On Tuesday, hundreds of Philadelphia residents rallied and spoke at an Environmental Protection Agency hearing on new safeguards to cut deadly soot pollution nationwide. Today, many more will rally at another soot hearing in Sacramento.

I grew up in the Smoky Mountains, where – believe it or not – dangerous levels of air pollution sometimes made it dangerous to hike in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Since becoming a mom two years ago, I know that I pay more attention to those “code red” and “code orange” days when the air pollution makes it dangerous for many kids to play outside. Well, soot is one of the main pollutants that triggers those air pollution alerts. Soot is an air pollutant caused by burning fossil fuels like coal, and it’s known to cause respiratory illness, heart attacks and even premature death, according to the American Lung Association.

Here is what Jackie Wilson (pictured below with a sign showing that Philadelphia ranks 10th worst in the nation for deadly soot pollution), a volunteer with the Philadelphia Sierra Club, had to say at Tuesday’s hearing: “On hot, humid days like today we are especially at risk from air pollution like soot, which poses a serious threat to our children and people with asthma like my young nephew. I’ve watched him deal with the challenges of not being able to breathe well first-hand. We’re here today to show our support for stronger limits on soot pollution that will clean up our air and mean healthier families in Philadelphia.”

Children and the elderly are most at risk from dangerous soot pollution, which can cause premature death, and is linked a long, scary list of health problems including heart disease, lung disease, heart attacks, irregular heartbeats, asthma, chronic bronchitis, decreased lung function, irritation of the airways, coughing, and difficulty breathing. Soot pollution is estimated to cause 9,700 hospitalizations and more than 20,000 heart attacks each year.

At Tuesday’s hearing, supporters of the new, stronger Environmental Protection Agency soot limits held a rally with a mom’s stroller brigade that marched from the hearing to Independence Mall to show support from moms and parents who are worried about their children’s health.

We were proud to be part of that broad PA coalition helping support these safeguards, including the Clean Air Council, Citizen’s for Pennsylvania’s Future (PennFuture), Pennsylvania Conservation Voters, PennEnvironment, Interfaith Power and Light, Mom’s Clean Air Force, Natural Resources Defense Council, National Wildlife Federation, and more.

The hearings continue today (Thursday) in Sacramento, California, starting at 9am PT, where huge crowds will again turn out to support these smart public health safeguards from the Environmental Protection Agency. You can follow along using the Twitter hashtag #SootKills or by watching the @SierraClubLive and the American Lung Association in California (@CaliforniaLung) Twitter accounts for live tweets.

Otherwise, send in your comment today!

Photos by Kim Teplitzky – see more on Flickr.

On Tuesday hundreds of Chicagoans rallied against a coal gasification plant proposed for the city’s southeast side. These residents are against this planned facility because of the pollution it would bring – not to mention what a poor plan it is to build another dirty coal facility after the city just announced the closure of Chicago’s two ancient Fisk and Crawford coal plants.

Currently, legislation is sitting on Illinois Governor Pat Quinn’s desk that would force the state natural gas utilities into 30 year contracts to pay for the construction and output of the Leucadia’s coal gasification plant. We are urging the governor to veto this boondoggle of a bill.

The Leucadia plant is proposed for the Southeast side of Chicago, a community that was once home to steel mills and now has incredibly high pollution and unemployment rates. Tuesday’s rally was organized by the Environmental Justice Alliance of Greater Southeast Chicago. Sierra Club has been working over the past few of years with the incredible community leaders on the Southeast side to fight this plant, and after yesterday’s great event we’re one step closer to victory.

Amazing leaders from the southeast Chicago community led the rally, leading cheers including, “Governor Quinn, here’s a solution: Bring us jobs that don’t bring pollution!”

Speaker after speaker rallied the crowd, including one young man who really wowed everyone. “Today is my 16th birthday and there is nowhere else I would rather spend it that standing up with you all to defend our community,” said Gustavo Mota.

Cheryl Johnson, daughter of Hazel Johnson, the “mother of Environmental Justice,” spoke to the crowd as well and had the line of the day: “What goes up must come down! Pollution – it don’t go to heaven!”

During the rally, Governor Quinn’s chief of staff came down to publicly receive the more than 11,000 petitions collected from residents and ratepayers across Illinois asking the Governor to say no to the Leucadia coal plant.

Even both of Chicago’s newspapers editorialized against the proposed plant, saying the Governor should veto it.

