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Friend,
Right now, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), headed by former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, is exploiting the coronavirus outbreak to dismantle important environmental protections. We need to raise our voices and demand change immediately.
Outrageously, the agency just suspended enforcement of all environmental laws during the pandemic. At the request of oil lobbyists, the EPA is giving corporations a free pass to pollute—worsening respiratory health conditions like asthma, which make people especially vulnerable to the coronavirus.
This is environmental racism at its worst.
It will disproportionately harm low-income people and people of color, who’ve been forced to live near dirty energy projects. Here in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, we have one of the country’s most-polluted zip codes due to corporations that are allowed to get away with poisoning our communities. We can’t let this continue.
Sign the petition: Demand the EPA protect our environment and communities, rather than big polluters’ profits!
A new study found that people with coronavirus who live in areas with a lot of air pollution are more likely to die from the coronavirus. Right now, we need clean air and water more urgently than ever. This is the time to regulate corporate polluters even more, not less.
But under the guise of emergency response, the EPA is gutting important protections and stopping the enforcement of important laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. Instead of helping struggling frontline communities already hardest-hit by COVID-19, Trump’s EPA is exacerbating the very health crisis they’re using as an excuse! All for the sake of big polluters’ profits.
Here in Michigan, Black people make up less than 15% of the total population but make up 40% of the people who’ve died from COVID-19. Some of the state’s highest death rates have been in zip codes in our district, Michigan’s 13th. Our communities are already mourning the staggering losses of loved ones, and more lives are at stake. Meanwhile, the EPA’s rollbacks are actively worsening health disparities.
The Trump administration is hoping they can get away with this while our attention is on the pandemic. We can’t let that happen. Weeks ago, I led a delegation of Michigan Congresspeople to demand that the EPA reverse course. But we need a massive public outcry to make sure the administration listens. Can you join us?
Sign now: Demand the EPA put people’s health over fossil fuel industry profits!
Initially established to protect the environment and our health, the EPA under Trump is actually doing the opposite.
Here are some of the ways the EPA has recklessly endangered our planet and people during the pandemic:
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Rolling back Obama-era vehicle fuel efficiency standards, leading to more air pollution while spurring climate destruction through a billion more tons of carbon emissions per year.
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Enabling more toxic mercury pollution—which causes respiratory illnesses and permanently damages people’s brains and other organs—by weakening a rule that will also make it harder to regulate other pollutants.
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Weakening the Endangered Species Act by clearing the way for the use of toxic pesticides that harm protected species.
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Gutting the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act, which would exempt major infrastructure projects from environmental impact reviews—and eliminate the requirement to consider fossil fuel projects’ cumulative environmental impacts, like contributions to climate change. This bedrock law has been a powerful tool for judges who’ve successfully stopped some of the Trump administration’s worst actions.
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Bypassing the public input process to approve a cancer-linked pesticide, ignoring the agency’s own scientists and putting farmworkers at risk.
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Restricting the EPA’s ability to use crucial scientific research (including epidemiology, or the spread of disease) when making regulations—at a time when we need access to as much research as possible to help with the pandemic, and when health experts are too busy dealing with the pandemic to fight back.
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Ignoring the EPA’s own recommendations to strengthen protections against soot pollution, linked to breathing trouble and lung and heart diseases. EPA head Wheeler explicitly dismissed findings from a recent study that determined even a slight increase of this type of pollution (particulate matter) could lead to a 15% increase in death rates from the coronavirus.
This is yet another way the pandemic response exposes the twin evils of environmental racism and disaster capitalism.
While corporate polluters get handouts and free passes, struggling communities like mine are left out—after suffering decades of disinvestment. We can no longer deny that the disease of corporate greed has infected our government. It doesn’t have to be this way. It’s up to us to take action.
Although we’re up against powerful forces, I know that together, we can make transformative change happen.
Please add your name to our petition to demand the EPA reverse course and do its job, rather than doing the bidding of fossil fuel executives.
In solidarity,
Rashida
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