By: Sam Schmitz, Project Manager, Moms Clean Air Force
Date: August 21, 2025
About: Environmental Protection Agency Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-0194
To: Environmental Protection Agency
My name is Samantha Schmitz and I am a Project Manager at Moms Clean Air Force, based in DC. As a member of Gen Z, I’ve lived through climate impacts my entire life, watching them get exponentially worse over time. I’ve studied climate change academically and devoted my career to protecting future generations, so I know our country’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions has been and remains enormous. Furthermore, there is scientific and public health consensus around the harms of climate change, so I am here to beg EPA not to overturn the Endangerment Finding or the critical safeguards that limit climate emissions from cars and trucks.
The courts have rejected legal challenges to the Endangerment Finding multiple times. This attack is unjustified and unsound – it is simply another attempt to appease wealthy big oil executives while undermining the health and safety of hard-working people. In 2024, the U.S. had 27 climate disasters that each caused over $1 billion in damages. The economics are clear: cutting climate pollution is crucial to limiting the exorbitant price of future climate-driven extreme weather.
Our country is already facing an affordability crisis with an estimated 57% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to make ends meet let alone save for their or their children’s future. Your choice to allow the costs of climate-fueled weather disasters to go unchecked will drive more Americans into poverty.
I feel the affordability crisis every day and know that everyone in my generation feels it too. We joke about how unattainable home ownership and parenthood is, so we laugh rather than cry.
And frankly, your effort to rescind the Endangerment Finding has left me reconsidering my desire to have children of my own. How could I bring a child into a world where their government knowingly puts them in harm’s way? Into a society on the brink of climate collapse with leaders gleefully fueling the fire? This is morally unconscionable and entirely indefensible.
I’d love to be a parent – I really would. But here I am, instead of planning for my own future, I’m fighting to make sure today’s children have a safe one. That is YOUR job, EPA. Do NOT rescind the Endangerment Finding.