Chicago can do better than dirty coal. Let’s really support these communities by vetoing new coal plants and instead choosing clean energy that will create jobs and will not harm public health.

A big Senate vote this week will determine the fate of mercury safeguards that continue to garner overwhelming support from Americans nationwide. This past weekend the U.S. Conference of Mayors unanimously passed a resolution (PDF) supporting the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) mercury pollution standards. This comes on the heels of NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s letter to the EPA, signed by 91 of his fellow mayors, in support of these critical public health protections.

Millions of Americans believe EPA is doing the right thing in requiring that coal companies clean up their act when it comes to mercury pollution. This week, supermodel and super mom Elle Macpherson joined us with a column on CNN.com about the importance of these public health safeguards in protecting our children.

But now, as expected, pro-coal legislators are taking the fight to Congress. This week Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) is introducing a Congressional Review Act (CRA)  – S.J. Res. 37 – to block these mercury standards. A vote is expected Wednesday.

These long overdue safeguards are poised to protect millions of Americans – particularly pregnant women and young children – from dangerous air pollutants like mercury, arsenic, cyanide, nickel and acid gases. These are practical, cost-effective standards that will improve our air quality and have enormous public health benefits.

In contrast, Inhofe’s proposal uses an obscure procedure aimed at sidestepping Congress’ traditional hearing, committee and debate processes. If Senator Inhofe’s resolution were to pass, it would void the mercury pollution protections and potentially block the EPA from ever again regulating toxic air pollution from power plants.

Senator Inhofe is clearly more attached to his big coal donors than to the public health of Americans. He recently even named me and – believe it or not – my two-year-old daughter Hazel during a speech on the Senate floor about mercury, as he tried to marginalize those of us who are speaking out to protect our children’s health. You can hear him talk about us at minute 17:55 of this clip from CSPAN.

Senator Inhofe goes on to talk about the Sierra Club’s work to move beyond coal and to support EPA’s mercury safeguards, about how we encourage people to bring their children and their asthma inhalers to public hearings to show the faces of coal pollution’s health effects. Yes, that is exactly what we do, because we want those who are affected to speak up – and they have been doing so by the hundreds of thousands. It’s clear that Americans want these public health safeguards, which is why a record 800,000 people sent in comments to EPA supporting the mercury standard.

Now we need your help. Tell your senator to protect our children and families by opposing S.J. Res. 37 and any other attempts to block or repeal EPA’s mercury pollution standards.

Today the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a draft pollution standard for soot that will reduce one of the most dangerous forms of air pollution, saving thousands of lives and preventing tens of thousands of heart attacks every single year. Unfortunately, it is sure to come under attack by big polluters, so we will need to stand together to defend it.

Soot, also known as particulate pollution, is the most harmful type of air pollution. Soot pollution is a significant health threat because these very fine particles, which come from burning fossil fuels, can be inhaled and lodge in the lungs, causing serious heart and lung problems.

Numerous scientific studies link soot exposure to a variety of serious health problems, including difficulty breathing, heart attacks, asthma attacks, chronic bronchitis, irregular heartbeat, and eve premature death in people with heart or lung disease.

Coal plants are the biggest source of soot, and a recent study (PDF) found that soot pollution from coal plants causes 13,000 premature deaths, 20,000 heart attacks, and $100 billion in health care costs annually. This new standard will save thousands of lives.

To put a face to all these numbers and health risks, I only have to think of six-year-old asthma-suffer Peter Wasserman who lives in Chicago near one of the Fisk and Crawford coal plants, who we featured in ads that we ran in Chicago calling for those plants to be cleaned up or retired.

I’ll never forget her opening words in this opinion piece she wrote for the Chicago Tribune:

I’m Peter’s mom. He’s that 6-year-old on those ads on the “L” trains or on billboards around town. You know, the one with the inhaler, the one he’s been using since he was 3. That makes him luckier than his older brother Anthony, who developed his asthma at 3 months. When Anthony had his first asthma attack, I didn’t know much about it. When he was struggling to breathe you could see his little rib cage. I learned that that was a telltale sign.

Peter’s asthma began with a cough that wouldn’t go away. Now that he’s been diagnosed, we’ve had to learn what his “triggers” are. Unfortunately, he has a really tough time on bad ozone days or when it’s really humid and really hot. While other families are able to go to the zoo or the park, my kids can’t. It’s very hard to explain to a 6-year-old who wants to do nothing but play outside that he can’t because the air quality isn’t good enough.

