Some members of Congress are attempting to gut the Clean Air Act by removing the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases -- particularly from huge sources such as coal-fired power plants. This moves us in precisely the wrong direction on global warming.
The Clean Air Act is directly responsible for saving lives, improving health, and decreasing hospitalizations and lost school and work days. According to the EPA, in 2010, the Clean Air Act will save 23,000 lives and prevent 1.7 million asthma attacks, 4.1 million lost work days, and more than 68,000 hospitalizations and emergency room visits. Yet the Clean Air is under attack.
In its first two decades alone, the Act provided benefits 42 times greater than the estimated costs of regulation, including decreased healthcare costs and reduced lost work time worth $22.2 trillion.
The Act already provides many of the necessary tools to reduce greenhouse pollutants. Under the Act, new coal-fired power plants must be built, if at all, with meaningful greenhouse emissions-reduction requirements.
Rather than preventing the EPA from fulfilling its duties under the Clean Air Act, we should be moving swiftly to use the Act to curb global warming -- before it's too late.
If you have a U.S. address, please take one minute today to send a letter to your senators letting them know we need to curb global warming, we need the Clean Air Act to do so, and we need to oppose all moves to gut the Act.
