By: Shaina Oliver, Colorado Field Organizer, Moms Clean Air Force
Date: January 8, 2025
About: NOx New Source Performance Standards, Docket # EPA-HQ-OAR-2024-0419
To: EPA
Thank you for taking public comments. I’m Shaina Oliver, Field Coordinator for Moms Clean Air Force/EcoMadres Colorado Chapter. We’re over 1.5 million Moms, Dads, and Caregivers united in fighting for our children’s right to clean air, and a safe environment. Importantly, I am an Indigenous Peoples Rights Advocate, wife and mother of four children. Today, I am speaking to ask EPA to strengthen Nitrogen Dioxide (NOx) standards on new gas power plants.
I am a Tribal member of the Navajo Nation from Shiprock, NM, currently residing in Denver, CO with my family. My children and I are descendants of the genocide known as “The Indian Removal Act”, known to the Dine as “The Long Walk of The Navajo”. Residing on the ancestral lands of 48 Tribal Nations, today over 260 Tribal affiliated First Nations live in Colorado.
I grew up along the Rocky Mountain Range of Colorado to New Mexico with Coal Power Plants to Gas Power Plants visible from a distance and now here in Colorado the Cherokee Generating Station is in the heart of the metro surrounded by communities. My family lives 8.3 miles from this gas power plant and our communities run along the high traffic zones due to the historic redlining of Black and Brown Communities.
I can only recall my experiences as a child experiencing and learning at age 9 or 10 years old that I was living with asthma. As an infant I was taken to the ER for breathing concerns by my grandparents for the first time and diagnosed with asthma. My youngest child was 9 years old when he was diagnosed with asthma after relocating to northeast Denver. Today, the American Lung Association’s state of air report reports Denver Metro still fails public health standards on ozone and particle pollution. Denver’s air quality continues to fail and respiratory illnesses like asthma continue to rise in adults and children.
The EPA knows that NOx is harmful to our respiratory system and that our children and elders are the most vulnerable. Moms Clean Air Force parents know these pollutants are linked to coughing, shortness of breath, chest pain, heart failure, preterm birth, and low birth weight. And Moms know long-term exposure is linked to central nervous system and reproductive harm. The health of our babies and children should not be compromised by where we live or work.
Moms Clean Air Force has been advocating for strong protections from power plant pollution for over a decade. We appreciate EPA’s efforts, but we know that gas power plants are capable of achieving greater reductions in pollution with the same technologies proposed in the rule, and we believe our families and communities deserve the strongest protection possible from health-harming pollution. We ask EPA to strengthen NOx protections in the final version of the rule.