As a mom, I know that parents are united in calling for clean air for our kids, so we support this move by the EPA. As the hot summer days roll by and our cities and towns face Code Orange and Red air quality alerts that keep our kids and other vulnerable populations indoors, soot is one of the major causes of these dangerous days.

What’s more, soot pollution is also the cause of hazy views in our national parks. Asthma and you can’t even enjoy the iconic views in places like the Grand Canyon or the Great Smoky Mountains? Come on.

This National Ambient Air Quality Standard establishes the standard for what is and isn’t clean air, and the Sierra Club strongly supports this update of the soot standard.

Once finalized, this pollution safeguard will require localities to reduce pollution from vehicles, power plants, and other industrial sources – moves that improve our health and our economy.

But, as usual, big polluters like the coal industry are spending millions to prevent these life-saving clean air safeguards, putting their profits before the public’s health and putting American lives at risk.

Let’s fight back. Industrial particle pollution, or soot, from power plants is dangerous and kills hundreds of thousands of Americans each year. That’s why new life saving standards should be put in place to protect our kids and families. Join us in thanking the EPA for this draft safeguard and working in the weeks ahead to finalize a strong version of the standard.

Today,New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office publicly released a letter signed by nearly 100 mayors from across the U.S. supporting the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) mercury safeguards.

From Mayor Bloomberg’s release:

Cutting mercury pollution will save countless lives and help millions of Americans avoid the terrible health consequences it produces. That is why today I am proud to join nearly 100 of my fellow mayors from around the country in offering our support for EPA’s new mercury standards.Twenty-two years is too long to wait for this common sense measure.

A diverse range of mayors signed onto the letter, representing big cities, small towns, and everything in between. Lots of states are represented, including coal mining states like Kentucky. I’m proud to say that the mayor of my town, Shepherdstown, West Virginia, signed the letter – maybe your mayor did, too.

If your mayor signed the letter, I hope you’ll thank them through Facebook, Twitter, or letter to the editor of your local paper – you can find the full list of mayors on page two of the letter (PDF).

Believe it or not, while coal plants are our nation’s #1 source of mercury pollution, until this year there were no national mercury standards in place for coal plants. None at all! Coal plants could just spew 100% of their toxic mercury into the air, which then made its way into our waterways and the fish that we eat. Expectant moms would then pass that mercury onto their babies in the womb, every year putting over 300,000 newborn babies at risk of life-long developmental problems, like lowered IQ and delays in walking and talking.

Congress required these safeguards back in 1990, but the coal industry successfully blocked them for over two decades. That loophole was finally closed earlier this year, when the EPA put standards in place that will require all coal-fired power plants to reduce their toxic mercury pollution by 90%.

As a mom, I’m thankful to these bold public officials for speaking out for public health, and I stand with them as they tell the EPA, “Clean, healthy air and water are fundamental American rights and we are eager to work with your agency to ensure these historic protections are quickly implemented.”

This week hundreds of residents from Appalachia and beyond came to Washington, DC, to demand Congress end mountaintop removal coal mining and enforce the Clean Water Act.

They talked to their representatives in Congress and the White House, rallied, and made calls to call for and end this destructive practice that has damaged or destroyed nearly 2,000 miles of streams and flattened over 500 mountains, and threatens to destroy 1.4 million acres of mountaintops and forests by 2020. The visit was organized by several Appalachian grassroots organizations, including the Alliance for Appalachia and Appalachian Voices, where I previously served as executive director.

This week, I was deeply moved as I watched live streaming videos of local residents from Appalachia get arrested for holding sit-ins at Rep. Hal Rogers’ and Rep. Nick Rahall’s offices. I listened to them insist that they are sick and tired of the coal industry poisoning their drinking water, destroying the beauty of Appalachia, and strangling their communities while their Congressional representatives do nothing. I saw their elected representatives close the door in their faces.

At a Wednesday rally in DC, some shaved their heads as a symbolic act to draw attention to the stripping of our mountains – the photo with this column shows some of those folks. This followed on the heels of a similar demonstration led by some brave Appalachian women on Memorial Day on the steps of the WV state capitol. This time, Sierra Club organizer Bill Price was one of those who made this dramatic statement. See photos from I Love Mountains here.

This activism came the same week that many other local residents in Kentucky stood up to the coal industry at Environmental Protection Agency hearings about mountaintop removal coal mining permits. Our Kentucky Beyond Coal organizer Alex DeSha said the coal industry bused in hundreds of employees to the Tuesday hearing in Frankfort, but all left after former Massey Energy head Don Blankenship spoke only an hour into the hearing.

