Testimony of Molly Rauch, MPH 

Public Health Policy and Outreach Manager, Moms Clean ,Air Force 

Environmental Protection Agency's Proposed Carbon Pollution Standard for New Power Plants 

Docket ID Number EPA-HQ-OAR-2011-0660; FRL RIN 2060-AQ91 

February 6, 2014 

Washington, DC 

Good morning, I'm Molly Rauch. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak with you today in 

support of EPA's proposed carbon rules. I am speaking as a representative of Moms Clean Air 

Force, an organization of more than 200,000 moms and dads. I am also speaking as a mother 

myself. My three children are the most important reason that I am here today, because their lives 

will be directly affected by the choices we make about whether and how much to limit the 

dangerous carbon pollution that is altering our climate. 

I was here a year and a half ago when you held a hearing on the prior version of this standard. I'm 

here again today. I'll keep coming back, until this work of limiting carbon pollution from power 

plants is done and done right. Each time 1 come back, I'll be recruiting more concemed moms and 

dads, because we are true stakeholders in this process. 

Carbon pollution is disrupting our planet's climate, causing temperatures to rise. These rising 

temperatures increase ground-level ozone. Climate change is also predicted to increase the levels of 

dangerous particle pollution in areas with already-high levels of the tiny particles, such as most 

major cities. So with climate change, we get increases in temperatures, increases in ozone, and 

increases in particle pollution, at least in some places. These three factors contribute to asthma 

attacks, heart attacks, heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, premature death, emergency room visits, 

hospital admissions, low birth weight, premature birth, diabetes, pneumonia, even autism. Many of 

these problems harm our children in particular. We at Moms Clean Air Force think that's 

unacceptable. 

Carbon pollution, in other words, is not healthy for children and other living things. 

Our electric utilities claim that they need the flexibility to give us cheap electricity. But what they 

call "cheap" could not be more expensive: a future of ill health created by us, to be endured by our 

cliildren. 

My kids are all in elementary school now, but I want to share something that happened to me when 

my children were babies, and I am sure it happens to most parents. Until I had children I was a 

very heavy sleeper, and could sleep through anything. But after I became a mom, it was as if my 

hearing beca,me more sensitive. 

If I heard my baby's little voice calling out in the night, I would find myself out of bed and halfway 

down the hall before she had even stopped to take a breath. I could hear her on a cellular level, in a 

different way than 1 had heard anything else before. 

Her cry wasn't just a baby crying. It was my wake-up call of a deeper sort: You are now my mother, I 

heard her saying in that little cry. You will hear everything differently now. 
And I do. I hear everything differently now. 

A colleague of mine calls it "mother love." lt's the jolt that makes us junip out of bed at night and 

go to our babies. My cotnnients today are fueled by that same jolt of adrenaline. There are currently 

no limits on the carbon emissions froni power plants - that fact is like the baby crying in the night. 

lt's a signal that my children's future is on the line. 

I want to end with a point I made a year and a half ago: Moms have a lot of experience cleaning up 

messes. We know that most children won't clean up their rooms, or clear the dishes, or hang up 

their coats, on their own. Our power plants are no different. The carbon emissions that come from 

this sector are making a mess of our climate, and it's up to us, all of us, together, to make sure it 

stops. Our children deserve a well-regulated electric power industry that produces electricity from 

clean sources, without causing asthma and other grave health effects of global warming. It's EPA's 

job to set the rules that will give us the power industry all Americans - and especially our children - 

deserve.