By: Brooke Petry, Pennsylvania field coordinator, Moms Clean Air Force
Date: February 24, 2022
About: Mercury and Air Toxics Standards for Power Plants: Proposed Reaffirmation of the Appropriate and Necessary Finding, Docket ID No. EPA–HQ–OAR–2018–0794
To: Environmental Protection Agency
Thank you for the opportunity to testify this morning. My name is Brooke Petry, and I am a field organizer for Moms Clean Air Force in Pennsylvania. I live in Philadelphia, and I am testifying today on behalf of myself, my family, and our nearly 100,000 members across Pennsylvania.
I support this administration’s proposal to reinstate the appropriate and necessary finding of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards.
Fishing was a huge part of my childhood. My father was, and still is, an avid fisherman. I fondly remember many nights sitting at opposite ends of our kitchen table—me with my homework, and my dad carefully tying flies for fly fishing. I spent summer Saturdays walking my two younger sisters to our local reservoir to fish for sunnies, packing picnic lunches for us to eat on a warm, flat rock in the sun, while trying to avoid the menacing geese that would terrorize us if we looked at them the wrong way.
These days, I thoroughly enjoy the look of disgust on my daughter's face when I tell her about how I used to go out in our yard after a rainstorm to help grandpa collect nightcrawlers for bait. And as a mother, watching her reel in her first fish was pure joy. It was a good sized trout—big enough to keep—big enough to eat! I remember that moment clearly, as well as the one that followed. Thoughts of concern instantly replaced my enthusiasm, Is this safe to eat? Do we need to worry about mercury?
As any person who has been pregnant can tell you—this is a question that we are trained to ask each time we even consider eating fish or feeding it to our children. Time and again, pregnant people are reminded that if they eat contaminated fish, mercury can cause long-term losses in IQ scores, impaired motor function, learning impairments, and behavioral problems in their children. Mercury exposure is linked to other health harms as well, such as cardiovascular problems, including increased risk of heart attacks. There is no such thing as a safe level of mercury consumption.
As I prepared this testimony, I looked at the fish consumption advisories for some of the places I grew up fishing. In more than one instance, the advisory reads: DO NOT EAT ANY FISH, or cautions that it is only safe to consume one 4-ounce serving per month. The reason? Mercury levels.
To be clear, Mercury and Air Toxics Standards have been successful, but there are still many coal plants that release significant amounts of mercury pollution, placing the health of babies, pregnant people, and children at risk. Two of the biggest mercury-polluting power plants are located here in Pennsylvania.
Mercury exposure from these coal-fired plants isn’t the only health concern. Air pollution from coal-fired power plants can travel hundreds of miles on prevailing winds. So even folks who are not living and raising their families in the shadow of these plants are still breathing the pollution that they spew into our air. This is of particular concern to me because I am a lifelong asthmatic and the mother of an asthmatic child. For us, air quality is always front of mind and impacts what we can or cannot do on any given day.
Exposure to air pollution is not equally distributed, with low-income communities and communities of color bearing a disproportionate and unjust burden. In Philadelphia, where I live and work, the childhood asthma rate is more than twice the national average, and Black children are hospitalized for asthma attacks at five times the rate of their white peers. By limiting mercury pollution, we not only reduce dangerous mercury exposure, we also reduce other toxic air pollutants from power plants. This, in turn, reduces exposure to air pollution, which is linked to cancer, asthma, premature death, and other serious health harms.
EPA’s proposal to reinstate the legal foundation of the standards that limit mercury and other pollution from coal-fired power plants is a public health necessity. It will shore up the standards that have helped slash mercury pollution by more than 80%.
Once again, I support the proposal to reinstate the appropriate and necessary finding of MATS, and I urge you to go further and strengthen MATS. Thank you for the opportunity to testify.