Meanwhile, Alex and other activists from the Kentucky Sierra Club and Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC) stayed until the hearing ended, offering “rational arguments recognizing the EPA’s authority to step in where the state has consistently failed to act in the public interest.”

Alex continued, “I was the last speaker of the night out of 120 speakers, making a final call for the EPA to not listen to the fear being peddled by the coal industry and stand strong on its objections in the face of systematic state failure to enforce the Clean Water Act.”

He added that pro-coal attendees heckled many Sierra Club and KFTC speakers, with some of the hecklers even having to be removed by police. I know first-hand how intimidating these kinds of settings can be, and the fact that these volunteers stood their ground is very inspiring. There’s video of the heckling here.

The next EPA hearing in Kentucky is today (Thursday) in Pikeville, Kentucky, and we and our allies will be there again.

Finally, last week my friend Maria Gunnoe, a powerful Appalachian woman and community leader, found herself in hot water at a House Committee on Natural Resources hearing in Washington, DC. Gunnoe – a mother herself – wanted to show a photo of the alarming water coming out of the tapat one Appalachia family’s home as a symbol of what so many Appalachian coalfield families are facing – it was a photo of the family bathing their daughter in disgusting red water. The family lives near a mountaintop removal coal site.

A GOP representative not only refused to let her show the photo, but actually had Gunnoe questioned about child pornography by the Capitol Police. Mother Jones has more on the controversy:

“I had to pull my chin off the table,” Gunnoe, a mother of two, said. “It gives you a very sick feeling when you’re actually a protector of children.” In 2009, she won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for her work defending rural West Virginia communities against the health and ecological impacts of mountaintop-removal coal mining.

Maria, who described the incident as a “new low” in her 15-year fight to end mountaintop removal, told Politico:

“I wanted Congress to see this because it’s what we have to deal with,” she said.”It is an obscene photo, and it’s not because this girl doesn’t have a bathing suit on. It’s obscene because our children shouldn’t be sitting in bathtubs full of red water.”

The coal industry and their allies will do everything they can to keep lining their pockets at the expense of our health, our communities, and our environment. They bully Appalachian residents and pay big money to members of Congress to keep public health and environmental safeguards weak. And as Maria’s story shows, they are willing to stoop to new lows all the time.

I am sick and tired of this – just like all these Appalachian neighbors of mine. We must end mountaintop removal coal mining.

The Moapa Band of Paiutes continues to fight the pollution from the nearby Reid Gardner coal plant in Southern Nevada, and the Sierra Club stands with them. Today, we are releasing this powerful new video that features members of the tribe telling moving personal stories about the devastating effects of pollution from Reid Gardner.

I first wrote about the Moapa in late April when we supported the Moapa Band of Paiutes on their three-day, 50-mile cultural healing walk from their reservation to the Lloyd George Federal Building in Las Vegas. The walk brought visibility to the damage that the Reid Gardner coal-fired power plant is doing to the tribe’s health, culture and economy.

Following that march, on May 3, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) held a hearing on the Moapa reservation about the pollution permits for Reid Gardner. That’s when much of the footage was taken for this short, unforgettable video.

The hearing was packed with tribal members telling their stories of serious health problems:  asthma, other lung diseases, nosebleeds, severe allergies, heart disease, and more.  Members also talked about being unable to live their lives according to their culture: the toxic dust stirred by the wind keeps people indoors; they are afraid to gather herbs and use them because they know they are contaminated with coal ash; and they universally are concerned about the long-term survival of the tribe.

This is an issue of fairness and justice.  This Tribe deserves clean air and water, not an outdated coal plant saddled with second-rate pollution controls.

The Moapa are leading the way beyond dirty coal and to clean energy by developing a major solar plant on the reservation.

Now EPA needs to do its part by requiring first-rate technology to reduce air pollution at the Reid Gardner coal plant. You can help – take action today to tell EPA to protect the Moapa from dirty coal pollution.

This has been a big week for clean air, public health, and grassroots activism that is moving America beyond coal.

First, we can breathe easier this week knowing that more aging, polluting coal plants are being retired as South Carolina Gas & Electric announced the retirement of six coal boilers.  As I’ve said with other coal plant retirements, now we must ensure that the transition from coal to clean energy happens in a way that protects workers and communities. We’ve seen it happen before – from the Pacific Northwest to the Tennessee Valley – and today we call on SCG&E to work with the employees at its affected plants.

