Tell Congress: Protect Clean Air Standards

Congress is attempting to overturn decades-old clean air standards and force states to comply with rules that will make our air dirtier while giving out tax breaks to corporate polluters.

This will hurt consumers at the pump, harm our air quality and our health, and kneecap companies that are investing in new job-creating factories.

Tell your members of Congress: Don’t take away our right to clean air >>

Friend,

Clean air standards reduce respiratory illnesses, prevent heart disease, and safeguard against premature death. And yet, Congress is attempting to overturn decades-old clean air standards and force states to comply with rules that will make our air dirtier while giving out tax breaks to corporate polluters.

If successful, these Congressional resolutions would mark the first time in the more than half-century of the Clean Air Act that Congress has attempted to take away states’ rights to choose clean vehicle standards that go beyond federal standards to protect people from dangerous air pollution.

Urge your member of Congress to stop these attacks to our air and public health.

If Congress overrides these state standards, people across the country will face severe health, economic, and environmental consequences:

1. Hurting Consumers at the Pump: Blocking standards that encourage fuel-efficient vehicles will cost consumers more than $89 billion in increased fuel costs through 2040. These standards are also key to accelerating the domestic supply chain for battery manufacturing and moving us closer to a sustainable model of battery recycling.
    
2. Harming Air Quality and Health: Cars, SUVs, and trucks are the single largest source of fine particulate pollution, which causes asthma attacks, heart attacks, strokes, premature births, lung cancer, and premature deaths. Preventing enforcement of states’ clean air standards would allow more than 1.6 billion metric tons of climate-harming emissions to be spewed into the air. More pollution means more children suffering asthma attacks and missing school, more grandparents dying prematurely, and more death and destruction from extreme weather.
    
3. Ceding Global Leadership to Other Countries: Businesses require certainty for investments in clean transportation. Overturning states’ clean air standards will kneecap companies that are investing billions of public and private sector dollars in new job-creating factories — primarily in areas like North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, and Arizona. U.S. companies led the world auto industry for a century, and they should be leading the global clean vehicle transition now underway. This will only leave domestic manufacturing behind.

These rules would affect all of us and make our planet less healthy. Tell your member of Congress: Do NOT take away our right to clean air.

Thank you for joining us in the fight, Friend.

Onward, 

Darien Davis
Government Affairs Advocate, Climate Change & Clean Energy
League of Conservation Voters