Friend, The Environmental Protection Agency has suspended is job of protecting the environment. Tell Congress to make the EPA do its job and regulate polluters! In late March, the agency issued a memo essentially giving companies a pass on polluting, stating that it will not “seek penalties for noncompliance with routine monitoring and reporting obligations” if companies can cite the coronavirus as a reason for violating environmental laws. This uses COVID-19 as an excuse to allow polluters to stop following environmental rules set in place to protect human and environmental health. This new policy is “temporary,” but there is no end date set. Oil, gas, and other polluting industries have capitalized on the coronavirus crisis and lobbied for more lax rules on air and water pollution. It’s unlikely that the same industries lobbying for regulatory rollbacks will voluntarily comply with the rules that protect our health. If anything, pollution rules should be stricter, since a recent study found that fatality rates of coronavirus patients are higher in areas with high levels of air pollution. And the pains of pollution are not felt evenly, as frontline communities have long been targeted and burdened by polluting industries. Black and Latinx communities, where people are more likely to have underlying conditions stemming from pollution, are particularly hard hit by the virus. People should not be subjected to worsening air and water quality that weakens their health during a pandemic. We need stronger safeguards from pollution – not an abandonment by the entity charged to protect us. Please join Green America in calling on Congress to do all in its power to stop the EPA’s reckless rollback of laws when it should be protecting communities and the environment. For people and the planet, | 
