LWVC Guidance—EPA Listening Session

Climate change is now. Heat records are being broken, glaciers are melting, the seas are rising and we have a moral obligation to protect are children and future generations from the even greater impacts of climate change that will occur if we don’t do something today.

The League of Women Voters of California is nearly 100 years old.  We have a long history of protecting the environment and promoting public health and we strongly believe that U.S. EPA must create a strong carbon pollution standard for existing power plants to address the main cause of climate change and to protect the world’s population from its devastating impacts. 

• In the United States, power plants account for 40% of the carbon pollution that causes climate change. While we currently protect public health with limits on arsenic, lead, mercury, soot and other pollution from power plants, there are no existing national limits on carbon pollution. That must change.
• Carbon pollution that causes climate change is responsible for increase air pollution that can cause thousands of death every year, yet it remains unchecked. That must change.
• According to researchers at Stanford University, unchecked carbon pollution could lead to 21,000 climate change-related deaths. And today, millions of children live in areas that receive an “F” rating for at least one air quality measure, based on the American Lung Association’s State of the Air Report.  That must change.
• Today, in California’s San Joaquin Valley asthma has reached epidemic proportions, where some counties report rates of over 20% for childhood asthma.  With climate change it can only get worse.  That must change.

As citizens of California we have seen our future in the ruinous fires and floods, the destructive diseases that our killing our forests, and through the shocking collapse of our salmon stocks.  Left unchecked, we know that climate change will have an overwhelmingly destructive impact on our state and that must change. 

U.S. EPA - pass a standard that will help turn the tide against climate change and usher in a future that protects our children and their children’s children from man-made climate change. 

Subject

Carbon Pollution Standards

Sent to

United States Environmental Protection Agency

In response to

Request for comments on the best Clean Air Act approaches to reducing carbon pollution from existing power plants.