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The latest on the Key Bridge collapse, New York puts forth legislation to get clean energy projects on the grid and Wisconsin and other states join a federal summer food program to help feed kids across the country.

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Republicans float conspiracy theories on the collapse of Baltimore's Key Bridge, South Carolina's congressional elections will use a map ruled unconstitutional, and the Senate schedules an impeachment trial for Homeland Secretary Mayorkas.

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Historic wildfires could create housing and health issues for rural Texans, a Kentucky program helps prison parolees start a new life, and descendants of Nicodemus, Kansas celebrate the Black settlers who journeyed across the 1870s plains seeking self-governance.

Clean Power Plan Rollback Has Health Consequences

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Wednesday, October 11, 2017   

RICHMOND, Va. - Doctors are warning that the Trump administration's intent to roll back the Clean Power Plan will mean more respiratory illness, especially in vulnerable neighborhoods.

In a long-expected move pushed by the coal industry, Environmental Protection Agency director Scott Pruitt announced plans to end Obama-era rules limiting carbon pollution from power plants. However, according to federal projections, by 2030 the Clean Power Plan would prevent 90,000 asthma attacks and 3,600 premature deaths a year.

Dr. Elena Rios, president and chief executive of the National Hispanic Medical Association, said poor and minority communities are being hit the hardest.

"The children's data has definitely shown that, in those areas that have more carbon pollution, young people in our communities are really disabled," she said, "and our families are spending much more time and money and effort on asthma than ever before."

Pruitt has predicted that ending the Clean Power Plan would be good for mining communities and will mean the so-called "war on coal" is over. However, Rios said the real war is on poor kids' health, since coal-burning power plants most often put soot into the air in poor white and minority communities. Even if we ignore the issue of climate change and the extreme weather it causes, she said, cutting power-plant emissions would have total health benefits of $14 billion to $34 billion. The EPA itself had estimated those health benefits at $54 billion annually.

"The government's number one responsibility from a public-health perspective is to help all people," Rios said, "and that's why we think President Trump and his administration really should not go backwards in cutting back on environmental health standards."

The Clean Power Plan calls for a one-third reduction in carbon pollution from 2005 levels by 2030, and the U.S. Energy Information Administration has said the power sector already is almost there. When the plan was proposed, Americans filed 8 million favorable comments - the highest number ever in support of an EPA proposal. The agency now is taking comments on the plan to reverse it.

The EPA proposal is online at epa.gov.


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