Breathing clean air is a human right.
Dangerous ozone levels in Las Vegas. Wintertime inversions in Salt Lake City. Summertime smog in Denver and Salt Lake City. Choking smoke due to more frequent and more intense wildfires. A growing generation of Westerners suffering with asthma and health issues.
Living in the Interior West has, sadly, come to mean living with air and climate pollution that threatens our health, our economy, and our environment. Emissions from power plants, mines, refineries, gas-powered vehicles, homes, and other sources don’t just contribute to climate change, they threaten public health. They cause early death, asthma, cancer, heart attacks, birth defects, and Alzheimer’s disease, among other adverse health impacts.
One particularly concerning contaminant in our region is fine particulate matter or PM2.5. Communities across the West – including in Adams, Weld, and Denver counties in Colorado and Maricopa and Pinal counties in Arizona – breathe in dangerous levels of this pollutant, putting them at risk of premature death and disease. To ensure cities and towns can thrive, we must clean up our air. At WRA, we believe that breathing clean air is a basic human right and that there’s no time to waste.
What can you do?
Right now, legislative sessions are starting across the West. They offer a chance to slash climate pollution and clean our air.
Here at WRA, we’ll be working to advance legislation to make communities healthier by cleaning up our air. One of our priority bills is the Medium and Heavy-Duty Vehicle bill in Nevada.
This bill would create an incentive program that will be structured to prioritize deploying electric trucks for groups that need them most: small businesses, public transit agencies, and school districts. These entities would greatly benefit from the operational cost savings of electric trucks and buses, but higher upfront purchasing costs are a barrier. This incentive program will lower the barrier of entry to electrification for Nevada’s small businesses and bus operators and help them realize the economic and public health benefits that electric trucks and buses offer.
