By: Elizabeth Bechard, Public Health Manager, Moms Clean Air Force
Date: October 1, 2025
About: EPA Docket No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-0186-0001, Reconsideration of the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program
To: Environmental Protection Agency
My name is Elizabeth Bechard, and I am a Public Health Manager for Moms Clean Air Force. I live in Vermont with my family. I’m here today to strongly oppose EPA’s proposal to repeal the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program—this program is a critical source of public information that we need to protect people from climate change and all the damage it creates. Families and communities around the country are feeling the health and economic impacts of climate change every day.
We know that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are heating our planet and intensifying dangerous extreme weather like heat waves, wildfires, strong storms, and flood events. Two summers ago, my community and many other communities in Vermont sustained devastating flooding that destroyed homes and businesses, traumatizing families and causing lasting economic harm. One of those businesses was a small farm about half a mile from my house where my children and I love to pick berries in the summer—the abundance of small farms is one of the things we love most about our state.
But small farms were hit hard by 2023’s Great Vermont Flood. The Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food, and Markets surveyed farms in our state after the flooding and found that losses were reported in every single county. The average respondent had 103 acres impacted by flooding and over $60,000 in damages, and across the state, farmers reported over $16 million worth of losses in damage to crops and land. Last July and this July, Vermont experienced flooding again, devastating many of the same farms, businesses, and communities that were still trying to recover from the previous floods. Global warming is contributing to Vermont’s increasing flooding: a recent study found that extreme precipitation in the Northeast is expected to increase by 52% by the end of the century.
I worry about what flooding like this will mean for farmers’ ability to stay in business and feed their families, and I worry about what it will mean for our state’s ability to feed Vermonters. There’s nothing more fundamental to a family’s well-being than being able to put healthy, fresh food on the table—and it benefits a whole community when that food is locally grown, nourishing both the people who eat it and the people who helped to grow it. Climate change is increasingly threatening local food systems like the hundreds of small farms across Vermont, among so many other impacts. If we don’t address the urgent problem of climate pollution, these impacts will only get worse. And if we don’t measure the problem of climate pollution, it will be so much harder to address.
EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program has been and must continue to be a source of accurate, reliable data about climate pollution so that polluters can be held accountable for their emissions and so that policymakers, businesses, and other stakeholders can make decisions that meaningfully address climate change and help keep families and communities safe.
Not collecting data about climate pollution won’t make the problem of climate change go away—it will only make it more expensive, more dangerous, and more difficult to deal with. Please do not repeal the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. Thank you.