By: Emily Petrucci, Pennsylvania Field Organizer
Date: July 30, 2026
About: Docket No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2026-0728-0114
To: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
My name is Emily Petrucci, and I’m a Pennsylvania field organizer for Moms Clean Air Force, an organization working to protect children and families from the harmful effects of air pollution. My husband and I live in Media, a suburb of Philadelphia, with our two daughters. I urge you to protect the 2022 Heavy-Duty NOx rule. This rule protects children, families, and especially vulnerable communities from the harmful effects of nitrogen oxides and soot pollutants. Please do not weaken tailpipe standards for new heavy-duty vehicles.
My family cares about rules like this, because they work to protect everyone in our community, from the school bus driver who takes our kids to and from school to the truck drivers bringing groceries and other essential goods to our neighborhood. Everyone deserves the benefit of safe, clean air. We recently saw very unhealthy particle pollution from distant wildfires descending on our region. While we can’t control such large-scale events, we can take sensible actions that decrease our overall exposure to air pollution that comes from heavy-duty trucks.
What’s most concerning is that air pollution from heavy-duty trucks is not always visible. I cannot draw a definitive line from the air pollution in our area to the unexplained respiratory problems I suffer from, which can include months of coughing and the use of two inhalers. But we do know that these harmful exposures cause respiratory harm, asthma attacks, lung cancer, and cardiovascular events and increase the overall health risks to my family. Young children and athletes, like my daughter, are especially sensitive and spend more time outside and exposed to air pollution.
The sooner we get cleaner vehicles on the road, the better. And it can’t happen soon enough for our neighbors living closest to the source of these tailpipe pollutants. The health-harming impacts from diesel truck exhaust disproportionately affect people of color, who we know experience higher than average levels of pollution exposure from a variety of sources.
EPA Administrator Zeldin and the Trump administration are failing to deliver clean air for Americans. Weakening enforcement of limits on harmful tailpipe pollution is not what working families, who are already struggling with the high cost of healthcare, want for their communities. EPA must make progress toward cleaner air, and maintaining the 2022 Clean Trucks Standards as they are is a step in the right direction. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today.