As the director of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign, I have to do a lot of traveling, which means spending more time than I would like away from my two-year-old daughter, Hazel. Just this Wednesday, I got home from a trip to find Hazel and her dad pretty exhausted after three days without Mom. I hope that someday, she'll understand that I had to be away sometimes because I was working hard to protect her from the pollution that is a very real threat to her future.

For Hazel, I hope when she's my age that the air and water are clean and safe, the mountains of her home state of West Virginia are still standing, and the threat of climate disruption has passed. I think that future is within our grasp, thanks to the work we are doing to move America beyond coal.

In the past year, we celebrated a historic victory that brought us much closer to that cleaner, safer future, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued the first-ever national mercury standards for coal fired power plants. Believe it or not, while coal plants are our nation's #1 source of mercury pollution, until this year ...

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Compass is a Sierra Club Blog, " Pointing the way to a clean energy future."