EPA held a hearing about their rule that rescinds the 2024 Greenhouse Gas Standards for Power Plants.
Dr. Anne spoke at the hearing, and this is what she said:
Hello. I am Dr. Anne Mellinger-Birdsong, a pediatrician who specializes in environmental health. I am a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics (or AAP), the professional organization for pediatricians. I work for Mothers & Others For Clean Air, a nonprofit that does education about air pollution.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is supposed to “promote the public health and welfare and the productive capacity of its population.” That is a direct quote from the Clean Air Act of 1970.
EPA established the greenhouse gas standard for power plants in 2024 following scientific review of hundreds of health studies, in order to protect human health. This is a fact.
This is also a fact: the American Medical Association, the AAP, the American College of Physicians, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, all have policy statements that recommend that national leaders take strong steps to rapidly limit greenhouse gases in order to protect health.
The New England Journal of Medicine and 200 other medical journals published a Call for Emergency Action to Limit Global Temperature Increases, Restore Biodiversity, and Protect Health 5 years ago, in order to prevent “catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.” That was 5 years ago.
The AAP climate change statement says: “Children’s physical and mental health are threatened by climate change through its effects on temperature, precipitation, and extreme weather; ecological disruption; and community disruption. These impacts expose and amplify existing inequities and create unprecedented intergenerational injustice.”
Climate change is hurting people’s health now. It is not far off in the future; it is already happening. EPA’s duty is to set standards to protect health, and this repeal does the exact opposite – it hurts health. These are scientific facts, proven by hundreds of studies.
We see it happening where we live, and read about it in news reports from other states. In Georgia where I live, we had 37 people die from Hurricane Helene, a hurricane made stronger by climate change. We had billions of dollars in crop losses in our state, just from one hurricane. Climate change is hurting us now.
In addition to climate change, the health benefits of this rule from prevented air pollution include many thousands of prevented cases of childhood asthma, asthma attacks, and COPD exacerbations, heart attacks and arrhythmias, high blood pressure, strokes, and dementia in adults. EPA is ignoring all of these and only focusing on the savings to industry.
EPA talks about the billions of dollars in savings from avoiding the costs of pollution controls, but ignores the hundreds of billions in extra health care costs and early deaths that air pollution and climate change will cost us. It ignores the billions of dollars in reduced crop yields from increased air pollution that farmers will have to absorb. (Crop yield losses calculated from these two references: https://www.morningagclips.com/2019-ohio-crop-values-summary/ and https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac0fa4)
Since EPA is supposed to promote the public health and welfare, you have to wonder why they are repealing the greenhouse gas standards for power plants, an action that physicians and the EPA itself know will damage health and lead to more deaths. Why are they choosing to ignore scientific facts? Are they hurting our health intentionally, or is it that they would rather help fossil fuel companies at our expense?
I and Mothers & Others strongly oppose this repeal, an action that is the exact opposite of protecting health.
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