By: Sophia Mora-Ortega, Intern, Moms Clean Air Force
Date: August 21, 2025
About: Environmental Protection Agency Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-0194
To: Environmental Protection Agency
Thank you for the opportunity to testify. My name is Sophia Mora-Ortega and I am an Environmental Policy and Research Intern for Moms Clean Air Force. I strongly oppose efforts to undermine the EPA’s Clean Cars and Clean Trucks rules as well as the Endangerment Finding, the legal foundation that protects families across the country from the emissions that lead to global warming. Emissions from industrial sources, burning fossil fuels to power our transportation system and to generate electricity.
In the past 16 years, the science has only gotten clearer. Climate change is here, and it is harming us now. In 2024 alone, our country endured 27 climate disasters that each caused at least $1 billion in damages. Communities across the U.S. are grappling with increasingly extreme weather that threatens their health, homes, and livelihoods. Wildfires fill our air with smoke, heat waves are breaking records, and floods are destroying neighborhoods.
Living in Florida I have seen the devastation brought on by climate change fueled weather events––particularly floods and hurricanes. I’ve watched families be displaced, had school cancelled for days on end, and seen communities left to recover with too little support and too few resources. Patterns like these are only getting worse.
The threat to roll back the Endangerment Finding risks the lives of everyone in our communities, particularly the most vulnerable: children, the elderly, and those with chronic illnesses. Children’s developing lungs, brains, and immune systems make them especially susceptible to the impacts of air pollution worsened by warming temperatures. I shouldn’t have to weigh my desire to have children against the fear of the world they would be born into, but that’s exactly what this moment demands.
Further, not all communities bear the brunt of these harms equally. Across the country, it is often low-income neighborhoods, communities of color, and Indigenous people that are forced to live closest to highways, industrial zones, and power plants, the sources of pollution driving climate change. These are the same communities that have the most limited resources to recover when disaster strikes or when health is impacted. Revoking the Endangerment Finding would only deepen these inequities and send a clear message that some lives are worth protecting more than others. Every person deserves to live in a community where their air is safe to breathe, weather events are survivable, and the government is committed to using the best available science to protect its citizens. Rescinding the Endangerment Finding and the Clean Cars and Trucks rules would betray a promise to those very people and fail those who have already suffered the most.
I urge the EPA to uphold and defend these important safeguards and thank you for your time.