Then yesterday we saw a victory against coal exports when the Seattle City Council voted “Unanimously (and Symbolically) Against Transport of Coal”- marking their disapproval of coal exports through their city and the region. We’ve seen amazing work by dedicated residents of the Pacific Northwest to get communities along the coal export rail lines to oppose or raise objections to new coal export facilities. With six new coal export terminals proposed that would ship 150 million tons of coal per year to Asia, these hard-working activists have been sounding the alarm all along the train routes – from points east, to Spokane, through the Columbia River Gorge; and from Portland, Oregon, to Bellingham, Washington.

This news came just as the Energy Information Administration (EIA) released its latest numbers, showing that coal generation was down to only 34% of US electricity in March – its lowest level since 1973, the first year the agency started keeping records. Meanwhile, wind increased by 28% from this time last year nationwide – Iowa is now getting 29% of its electricity from wind, and South Dakota hit 30%!

King Coal is struggling – they know Americans are fed up with their life-threatening pollution and their excessive lobbying for loopholes in our clean air and water laws. Americans wants clean energy. These winds of change are blowing not just on our coasts, but even in the heart of Appalachian coal country. Yesterday, the New York Times ran a major front page article that featured American Electric Power’s massive 800MW Big Sandy coal plant as a symbol of both coal’s decline, and the increasing pressure on ratepayers to prop up aging coal plants.

Later that same day, AEP announced it was withdrawing its plans to put a $1 billion scrubber on the Big Sandy coal plant, which would have caused local rate-payers’ bills to skyrocket. It was a stunning reversal.

Until yesterday, American Electric Power was planning to sink over a billion dollars into new scrubbers on the plant. However, AEP faced strong criticism from the local community over a 30% increase in rates that would be required to finance the upgrades. This rate increase would have taken the average energy bill for a household from around $1,500 per year to over $2,000 a year.

“I went to the hearing and listened to AEP explain their plan,” said Patty Wallace, an 82-year-old resident of Louisa, Kentucky and member of Kentuckians For The Commonwealth. “Their own presentation showed exactly why the proposal to invest more money in that old coal plant made no sense. On top of our existing bills, all of us would have to pay a billion dollars in surcharges. I said, ‘We’d be fossil fools for sure to do that.’ I’m glad to see that they are beginning to pay attention to what’s going on in the world. It’s time to invest in energy efficiency and clean energy.”

Finally, there is a new voice in that fight for clean energy this week – in Indiana, the Sierra Club’s new state Beyond Coal campaign representative, Dave Menzer, was the subject of a full-page profile in the Indianapolis Business Journal (article is behind a pay-wall). While the Journal said that coal interests in the state might see Dave as “the devil,” his vision would seem pretty reasonable to most Hoosiers, and most Americans:

“It really makes sense to put that money into something cleaner, in our view, than into something past the point of its useful life,” Menzer said.

Indeed.

At public hearings in Chicago and Washington, D.C. today, supporters, public health officials, and scientists are testifying in favor of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Carbon Pollution Standard, the first-ever limit on life-threatening carbon pollution from power plants.

Thousands of Americans have already spoken out via email in support of these standards to protect our health and clean our air, and now hundreds more will do it in person at these hearings.

This morning I spoke at the Washington, DC, hearing. I want to share that testimony with you and encourage you to follow along with the hearings online to both voice your support and to see the support from Americans nationwide.

Here’s what I said to the EPA this morning:

Good morning. My name is Mary Anne Hitt. I’m a mother, a concerned citizen, and the director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign. I live in West Virginia with my family, and because my husband is traveling on business this week, I am joined today by my two-year-old daughter, Hazel. Hopefully, her patience will match the length of my remarks this morning. We will see.

I’m here today to voice my full support for the EPA’s proposed carbon pollution standard.

A decade ago, there were over 200 proposed coal-fired power plants on the drawing board nationwide. Fast forward to today, ten years later, and only a handful of those plants have been built. Why?

Some were rejected by moms, dads, small business owners, and other local residents who feared a major new industrial polluter in their backyard would harm their children’s health, destroy their property values, and trap them in a town or neighborhood condemned to a downward spiral of pollution and poverty.

Some were rejected by governors, who wanted their states to be clean energy leaders in the 21^st century, and thought major new investments in coal would take their state in exactly the wrong direction.

