# Moms fighting for clean air and climate action with Dominique Browning

An episode of [Not a Climate Scientist](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1893397479), 29 Jul 2026, 34 min.

Audio: https://api.riverside.com/hosting-analytics/media/ef4101cea8c8c8a0be38b5971040c3ecb8bbb2c16a81bec1525786adc116a53f/eyJlcGlzb2RlSWQiOiI2MTMyZDFmYy00MzU1LTRjODEtODE4MC1hNmM1OGE0ZDk5YzYiLCJwb2RjYXN0SWQiOiI1MjZkMzc5MS0xYzVmLTQ1ODQtOTFlZi0yZTk0Mzg4ZGZkNTMiLCJhY2NvdW50SWQiOiI2OTE0ZDYxOGQzMTgxZTA5YWMwYjM3NTAiLCJwYXRoIjoibWVkaWEvY2xpcHMvNmE2OTZhMzk2YTk0ZGRjMDQxYzE5M2Y5L2hlYXRoZXItZ29sZHN0b25lcy1zdHVkaW8tY29tcG9zZXItMjAyNi03LTI5X180LTQ5LTI5Lm1wMyJ9.mp3

Dominique Browning, co-founder of Moms Clean Air Force, has a simple message for those who care for and about future generations: people get it, we have the power to make change, we just have to use it.

## Transcript

Heather Goldstone: Hi everybody, I'm Heather Goldstone, and this is Not a Climate Scientist, the podcast where we talk with everyday Americans about the very real ways climate change is showing up in our lives and livelihoods. If you listened all the way to the end of our last episode, first of all, thank you. You might be expecting a conversation today about bread and baking. We switched things up a little bit. That's going to be coming in a few episodes. But today we've got something really powerful for you. Dominique Browning has had an impressive career as a writer and an editor. She's authored multiple books and worked at publications you might have heard of, like Esquire and Newsweek. She was editor in chief of House and Garden for more than 10 years, until she wasn't. After getting laid off, she tapped into not only her skill set as a communicator. But also her experience doing a job many of us would consider our most important, being a parent. She co-founded Moms Clean Air Force to activate moms to advocate for common sense clean air and climate policy. And today, Moms Clean Air Force is more than 1.5 million caregivers strong. Dominique has some incredible perspective to offer on some of the hardest questions in this space, like, is any of it working? And is it too late? I am not going to spoil her answers. let's get into the conversation. Dominique Browning, welcome to Not a Climate Scientist.
Dominique Browning: Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be here.
Heather Goldstone: I'm really excited to have you here because I will tell you I've known about and to some extent followed mom's Clean Air Force I was, I think kind of a relatively new mom and also a relatively new climate reporter when
Dominique Browning: Hm.
Heather Goldstone: I heard about this effort which seemed fabulous. And we will get back. more to the work that your organization does, but I'm really excited to hear how this came about. Because as the title of our podcast implies, you are not a climate scientist and you were not always a climate activist or advocate. You had a career in magazine publishing, right?
Dominique Browning: Yes, I had a career as a magazine editor. And actually I was interested in climate change for a long time. And even at House and Garden, when I was running House and Garden, we had a column by Bill McKibben and Sue Halbron, his wife, about going green. And when I was at Newsweek, we covered whatever news there was in terms of what scientists were beginning to understand. But no, I never was an advocate. And when I decided to leave the magazine business, because my magazine folded under me, but magazines were folding left and right, I decided I really wanted to try to put my energy into something completely new. And I really cared about climate at the time. Failed, an utter failure that stunned everybody and sent the entire community into I would say a massive depression. yeah, yeah,
Heather Goldstone: And that was 2009, if I recall correctly.
Dominique Browning: yeah. And at the time I had started blogging. If you Heather, can you believe like blogging was a new thing?
Heather Goldstone: Actually, I can believe that because I wrote a blog in 2009, 2010, 2011 about climate change in coastal communities. And yes, it was kind of a novelty at that point.
Dominique Browning: Eric. Yes. And I'm sure I was reading you. I was writing about home and love and heartache and gardens and everything else. but I noticed that there were a lot of women online blogging and they were self-described mommy bloggers, and they had huge concern about their children's health. About air quality, about toxic chemicals, that was a big one. And I started thinking, what if we could harness all of that energy around protecting our children to a fight that clearly was not going anywhere and needed participation of regular people? So all my communications and marketing skill, all of that I could bring to bear on the climate issue. And noticing the bloggers, I thought. Mothers, that's a key. I was not a new mom, I was an old mom. and my kids were grown and out of the house, and I thought this is a way I could still take care of them. So that was that
Heather Goldstone: Hm. I love that framing.
