By: Shaina Oliver, Colorado 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 taking public comments. My name is Shaina Oliver, and I am the Colorado Field Coordinator for Moms Clean Air Force and EcoMadres. We are a national community of over 1.5 million moms, dads, and caregivers united in the fight for clean air, and a healthy climate for our children. I speak today on behalf of our over 44,000 Colorado members who strongly oppose efforts to roll back the Carbon Rule, which helps protect our families from harmful climate pollution that contributes to impacts on health and our environmental well-being.
Importantly, I am an Indigenous Peoples Rights Advocate, a wife and mother of four. I am a Tribal member of the Navajo Nation, originally from Shiprock, New Mexico, and now living in Denver, Colorado, with my family. My children and I are descendants of the genocide known as “The Indian Removal Act,” known to the Diné as “The Long Walk of the Navajo.”
Colorado is the ancestral home of 48 Tribes; Moms Clean Air Force acknowledges the ancestral lands of the 574 Tribal Nations of the United States. The Indigenous people of the Rocky Mountains have long endured systemic injustice, including harmful development and pollution on our ancestral lands, fueled by unjust laws, policies, and regulatory rollbacks. These actions have compounded the impacts of human-caused global warming, including rising temperatures, drought, wildfires, and worsening air pollution.
While the Carbon Rule primarily targets planet-warming greenhouse gases, it also helps reduce other dangerous air pollutants from power plants—pollution that has harmed my community for generations. Where I grew up on the Navajo Reservation, we could see coal fired power plants from the roads on our way home. I grew up seeing my grandmother make breakfast for my grandfather before he left to work at one of those plants. His asthma was constantly triggered by exposure at the plants, and he was frequently rushed to the ER. He was eventually forced to retire due to his frequent asthma attacks. Later in life, he died of leukemia. He was one of the Navajo uranium miners who were not provided with the proper equipment during the 1960s. With creditable research, we’re now understanding the risks of air contaminants on our health and how they impact our lifespan.
These health impacts fall hardest on communities like mine—Indigenous, Black and Brown communities. My grandmother first took me to the ER for breathing concerns— first as a baby in Phoenix, Arizona, and again at age nine, in Denver, Colorado, where I was diagnosed with asthma. I often missed school and had to stay indoors, and my mom missed work. To this day, I struggle to breathe during bad air quality days, and I have bad allergies each year.
Poor air quality in Colorado is worsening due to power plant emissions, car exhaust, and the growing threat of wildfires intensified by climate change. Here in Denver, a gas-fired power plant operates in the heart of the city, surrounded by homes and families. The Denver-Greeley-Aurora region ranks sixth worst in the nation for ozone-pollution according to the American Lung Association’s state of air report. Ozone smog is especially harmful to children, pregnant women, elders and people with chronic conditions like asthma.
As a mother, I worry deeply about my youngest son’s asthma and how this EPA proposal, if finalized, would further endanger his health. It is unacceptable to continue putting polluters over our children.
Research shows fossil fueled power plants are responsible for nearly one-quarter of the climate pollution in the U.S. Rolling back the Carbon Rule is a direct threat to public health and climate stability. Instead, we must strengthen and ensure environmental protections for communities like mine.
We at Moms strongly oppose any attempts to repeal or weaken the Carbon Rule. Strong climate pollution standards for power plants are vital for cutting pollution and protecting the health and future of our children, and of generations to come.
Thank you.