Some were rejected by state regulators, who feared that ratepayers would pay dearly on their electric bills if their state became locked into high carbon energy for the next fifty plus years.

And some were rejected by financial backers, who realized that these projects were an increasingly bad bet, because they simply could not compete with the rapidly dropping prices of cleaner sources of energy.

As a result, only one new coal-fired power plant has broken ground in the US since 2008, and the permit for that project was recently struck down in a unanimous decision by the Mississippi Supreme Court.

During this same decade, in 2009, the EPA issued its finding that carbon pollution endangers public health and welfare. As I just noted, Americans of all walks of life were simultaneously reaching the same conclusion – from financiers to governors, from state regulators to local moms and dads.

In issuing this proposed carbon pollution standard, the EPA has taken an important step to safeguard our health and our families.   As I’m sure you will hear many times today, carbon pollution has been linked by scientists to increasing temperatures and increasing levels of smog, which triggers asthma attacks and other life-threatening health problems.

But carbon pollution doesn’t just threaten our children’s health today. As the main cause of climate disruption, carbon pollution casts a dark shadow over every aspect of their future, a future menaced by the threat of increasing droughts, wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, and rising sea levels, not to mention the resulting political instability around the world.

My daughter Hazel is the light of my life. She is learning to sing, she never wants to come inside, and one of her favorite things is wandering around the alleys of our small town looking for cats. She is also an 11th generation West Virginian, through her father. With our deep Appalachian roots, we understand all too well the challenges that the clean energy future poses to some parts of our country. But I believe we have the ingenuity and know-how to tackle those challenges. Here is how the largest newspaper in West Virginia, the Charleston Gazette, put it in their editorial this past Sunday:

This topic [climate change] has special resonance in West Virginia, a fossil fuel treasure trove. And what happens here has a special impact on the future of the planet. Pollution controls seeking to reduce global warming are sure to impose tighter restrictions on coal and natural gas. West Virginia’s energy should not be squandered on a shortsighted attempt to protect the status quo, or to discredit science in the public’s eyes, or to vilify the Obama administration’s very reasonable proposal that new coal-fired power plants be required to limit their greenhouse gas emissions.

The EPA’s proposed carbon pollution standard is a common-sense step towards addressing a very real threat to this nation, and to the future that my daughter, and all our children, will inherit. If anything, the EPA is arriving late in the game, following in the footsteps of community leaders, governors, state regulators, and financiers who all realized, in the past decade, that new power plants in this country must deal with their carbon pollution. I support the proposed standard, and I encourage you to finalize it with all due haste. Thank you.

As the director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, I have to do a lot of traveling, which means spending more time than I would like away from my two-year-old daughter, Hazel. Just this Wednesday, I got home from a trip to find Hazel and her dad pretty exhausted after three days without Mom. I hope that someday, she’ll understand that I had to be away sometimes because I was working hard to protect her from the pollution that is a very real threat to her future.

For Hazel, I hope when she’s my age that the air and water are clean and safe, the mountains of her home state of West Virginia are still standing, and the threat of climate disruption has passed. I think that future is within our grasp, thanks to the work we are doing to move America beyond coal.

In the past year, we celebrated a historic victory that brought us much closer to that cleaner, safer future, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued the first-ever national mercury standards for coal fired power plants. Believe it or not, while coal plants are our nation’s #1 source of mercury pollution, until this year there were no national mercury standards in place for coal plants. None at all! Coal plants could just spew 100% of their toxic mercury into the air, which then made its way into our waterways and the fish that we eat.

These protections are long overdue, and will safeguard our families. According to the EPA, every year over 300,000 babies are born exposed to high enough levels of mercury to put them at risk of developmental problems, like lowered IQ and delays in walking and talking – problems that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. Babies come into contact with this toxic mercury if their mothers eat a lot of certain species of fish, even before they become pregnant.

I was one of hundreds of thousands of moms and dads who worked hard to secure these new mercury protections, which were finalized in January. Now these safeguards are under attack, and we have to defend them.

Unfortunately, Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma is preparing to file a measure in Congress that would not only stop these mercury protections, but would also prevent the EPA from ever taking action on mercury again. Yes, you heard that right.

This Mother’s Day, my wish is that you will join me in taking action to defend these crucial mercury protections. I know all you moms and dads out there are busy, so we’ve made it simple for you - just click here to send a note to your Senator. Our kids are counting on us, so it’s time to speak up in defense of these long-overdue safeguards from toxic mercury pollution.

Thank you. And happy Mother’s Day!