Dominique Browning: that was the that was the birth of it, and got together with other moms who got it and they gave me the seed money to get going.
Heather Goldstone: So the origin story of Mom's Clean Air Force, as I've seen it written in a few places, is often this very condensed. Dominique ran into a career roadblock, got laid off from her magazine career, and convened conversations with women leaders in the climate space, and Clean Air Force was born. It's got to be more complicated than that.
Dominique Browning: Ha well indeed. it it was an idea, but as you know, you know, an idea is nothing without execution, right? So we started and I thought, okay, this is a simple communication problem, and we've just got to explain to people why climate change matters, how dangerous it's gonna be. I used to say I wanted to change the conversation from polar bears to people. of course now we're feeling very, very sad for. polar bears too, as well as the people,
Heather Goldstone: maybe all of the above.
Dominique Browning: all of the above, right? But people weren't and the media was not portraying and describing and reporting on this issue as right now destructive in our homes right here. that lack of urgency I think contributed to people's not feeling like they had any say over making any change.
Heather Goldstone: It's really funny that you mention that and the timing because it was in 2009 that I wrote my first story about climate change and it was about fisheries here in New England. And what really struck me was that the scientists that I spoke to said, where people have to go to catch fish has changed for over half of all species that we fish for. And I said, wait, you mean it's already changed? And they said, yeah. And that was my wake up moment of, this isn't a future. It's a now problem and to your point, it's in our homes and our backyards and our wallets and all of those sorts of things. So it seems like something was going on around that time, that 2009, 2010 kind of timeframe of more people. Obviously there are people who had been working on this for decades already, but a broader kind of awakening to the fact that this was here and now.
Dominique Browning: Yeah, that's fascinating. And of course, the fish populations are still moving further and further away. And it's having a devastating impact on a big part of the coastal and economy. I live in Rhode Island on the coast. these are these are Situations that we notice every single day and still and even now people don't completely connect the dots. And here we are in a massive heat wave. And are people understanding that this is happening because of climate change? But anyway, yes, the yeah.
Heather Goldstone: Well, and even if they understand that it's happening because of climate change, I read recently that most people dramatically underestimate the risk of heat. We tend
Dominique Browning: Yes.
Heather Goldstone: to think it's kind of hot and it's uncomfortable when in fact that extreme heat is the deadliest climate impact at this point. And so we haven't connected those dots fully. And I'm curious, because I think where you were going was that you started out on this project with an idea that this was just about clearer communication of facts and kind of education, getting information out there. Where are you now on that? Is that actually what's needed?
Dominique Browning: That's yeah. yes, actually we still do need that. and we need that quite desperately because as you say, people aren't understanding yet how grave the dangers are. but apart from connecting the dots, the the the other thing that people really need to understand more is that we have power, but we have to use it. And we can demand laws. We can demand that EPA not be doing what it's doing. It's tough. but so as as you were asking me before, so we got started, and lo and behold, there was nothing to work on in terms of climate because after that bill failed, it was a third rail for politicians. said, and I was dumbfounded. I'm like, okay, what are we gonna do? And then Someone mentioned to me that there was a huge battle going on with EPA, hard to believe, except it's happening again, about mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants. And people wanted to control those emissions because mercury is a potent neurotoxin that harms the developing fetal brain. But other people in the industry, especially the coal and fossil fuel industry, wanted no regulations or fewer regulations. So I decided that we would dive into that for two reasons. one, actually, if you shut down the most polluting, rackety, filthy coal plants, you have an enormous impact on climate emissions. But two, I remember being pregnant, being called don't eat fatty fish, and I never knew that it was because of emissions from coal-fired power plants you don't tend to connect air and water and food and of course our bodies. So that turned out to be a really a brutal fight, but a really interesting, interesting one. And the good news is we did get stronger restrictions and they did start cleaning up mercury pollutions, but it also made me realize that EPA could be a force for good in the climate fight as well as legislation.
Heather Goldstone: say more about brutal and interesting. What was that campaign like?
