Editor's Note: The following blog item, written by Earthjustice "Clean Air Ambassador" Alexandra Allred, first appeared on The White House blog. Allred's 11-year old sonTommy suffers from chronic asthma. Allred journeyed to Washington, D.C. earlier this month to advocate, for keeping and strengthening clean air protections, in the halls of Congress and to the Obama administration.

Early in his term, President Obama's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized an important health-protective standard that cleans up the smokestacks of cement plants, among other things, to better protect my son! This is very important to us as we live in Midlothian, Texas, the "Cement Capital of Texas," where three cement plants spew dangerous pollutants that can trigger asthma attacks, cause neurological damage, destroy organs, damage the nervous system and much more. 

If you read my son Tommy's book, How I Met the President, you will learn that he developed chronic asthma from breathing toxins in the air from our local cement plants, and as a result, met the President. While our experiences did not unfold that simply, as Tommy likes to say, "That was how we met President Obama!"

Jamestown, VA is a fixture of American history. Founded more than 400 years ago, it was the first permanent English settlement in what became the United States. Today, not far from there, The Old Dominion Electric Cooperative is looking to make history of a different kind. It wants to build what would be the largest coal-fired power plant in all of Virginia. But if built, something new will settle in the region: a large cloud of harmful air pollution.

And indeed, a report released today by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation shows that if this chapter of history is written, it will have a profound and negative impact on the region's future. Pollution from the plant will lead to dozens of deaths, hundreds of asthma attacks and more than $200 million in regional health care costs every year. Moreover, the Chesapeake Bay, a suffering icon of the eastern seaboard, would be further polluted with mercury as well as nitrogen oxides.

The story in Virginia told by the CBF is a microcosm of the rest of the country, where coal plant pollution is claiming lives, polluting waters and costing the public billions of dollars. The Environmental Protection Agency is holding its first public hearings tomorrow, in Philadelphia and Chicago, on a recent proposal to cut toxic air pollution from the nation's coal-fired power plants.

Shame on the Environmental Protection Agency. Yesterday afternoon, the agency decided that it would postpone indefinitely a new health standard finalized a few months ago that would reduce toxic air pollution from industrial boilers. These small power plants are used at larger industrial facilities like oil refineries and chemical plants—more than 13,000 of them are in operation across the country. In the aggregate, they are among the worst emitters of mercury, chromium, lead, arsenic, dioxins and other hazardous air pollutants.

But rather than clean up their pollution, the EPA decided instead to cave to the polluters and some members of Congress who began ramping up the pressure during the mid-term elections. According to the Los Angeles Times, “Since December, the administration has slowed review and implementations of several closely watched regulations, including two affecting the powerful coal industry: ash disposal and mountaintop-removal mining.”

It seems to be politics as usual with this EPA. According to the agency’s own assessment, the projected pollution cuts from industrial boilers would have saved up to 6,500 lives every year, and outweighed the costs to industry by $22 billion to $54 billion annually. But the delay in implementing these pollution cuts will now cost 6,500 lives, 4,000 non-fatal heart attacks and 4,300 hospital and emergency room visits for every year that we wait.

The Bieber model of Puff-Puff inhalers.

Coal cares. It really does. So we're told, at least, by a new website that offers free inhalers to asthmatic youngsters. The Puff-Puff inhalers come adorned with all sorts of kiddie icons: Elmo, Dora the Explorer and a little old heartthrob by the name of Justin Bieber, who takes breath away in a different way. The inhalers are meant to help "American youngsters with asthma…to keep their heads high in the face of those who would treat them with less than full dignity."

It wasn't until after I'd finished the Asthmaze (which you can struggle through in the Kidz Koal Korner) that I was struck by a suspicion that the website is a parody. Actually, I'd also already colored in the Puff and Ash dress-up cartoon before the realization hit, but I love playing with crayons.

And indeed, soon after I set the crayons down, a statement from Peabody Energy, the target of the parody website, hit my inbox.