At the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s listening session regarding carbon pollution controls from existing power plants, I put myself in EPA’s shoes and did some real listening. It turns out the list of what may be lost and what must be protected by such a rule is not as short as we sometimes make it in the name of expediency.

Hundreds of people spoke in Washington, D.C., and thousands have spoken at the 10 other listening sessions the EPA is conducting across the country. Below are just 55 reasons*—one for every state and territory in our nation—for the EPA to take bold strides when it comes to limiting carbon pollution:

1. Protect our children and future generations
2. Protect the hungry and the homeless
3. Be good global neighbors
4. Save honeybees
5. Protect plant and animal life
6. Relieve those with asthma and other lung diseases
7. Make the moral and ethical choice
8. Pay our debt to coal miners and coal mining communities
9. Save mountaintops
10. Reduce coal-related illnesses
11. Empower those who disproportionately suffer from direct impacts of pollution
12. Provide justice for communities of color
13. Provide justice for the economically and socially disadvantaged
14. Help those without access to adequate healthcare
15. Address the costs of inaction
16. Reduce the cost of extreme weather, drought, wildfire and infestation
17. Embolden states like California that have taken action
18. Protect forests
19. Help those who live wherever coal is burned
20. Watch out for Charlie, and other brothers and sisters in the Arctic
21. Give relief to Pittsburgh asthmatics
22. Help rural communities
23. Lookout for Lucy and Liddy [sic]
24. Provide justice for Latinos and other minorities
25. Spare those in the path of storms like el derecho
26. Make amends with those who have little to do with creating the problem
27. Provide for Katie and Brendan and their future children so they might enjoy hiking at Great Falls, VA, someday
28. Relieve suffering for kids who breathe smog
29. Spare Norfolk, VA, from flooding
30. Spare those who cannot protect themselves from polluters/pollution
31. Keep the Unitarian Church school from flooding
32. Return the ice, skating and Jeep rides to the lake in Wisconsin
33. Look out for Brooklyn, NY, and NJ
34. Spare the 1,700 places in the U.S. at risk due to sea level rise
35. Avoid the tragedy of the commons (the air)
36. Learn to provide power [energy] without the human cost
37. Eliminate the externalities from which polluters profit
38. Empower the Environmental Protection Agency
39. Protect those from whom we borrow the Earth
40. Help a friend from Chesapeake with asthma
41. Keep 7 million kids in the U.S. with asthma from getting sicker
42. Embolden Mom’s Clean Air Force and protect the kids for whom they advocate
43. Erase Washington, D.C.’s failing ozone score
44. Reduce global food security threats
45. Provide justice for those without a voice in this decision
46. Save $1,100 per taxpayer on climate-related disasters
47. Answer more than 3.2 million comments in favor of a carbon pollution standard
48. Minimize the risks from severe weather events like microbursts
49. Reduce the greatest threat ever to humanity
50. Meet our obligation to future generations
51. Recover lost cultures and species that may otherwise be lost
52. Respond to the scientific imperative
53. Employ renewable energy
54. Provide justice for a 73-year-old woman from Virginia with asthma who has been choking on lies, greed and pollution from a power plant 2 miles from her home
55. Prevent the early loss of loved ones

* In the order in which they were presented at the listening session held Thursday, Nov. 7 at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C.