By: Julie Kimmel, Senior Manager, Editorial and Member Cultivation, Moms Clean Air Force
Date: July 8, 2025
About: Environmental Protection Agency Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-0124-0001
To: Environmental Protection Agency
My name is Julie Kimmel. I live in Virginia, with my husband and daughter, and I work for Moms Clean Air Force. Thank you for the opportunity to testify.
I strongly oppose EPA’s proposed roll back to the Carbon Rule Strong climate pollution standards for power plants are vital for protecting families from harmful greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming and endanger human health.
For the past year, I have been collecting extreme weather stories from Moms Clean Air Force members across the country to illustrate how flooding, wildfires, hurricanes, and heat—all weather events supercharged by global warming—impact regular families across the U.S. The stories are numerous and easy to find (and you’ve probably heard some of these already today):
- Jayne in Wisconsin shared how smoke that blew in from Canadian wildfires triggered her adult son’s asthma.
- Brooke in Pennsylvania shared how homes and businesses in her neighborhood were wiped out by flooding after Hurricane Ida.
- Hazel in Arizona shared how she carries an oven mitt with her when she leaves the house in case she needs to hold a scorching metal stairway railing in 115 degree summer heat.
- Liz in Maryland shared how her kids watched their swim coach suffer heatstroke during an especially hot practice.
Global warming is real. It’s impacting families and neighborhoods across the U.S. right now. Climate-fueled weather is already costing us billions of dollars every year—in damages and health care. This is not the time—so not the time—to roll back a rule that reduces greenhouse gas pollution from a significant source.
My daughter is an artist. She spends hours drawing and creating animations every day and wants to make either movies or video games when she grows up. Awesome. I’m here for it. But also, does that mean she’ll need to move across the country to California for work, a state experiencing some of global warming’s worst impacts—rampant wildfires, extreme heat and drought, terrible soot and smog pollution?
As a parent concerned about climate change, I often struggle talking to my child about her future. I want to tell her the sky’s the limit, but that’s simply not true. The earth is changing, climate disasters are much more frequent, and my daughter probably won’t have all the options I had when I entered adulthood more than two decades ago.
So that’s why I’m here to oppose EPA’s proposed roll back to the Carbon Rule. Fossil fueled power plants are responsible for almost a quarter of the climate pollution generated by the U.S. If we can cut our greenhouse gas emissions down, we should do it. And we should do it now. Because our children deserve as comfortable a life and as many opportunities for success as we can give them.