By: Vanessa Lynch, Pennsylvania Campaign Coordinator, 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
My name is Vanessa Lynch and I am the Pennsylvania Campaign Coordinator for Moms Clean Air Force. Moms Clean Air Force is an organization of over 1.6 million parents united against air pollution—and the urgent crisis of our changing climate—to equitably protect children’s health. I live in the Pittsburgh area in southwest Pennsylvania with my husband and two children. I’m here today to express my strong opposition to rolling back climate pollution standards for power plants.
For over a decade, Moms Clean Air Force has been advocating for strong protections from fossil fuel power plant pollution. Two of the biggest greenhouse gas polluting coal fired power plants in the United States are located in Pennsylvania—the Keystone and Conamaugh electric generating stations.
Pennsylvania families like mine deserve the strongest protection possible from climate warming carbon pollution and other forms of health-harming air pollution emitted from power plants, like particle pollution (also known as soot), sulfur dioxide, and smog-forming nitrogen oxide. EPA must not weaken climate pollution protections.
Climate change worsens air quality. Wildfires, exacerbated by climate change, are often one of the culprits. In 2023, Canadian wildfire smoke reached Pittsburgh causing very unhealthy air in our region for many days. In the most recent State of the Air report by the American Lung Association, the Pittsburgh area ranked 16th worst in the country for daily particle pollution and is the 12th most polluted area nationwide for year-round particle pollution.
Additionally, Pennsylvania was ranked 49th in the nation for the rate of growth of renewable energy sources over the past decade by the PennEnvironment Research and Policy Center. At the center of this issue is PJM Interconnection, the organization that operates the electric grid for the Pennsylvania region and beyond.
PJM has created a bottleneck where renewable energy projects are not being allowed to move forward. Fossil fuel unreliability and PJM’s failure to speedily connect new clean resources to the grid are creating severe problems.
Why does this matter? Appalachia, where I live, is at a disproportionately high risk of increases in the number of new fossil fuel-fired power plants generating climate pollution making us especially vulnerable to rollbacks of the Carbon Rule. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, most new natural gas plants are being built in the Gulf Coast, Appalachia, and Florida.
EPA’s Carbon Rule deserves to be protected rather than destroyed. I encourage you to keep the Carbon Rule for the sake of Pennsylvania’s children.