significantly to the global warming that is supercharging extreme weather.
In response, Moms Clean Air Force Director & Co-Founder Dominique Browning released the following statement:
“We’ve watched the Trump-Zeldin EPA destroy one climate protection after another—and this anticipated rollback on limits on climate pollution for power plants is yet another direct attack on our ability to keep children safe from increasingly dangerous extreme weather. There’s overwhelming scientific consensus that greenhouse gas pollution from human activity is driving climate change, that our critical window of time to act is shrinking, and our families and communities are feeling the impacts of an ever-hotter climate every single day.
“Zeldin’s expected rollback of power plant protections is particularly egregious given the devastating extreme weather we’ve seen, yet again, this summer. Last month was the hottest month ever recorded. Families suffered through heat-related illnesses, smothering wildfire smoke, and catastrophic flooding in Texas just a year after the Camp Mystic floods. Rather than act on his clear responsibility to protect families in the U.S. from environmental harms, Zeldin has corrupted his agency’s mission to protect human health and the environment.
“We are paying the price for this corruption. Failure to limit climate pollution means more children ending up in the emergency room with asthma attacks and heatstroke, more families struggling to rebuild homes after harrowing storms and more farmers’ livelihoods disrupted by dangerous drought. It means higher health care bills, higher insurance costs, and more economic struggle at a time when Americans cannot afford it. We should not have to pay for the government’s failure to safeguard our families with our wallets and our health.”