Dominique Browning: It's shocking to think that anybody would want to protect the right to poison a baby's brain. When you stop and think about it, it's horrifying that there are people who actually think that is okay because they can save a few dollars and not buy US-made pollution control filters. That's all it's that simple. So That's brutal. It was brutal to see how people lied and denied about what was going on. Brutal to see people immediately blaming it on China. Okay, yes, other coal plants contribute, but our own waterways are polluted. And the air doesn't stop at borders, right? The air is the first immigrant. And so It it's kind of r it's a real wake-up call to to see the reality of what we're dealing with. and the science is always interesting to me, the medical science and in mercury space, doctors are learning and researchers are learning more and more and more about how neurotoxins work, We used to think of the blood brain barrier and the placental barrier as barriers. They are not, they are permeable. They are not impermeable. Things get through. And so the idea that your baby would be fine because your body would block it completely wrong. So the science evolves every year. And then the other fascinating thing is the politics of it all. And I naively thought, okay, you know, strange bad fellows, but this is harming the fetal brain. Why don't I call people who are running anti-abortion organizations to see if they will join the fight in protecting fetal health? That makes sense. Almost none of them would speak to me about this, but one Reverend Hitchcock jumped in and rallied members of his faith to support these protections. And so that that was also fascinating. And you know, so what you have to do to get things done.
Heather Goldstone: It's interesting to me, I mean, with the name clean air force. I think the history of when we say clean air, what we mean by that, has tended to be more things like mercury or particulates, what we have traditionally considered to be air pollution. There's now actually science that says when we refer to greenhouse gases, the carbon dioxide and the other gases that actually warm our planet and cause climate change when we refer to those as pollution as opposed to greenhouse gases or those sorts of things, that that resonates with people in a different way. And we've seen at the federal level a political fight very recently about whether these climate warming gases count as air pollution. Was that always in your mind? Just a settled yes, of course, this is all part and parcel of clean air and air pollution. Are these gases that cause climate change?
Dominique Browning: Well, as you'd say, I'm not a climate scientist. And so as I started
Heather Goldstone: you
Dominique Browning: thinking about how do we talk about this, I thought nobody talks about emissions. I mean, maybe car emissions, but nobody talks about emissions. What we talk about is pollution. Why isn't this pollution? It is disturbing the natural balance of our atmospheric quilt, so to speak. And so I started talking about climate pollution. I got so many emails and notes from climate scientists who said, What are you doing? You can't do this. You can't talk about it this way. They're emissions, they're not pollution. And I would say, Yes, I understand that. But people don't understand emissions, and everybody understands pollution. I'm a generation that grew up. I saw those images of the Cuyahoga River on fire, right? And we saw that so. Pollution and fighting pollution and our right to clean air is very generationally deeply ingrained. Maybe younger people sort of take it more for granted. But I I thought that would resonate. I just went ahead and did it anyway, even though I know I was causing a lot of my colleagues to wince, but I think that it was the right call. I mean I we have to speak English, but people understand. I have profound admiration for expertise and I understand jargon and shorthand, but that's not the way you reach outside of your bubble.
Heather: when I first encountered the idea of moms clean air force of really targeting mothers to be advocates on the environment. I think what really resonated for me was that I had cared about the environment for a long time. And even if it was a future problem or I thought it was a future problem, I still thought it was an important problem. And then I had my first child. And suddenly the future was really, really tangible in a way that it just had not been before. And so even if something were a future problem, It felt very present for me in a way that it had never felt before in my life. And I'm curious if that's something that you hear from moms when you do reach out to them.
Dominique Browning: That is so moving. I feel the same way as a grandmother. You know, I cared as a mother. It wasn't the same as thinking about my 10-year-old grandson, what age he will be in what year, and what is the planet going to look like? What kind of disruption? Will he be living with and and what kinds of unbelievable technologies might fix it? So I definitely hear that you know just across the board from mothers of all ages say I think there's a real moral imperative, bring a person into the world, and you don't want to make the world worse for them. We do a lot of work on toxic chemicals. Partly there's a huge air pollution problem with the creation of these toxic chemicals, but also just because so many of these pollutants are toxic. that's something that parents really respond to as well. I think partly because you feel like you should have some control over what you're bringing into the house. And so therefore you feel an immediate ability to do something about toxic chemicals. Although it's again shocking how much stuff is hidden away in our stuff that we don't know about. But yes, I feel like love is a powerful motivator for change. And the love we have for our children is kind of the ultimate renewable fuel, right? It is the energy that will keep
Heather: Hahaha
Dominique Browning: us going now. I also have children who, when I start talking about this, do that whole like, you know, there's Debbie Downer. Yeah.
Heather: Okay, I'm not the only one.
