By: Karin Stein, Iowa State Coordinator, Moms Clean Air Force
Date: June 14, 2023
About: Environmental Protection Agency Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2023-0072
To: Environmental Protection Agency
Hello, my name is Karin Stein. I live in Central Iowa, and I am Iowa Coordinator for Moms Clean Air Force, a national organization that fights every day to protect our children from air pollution and the climate crisis. I support the Carbon Rule and am calling on EPA to implement the strongest possible standards for power plants.
I think about the climate crisis regularly, almost every day. I am often filled with anguish when I think about what my daughters' lives will be like when I am no longer here to help. Will they lose their homes? Will they have enough to eat? Will new diseases and more frequent pandemics rob them of their lives’ potential? Will they watch their loved ones die from the consequences of climate change? Will governments be unable to manage the chaos that could ensue from major, relentless climate disasters? These are no longer topics for science fiction movies. You and I know that these could easily become real-life scenarios in future decades.
I watch how the climate crisis affects all the places where I have lived and where I have loved ones, mostly in Latin America and here in the United States. My brother and sister are struggling on our family farm in Costa Rica, in good part because of climate change. My cousin in Colombia is experiencing the same problem on his farm. In Iowa, we keep experiencing ever-increasing, severe storms. A massive derecho storm during the pandemic destroyed buildings and cornfields and caused an estimated 11 billion dollars in economic damage. A month ago we had a severe hail storm that once again caused millions of dollars in damage in my area. My house was spared the worst, but we have to replace our roof, which was new.
With major insurance companies declaring they will no longer insure new property in California because of climate change, when will this happen in Iowa? It is a matter of time, and we’ll be left to our own devices to deal with the fallout of climate disasters. We desperately need rules that make us safer, faster. Furthermore, the greenhouse gasses that travel into the atmosphere from our power plants right here, in Iowa, enter the global atmosphere and contribute to making the lives of my siblings and cousins abroad less safe, every day. EPA’s proposed carbon rule will make the US, which is the second biggest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, a better neighbor.
Finally, I’d like to express concern about something that has great potential for becoming a new environmental justice issue here in Iowa: the construction of pipelines to transport carbon dioxide from CCS sites. I realize the CCS pipelines proposed for Iowa are for ethanol processing plants and not for power plants, but these pipelines will transport CO2 nonetheless, so our concerns mirror those of other communities facing possible CO2 pipelines. One of them, the one proposed by a company called Navigator CO2 Ventures, will cut diagonally through my county, Jasper County, and its centerline will pass between 10 to 30 miles from my house, judging from the map the company has published. How safe will I be if that pipeline ruptures? How will family farms around me be affected, farms that have been fighting an uphill battle for survival for decades? Who will protect frontline communities around the country from CCS systems that have not been tested on a large scale?
I support the EPA’s proposed Carbon Rule, and I also call on EPA to strengthen community input and safeguards in the final version of this rule. Power plants that use CCS pipelines as part of their carbon reduction plan, have to be responsible for keeping humans safe and keeping environmental justice principles at the forefront of how they operate.
Thank you.