Patrice Tomcik: New protections will save lives and slash climate pollution from coal plants

In Southwestern Pennsylvania where I live with my family, the Keystone and Conemaugh power plants have been burning coal for more than 50 years, filling the air with potentially life-altering pollution and fouling the region’s water and soil with mercury-laced waste.

Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency took action that will apply to existing coal-burning power plants. Their four new pollution standards will do more to protect the health of children and the stability of our communities by seriously reducing the allowable amounts of mercury, toxic heavy metals — and the carbon dioxide that is making each summer more dangerous than the last.

The updated Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) is crucial. Mercury occurs naturally in coal in small quantities, and when coal is burned, mercury is released into the air. From there, it falls onto waterways like rivers and lakes and enters the food chain. But no amount of exposure to mercury is safe. It’s a powerful neurotoxin that is a special concern for pregnant women, nursing mothers and children. Mercury migrates through a pregnant woman’s body and lodges in the fatty tissue of the fetal brain, where it disrupts the brain’s delicate architecture. Mercury is also harmful to the developing brains of infants and children.

For communities living near dirty coal-burning plants, the strengthening of limits on other toxic metals like nickel and arsenic linked to asthma, cancer and premature death, along with the proposed requirement to continuously monitor these emissions, is an important step forward to improve public health. Since 2012, EPA’s MATS protections have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. These stronger standards will further limit the neurological harm, disrupted motor function and learning impairment that mercury can cause to ripple through a lifetime.

But it’s not only mercury and air toxics EPA took action to reduce. They introduced another standard that will reduce the climate pollution coming from these same coal-burning plants — the largest source of climate pollution today in the U.S. energy industry. The EPA estimates the standard limiting the amount of climate-changing carbon will have the same effect as switching 328 million gas-powered cars to zero-emission bicycles, trains and electric cars and buses — and it’ll avoid nearly 50,000 missed days of school, too. I went to school about a mile downwind from the coal-burning Cheswick power plant, which closed just two years ago. As a child, I watched the plumes from the plant float directly toward our school playground — and I missed a lot of days due to chronic bronchitis.

The protections arrive after 10 consecutive months of new records for monthly global heat — with both air temperatures and the world’s oceans hitting an all-time high for the month of March 2024. Climate change is already causing harm, and the World Health Organization says that it leads to death and illness from increasingly frequent heatwaves and storms, disrupting food systems and more. In April, much of southwestern Pennsylvania was awash in heavy rains that led to so much flooding.

It’s a stark reality, but it doesn’t have to be this way. We have a right to know what dangerous pollutants are in the air our families breathe — and to be protected from them. As the mother of a son who is a cancer survivor, I am on a mission to protect all children from health-harming pollution. It’s why the work that Moms Clean Air Force does is so important. We are a community of 1.5 million moms and caregivers around the country, with more than 100,000 members in Pennsylvania, advocating for vital mercury and air toxics protections and strong limits on climate pollution for over a decade.

We support the work EPA, the Biden administration and our brother and sister advocates have done to stand up for our health and safety, and we commend these new standards, critical for addressing climate change, protecting the most delicate brains and helping hold coal plants accountable for their pollution. Let us keep standing together to protect these standards for the future of our children and our planet.

Patrice Tomcik is national field director for Moms Clean Air Force.