By: Rachel Meyer, Ohio River Valley Field Organizer, 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
Thank you for the opportunity to testify. My name is Rachel Meyer, and I am the Ohio River Valley Field Coordinator for Moms Clean Air Force. I am from Independence Township, Beaver County, in southwestern Pennsylvania.
I support strong climate pollution protections for power plants and am calling on EPA to maintain its standards to help protect our families from harmful greenhouse gas pollution that contributes to climate change and the many ways climate change impacts our health.
Climate change is one of the biggest concerns I have for my five-year-old daughter. Even living in a rural area, I am faced with its reality every day. I see the petrochemical infrastructure including fracking operations and an ethane cracker plant near my family’s home and know this all contributes to a heavy load of climate warming pollution. Every source of climate pollution matters, from the petrochemical infrastructure in my neighborhood to the fossil fuel power plants across my state.
Climate change is an issue of generational justice. Today’s children will live through at least 3 times as many climate disasters as their grandparents. According to the peer reviewed EPA report Climate Change and Children’s Health and Well-Being in the United States, specific health impacts of climate change that particularly affect children include increased infectious disease such as Lyme disease, reductions in academic achievement, damage to or displacement from homes from natural disasters such as flooding, and increased asthma, allergies, and respiratory illness due to increased pollen and air pollution. By reducing climate pollution from power plants now, we can improve the outlook for our children’s future well-being. Rolling back protections would have an unconscionable effect on our children and future generations.
As a person who suffers from asthma, I know that air quality is very important. Increasing temperatures due to climate change worsen existing air pollution. One example of this is that higher temperatures result in higher ozone levels. The Shell petrochemical facility located near me, along with annually emitting two million tons of carbon dioxide, regularly exceeds its annual rolling pollution limits for VOCs and NOx. These pollutants combined with warming from climate change create the perfect conditions for elevated smog levels. For me and the almost 17,000 other asthma sufferers in my county, this means more days gasping for air.
Cutting climate pollution and other forms of air pollution from power plants will have profound benefits for the health of our children and everyone in our communities. We cannot afford to go backwards. I strongly oppose efforts to roll back climate pollution standards for power plants.