Amy Dominguez, amy.dominguez@sierraclub.org
ARIZONA - on Monday, May 5, the Sierra Club unveiled a new tool that shows the public health and environmental toll of the Trump Administration’s planned rollbacks of the Environmental Protection Agency’s safeguards against coal pollution.
The Trump Coal Pollution Dashboard analyzes the potential consequences of dismantling five critical federal standards designed to limit harmful emissions from coal-fired power plants, offering plant-by-plant data nationwide to show the risks to public health and the environment so that the public and decision-makers have a clear picture of what’s at stake. These safeguards include:
- the Good Neighbor Plan
- Regional Haze Standards
- Mercury and Air Toxics Standards
- Effluent Limitation Guidelines
- Greenhouse Gas Standards
If these rollbacks move forward, Arizona stands to face serious consequences, with increased pollution threatening both public health and iconic landscapes. Eliminating the Greenhouse Gas standard alone would allow plants like Springerville, Apache, and Coronado to emit over a million tons of carbon dioxide annually. Rolling back the Regional Haze rule could add more than 2,000 tons of nitrogen oxide, degrading air quality and obscuring views in beloved national parks. These impacts would fall especially hard on vulnerable populations, with 41% of low-income communities within three miles of these plants at heightened risk.
In response, Sierra Club released the following statements:
“This new resource demonstrates how these rollbacks are a direct threat to the health of our communities, and the landscapes we love, including national parks. They give the state’s worst coal polluters a free pass to operate with little oversight, undoing decades of hard-fought progress to reduce pollution and safeguard public health. Clean air, and clean water should be a given in Arizona. We need more protection, not less,” said Sandy Bahr, Director of the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter
“The Trump Coal Pollution Dashboard demonstrates clearly that with every executive order, Donald Trump is recklessly releasing tons and tons of toxic, deadly chemicals into our air. These EPA safeguards were put in place to shield our communities from toxins that poison children, cause more asthma attacks, more heart attacks, and more premature deaths.
“The American people should be outraged that in the first few months of his presidency, Donald Trump has so callously attacked these lifesaving standards and given Big Coal a free pass to make Americans sicker with no consequence. The Sierra Club will continue to fight these dangerous rollbacks and defend our people from more deadly pollution,” said Laurie Williams, Beyond Coal Campaign Director.
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About the Sierra Club
The Sierra Club is America’s largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization, with millions of members and supporters. In addition to protecting every person's right to get outdoors and access the healing power of nature, the Sierra Club works to promote clean energy, safeguard the health of our communities, protect wildlife, and preserve our remaining wild places through grassroots activism, public education, lobbying, and legal action. For more information, visit www.sierraclub.org.