Dominique Browning: Right, right. But, you know, that's actually a good discipline for me to think about, okay, how to focus on solutions instead of just the problem.
Heather: Well, yeah, and you mentioned, right, how much the world will change potentially in a negative way, but also how much the solutions might change. So getting both of those perspectives in there. Do you feel like the toxic chemicals, those more tangible and immediate, what you're bringing into the house sorts of issues and information are maybe a little bit of a side door in to talk with people about this less tangible, bigger, more amorphous problem of climate change.
Dominique Browning: Yes, definitely. I think it just the the wake-up call that we have to protect ourselves because our government is not doing it, and neither is our EPA, in particular now. and so we have to be aware that we can't just take for granted. I mean, I always thought climate change is such a huge problem. The government will take care of it, you know, people will take care of it. It just seems irrational. not to. Not not gonna happen unless we demand that it happen, unless we boycott, unless we name names, you know, that kind of thing. So
Heather: curious what kind of asks you make of your 1.5 million followers or members, because as we've talked about, moms potentially have more motivation than anyone to act on this issue. Moms in this country in this day and age are also often stretched really thin. So what feels like a realistic and meaningful thing to ask of moms to get engaged in these issues.
Dominique Browning: Yes, you're absolutely right. and so we talk about nap time activism, something that you can
Heather: Hahaha
Dominique Browning: do in one minute, and that is sign a petition or sign a letter to a senator, to your governor, to the EPA. These things matter, they get put into the public record. It makes a difference if a hundred people sign or a hundred thousand people sign and We've done all the work we've written with really simply pressing a button. And that is the easiest way to engage and the fastest way to engage. And I understand people are incredibly busy. Out of that, there are people who, when time opens up, want to do more. And I've hired people who were members who just said, Wow, this is really interesting. What can I do? And You know, making a phone call to your legislator's office is a bit more time consuming, but incredibly important. It's important for them to hear from us that we care and that we're holding them accountable. so more personal touches, phone calls, handwritten letters. Those kinds of things. And then showing up at events. So if you happen to be lucky enough to have a governor who is doing the right thing on climate, show up and say thank you. That makes a huge difference. If you have somebody who is being irresponsible, show up and say, How dare you? so you know, all All of these touches matter.
Heather: I just ask you, guess bluntly, do you feel like it's working?
Dominique Browning: I definitely feel like it's working. I definitely feel and I'll tell you why. I do feel like we've changed the conversation I do think people understand, all kinds of people understand, people conservative, people radical understand something is happening that we are doing that is creating chaos. And if you're not feeling it as a farmer, you're feeling it as somebody who can't get insurance or somebody who has a child who collapses of heat on a playing field. So people people get it and they understand why it's happening. The reason we have an administration now that is so destructive is that we actually made a huge amount of progress. EPA made progress before. a lot of the programs that the Biden administration and that legislators authorized by law, those things matter. People, solar panels started popping up on people's roofs all over the place, even with Trump signs in the front yard and solar panels on the that's fantastic. And that tells me that people are getting it, that they need that they want to do something to change. So I I feel like Yes, it's making a difference, but you know, we need a hundred of these organizations, and we need not to get distracted. I mean, also you look at where the renewable energy sector is going, look at Texas as the largest, one of the largest suppliers of wind energy, and they're certainly not your climate forward state. So I think. People get it. There are markets for technology that will be cleaner. The battery market is gung gangbusters and changing. So the technology and the investment in technology is also giving me a huge amount of hope and a huge amount of feeling that lot, yes, and not just moms, we as a community of climate advocates have made a difference. We have.
Heather: What is the biggest success that you've seen in the past 15 years?
Dominique Browning: That's a that's a hard question. I'll tell you one that's not a success yet, but that I have huge
Heather: Okay.
Dominique Browning: hopes for. We started working on methane, natural gas, as they call it, right? Gas pollution. And along with methane leaking out of the ground and leaking out of every phase of development, come a lot of volatile organic compounds that are very dangerous for people's health. So we started working on that a good 12, 13 years ago. Methane is an even more potent forcer of climate change, right? If we could get methane emissions under control, which in many ways is as simple as a wrench tightening things, shutting down things that are leaking. Plugging wells that have been abandoned all over the country, thousands of wells that are just spewing methane into the atmosphere, finding them and plugging them, as the governor is doing in Pennsylvania and as needs to be done in New Mexico and Texas and elsewhere. If we can get methane under control, that will buy us some time. And that would be a huge success.
Heather: curious how often you get asked if it's too late and what you say in response to that question.
