Climate Action
Smoke on the Hill: Saving Climate Protections
September 24, 2025
As world leaders gather in New York for Climate Week, the urgency of their task has never been greater. This year’s summit arrives on the heels of the third-hottest summer ever recorded in the northern hemisphere (surpassed only by 2023 and 2024) and a season defined by extreme weather disasters that made the climate crisis impossible to ignore.
The Palisades Fire tore through Los Angeles, leveling homes in affluent communities where the impacts of climate change had typically felt more abstract and remote. More people died from wildfire smoke in the US last year than from car crashes. Across the country, unprecedented flooding devastated towns from Asheville, North Carolina, where entire communities lost their homes and businesses, to Camp Mystic in Hunt, Texas, where 20 young campers and seven adults tragically perished.
We refuse to allow corporations to speak louder than our kids and our neighbors. We’re seeing industry profits rise while communities burn down. And we’ll keep speaking out. We’ll keep standing up to what we know is wrong, because too many lives and future generations depend on it.
Senator Alex Padilla, California
Despite mounting human suffering and the nation’s top scientists sounding the alarm on the health impacts of climate change with new studies, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin, is now moving to dismantle the very foundation of U.S. climate policy. He proposes eliminating the EPA’s Endangerment Finding — a cornerstone ruling that recognizes greenhouse gases as a threat to public health and gives the agency the authority to limit pollution from vehicles and power plants. Zeldin’s move flies in the face of science, law, and basic morality
United in Action
This is why EARTHDAY.ORG joined with the Climate Action Campaign (CAC), and dozens of allied organizations to deliver over 225,000 public comments to the EPA, in person, urging them to uphold the Endangerment Finding. On September 17, we gathered at the U.S. Capitol for a press conference that underscored just how high the stakes are.
This administration’s position on climate change – denying that it is happening – is not only a minority position, it is blatantly false. The science is unequivocal: Our climate is in crisis. A majority of Americans want protection from climate pollution’s dangerous and deadly impacts. Members of Congress, climate leaders, and young people, who stand to lose the most from this administration’s policy of climate denial, know they deserve better.
Margie Alt, Climate Action Campaign
In a room filled with journalists and climate advocates, eight members of Congress—from Maine to Texas—spoke candidly about how climate change is already harming Americans of every background, through rising seas, collapsing fisheries, emerging diseases, and worsening wildfires.
Senator Ed Markey, of Massachusetts, warned that repealing the Endangerment Finding would eliminate regulations that “will kill jobs, cause families to shell out more for gasoline, and hurt our kids with asthma attacks.”
Representative Chellie Pingree, of Maine, spoke to the collapse of her state’s fishing economy and the spread of climate-driven diseases: “It impacts our lives every single day. It’s impacting our economy and our livelihood.”
Rejecting the influence of corporate profiteers, Senator Alex Padilla, of California, reaffirmed his commitment to constituents: “We refuse to allow corporations to speak louder than our kids and our neighbors. We’re seeing industry profits rise while communities burn down. And we’ll keep speaking out. We’ll keep standing up to what we know is wrong, because too many lives and future generations depend on it.“
Together, we stood up and spoke out this week against Trump and Zeldin’s plan to strip the EPA of its responsibility to protect the public from the dangers of climate pollution while hundreds of thousands of public comments were submitted during a short and rushed public comment period opposing the rollbacks. With climate-fueled extreme weather getting more frequent and more deadly, we refuse to back down from this fight.
Margie Alt, Climate Action Campaign
The most powerful testimony, however, came from children. One girl declared, “Kids want the EPA to protect our health and future. Our generation is expected to live through three times as many climate disasters as our grandparents, and we’re already living through them.”
An impassioned boy pleaded, “To every adult listening today who cares about children now and our lives in the future, we are asking you to please protect the Endangerment Finding and our future.” Their words were a reminder that climate change is not an abstract threat. It is impacting the lives of real people, in real time.
These kids deserve better than what this dangerous administration is doing to them and their future. We all deserve better.
Senator Ed Markey, Massachusetts
Delivering Public Outcry
After the press conference, we carried box after box of public comments to the EPA headquarters. Though the agency has recently weakened many avenues for public input, we refuse to let these voices go unheard, even if we have to deliver their comments by hand.
As we set the boxes down in the EPA’s lobby, recently adorned with an austere presidential portrait, it was a good moment to reflect on everything we had heard at the Capitol from both seasoned elected leaders and young activists alike. Every person who spoke did so because they or their communities had already suffered loss because of climate change. Their message was clear: denying the causes, reality and dangers of climate change is not just a policy failure, it is an act of harm that results in destroyed homes, lost livelihoods, and shattered futures. If the Endangerment Finding is repealed, lives will be lost.
All of this unfolds on the eve of Climate Week NYC, beginning September 21. These global summits have often been criticized as inaccessible and toothless, more about speeches than solutions. But with the Endangerment Finding under direct attack, it is no longer enough for leaders to merely acknowledge the climate crisis.
The EPA is doing everything it can to deny the terrible costs of climate change, and we need the participants of Climate Week to help set the record straight. They must speak up and act, and they must do so with the same urgency that millions of families already feel in their lungs, their wallets, and their communities.
Want to make a difference? On a related issue, you can speak out by writing to strongly oppose Section 453 of the Interior Appropriations Bill, which would grant pesticide manufacturers broad legal immunity, even when their products cause harm.
