Fighting Climate Change for Our Kids' Future Just Got Harder — Here's What Parents Need to Know (and Do!)

Yahoo

04-02-2025

President Trump's executive orders, 45 so far, are wide-ranging. Aimed like powerful firehoses at entire swaths of our government, communities, and culture, they are — by design — creating chaos, disruption, and destruction. Trump's environmental orders, more than a dozen to date, include these whoppers: freezing funds to states for infrastructure spending and investments in jobs in the cleaner energy sectors; repealing tailpipe pollution regulations from cars and trucks, protections that help cut deadly particulate aka soot pollution; and declaring a National Energy Emergency to make it even easier for oil and gas companies to drill, baby, drill, as Trump likes to say. Never mind the legality of any of the above, some of which are drilling holes in our Constitution. Lawyers and judges are scrambling to keep up. To be honest, so are we.
At Moms Clean Air Force, the organization that I co-founded to mobilize moms to fight climate pollution, our mission — regardless of who is in the White House — is to protect our children's health from pollution and global warming. We know that children are uniquely vulnerable to the dangers of dirty air, exposure to toxic chemicals in plastic, and extreme weather. The bodies of babies, toddlers, and teenagers are still developing. Their hormone systems are still unfolding. Their little lungs and hearts work harder than those of adults — they breathe in more air and spend more time outside. Extreme heat, infectious diseases, and endocrine disrupters are more dangerous to them. No surprise that we at Moms are attuned to changes in policy like the more than a dozen recent executive orders that will mean more pollution and more toxic chemicals in our air and in our everyday things.
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One of the Trump Executive Orders — one of the most dangerous ones, with potentially the most lasting impacts — commands the EPA to report within weeks on whether or not it is appropriate or viable for the agency to regulate greenhouse gases, the dangerous emissions that come from oil and gas production among other industries.
The Supreme Court decided years ago that greenhouse gases, such as carbon and methane, endanger us by trapping the sun's radiation in our atmosphere, warming the planet: these are called the 'endangerment findings.' Global warming is extremely harmful to all living creatures. It puts our weather on steroids, intensifying heat waves and wildfires and floods and droughts; it disrupts agriculture through changing weather patterns; it accelerates the spread of infectious diseases borne by insects that prosper in hot temps.
The people crafting these executive orders know exactly what they are doing. They're like car mechanics who get under the hood to find that one tiny wire that sparks everything. For EPA to lose the ability to fight climate emissions would be devastating; the only benefit is even more profit for the super-wealthy fossil fuel companies. But the dangers of a warming planet affect everyone. It will ultimately be more expensive to do business, more expensive to raise food, more expensive to insure homes, more expensive to get adequate healthcare, more expensive to raise families.
Without the ability to regulate emissions pollution, the U.S. has no national path forward on cutting carbon and methane pollution. That matters. We know from the history of life before the Clean Air Act that industries don't voluntarily control their pollution. Some of the biggest polluters aren't even American-owned companies; they could care less about the cascades of cancers they are triggering in communities around their toxic plants. The 85-mile stretch of Louisiana along the Mississippi River, home to more than 200 petrochemical plants, has for decades been known as cancer alley. Childhood leukemia is off the charts.
It's all terrifying, but we haven't lost hope, and neither should you. We like to tell Washington: Listen to your mothers. Here are six things you can do right now:
1. Don't Get Overwhelmed. The point of the Firehose Method of (Un)Governing is to push people so hard that we are flattened. Pick a focus. Pick your battles. You can't do everything, but that doesn't mean you can't do anything.
2. Don't Get Quiet. Speaking up and out really matters. Call your Senator, your Congressperson, your Governor. Every time they do something outrageous and destructive, every time they wimp out, phone their office and voice your displeasure. And say thank you when they show leadership too. Sign petitions. Show up to testify when it is possible.
3. Remember That Small Efforts Count. One phone call. One a month. One a week. One letter. One post on your social media feed exclaiming outrage. One light shining on one outrage. All those 'ones' add up to a bright light.
4. Stay Informed. Find the organizations and media feeds you trust. Make sure they are reliable. Read. Share. Absorb. Connect the dots.
5. Mobilize Your Community. Whether that's your church group, your musical group, your book group, your tribe of friends, being in it together helps amplify everyone's power.
6. Stay healthy. Stay safe. Stay Strong. Your children need you. Your families need you. Your friends need you. And we need you.
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