Dominique Browning: I get asked that all the time. And I asked as you were starting to write about climate, one of the things I did was I I got an assignment from Environmental Defense Fund to write about what they do. So I went around and interviewed a lot of different people. And one of the people I had a great excuse to interview was Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, who's a climate scientist. And An amazing person, and I said to him 15 years ago, do you think it's too late? And he was very quiet for a minute, and then he said, You know, I grew up thinking we were going to be obliterated by a nuclear bomb, and it hasn't happened yet. He said to Think that it is too late is actually the height of arrogance and an excuse to do nothing. Because we do not know what is going to solve this ultimately. We don't know what's in the future. Something might be developed, something might happen. There might be an enormous sea change in our attitudes. It's too late to pull back. The damage that's already been done, it's too late in the sense that there is a lot of change baked in, right? So no matter what we do, but no matter what we do, there is going to be continued chaos. And we will look back on this summer as a cool summer. So it's too late in that way, but in the ultimate way, I don't think it is too late. It's never too late.
Heather: I'm gonna guess that you get this next question a lot as well. And that's how do you advise moms and parents in talking to their kids about this? And I'll use the word kids loosely because that can span a whole lot of ages as you were just alluding to a few minutes ago.
Dominique Browning: Yeah. And and it's a really difficult thing to talk about a problem that is serious and life threatening and then to have children ask, well, why aren't we fixing it? So you know, depending on a the age of your child, B, the temperament of your child, C their level of anxiety already, whatever. everybody has to make a decision. But I think what all children naturally love is to understand nature and how the world works. And I think just explaining, I mean kids understand dirty and clean. Right. They understand. I mean little kids love to talk about farting. There's an emission for you.
Heather: you
Dominique Browning: Right? So there's so many wa
Heather: for sure.
Dominique Browning: there are so many ways to talk about what we do to the air, what we put into the air, how we can try to make things better without getting cataclysmic and the world is ending about it. We need more engineers in this country. We need more people focused on systems change. We need leadership. so all the ways that we can talk to children to tell them what you can do to help solve this, I think that all of those things are useful.
Heather: You said a few minutes ago, you feel like the work that you've been doing over the past 15 years has made a difference and it is working. But I think you started to say, we need, you know, a hundred times more. Are there things that you've learned from the work of building and leading Moms Clean Air Force that you think the rest of the climate advocacy community could? learn from or utilize to grow the movement and also to be more effective.
Dominique Browning: Well, I think we could never underestimate the depths of evil that we are facing. and it's good to be aware of that. I think it's really important to stay focused. That's super important. I've also learned that. What really matters is showing up day after day after day, month after month, year after year. A lot of this work is tedious. It's tedious to deal with EPA regulations and to get them to change, but it's necessary. And I also think it's important not to get Howed by people who say, you know, the polls show that people don't care about climate. That's completely untrue. They do care. But like everybody, we care more about like I've got to get food on the table, I've got to pay my bills, I've got to make sure my kids are safe. Of course. But people do care. We should be saying, yeah, we are the people who care about your children's safety and their futures. the affordability of electricity and the prices we pay. And so we're gonna do more of that. So I think focusing conversations on what's happening right now, where people are, where their heads are, what they care about, I think that that's a good lesson too. And just not letting up the pressure.
Heather: You seem incredibly energetic, optimistic, and that can be hard to come by. What keeps you energized and optimistic?
Dominique Browning: I am not normally an optimistic person and energy, okay, I like coffee. But I think this is maybe a question of age, but I've come to realize that a lot of these things are just a decision. And making a decision that I am going to be hopeful, that I am going to be focused on trying to make things better because There isn't really for me a choice. The alternative is paralysis or denial, and hoping things go away. so it really helps to look at what we've come to, you know, where how far things have gone, how how much better things are, as well as how much worse things are. So
Heather: Dominique Browning, I want to thank you for the work that you do, for giving moms and parents a way to channel their concern to make positive change and for sharing your energy and your optimism with us today.
Dominique Browning: Thank you so much, Heather. And thank you for keeping on talking about this and reporting on this. It's just incredibly important for people to understand.
Heather Goldstone: Not a Climate Scientist is a podcast from Woodwell Climate Research Center. If you like what you're seeing or hearing, please let us know. Rate this podcast and leave us a comment. Then head over to our website to sign up for emails. We'll let you know when new episodes are out, plus share links to more information on things we mention in our conversations. And thanks for being part of the Not a Climate Scientist community.

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