With its vast public lands, the “Dark Skies” region of north-central Pennsylvania is a destination for stargazers, night photographers, and hikers. Now the fossil fuel industry wants to build the state’s first ammonia facility there, in Karthaus Township, a $2.3 billion plant proposed by KeyState Energy. The plant would dominate this remote area, home to a small village and about 800 people in total. This pristine spot in Pennsylvania is not alone. Dozens more ammonia facilities, all of which would release hazardous air pollution, are currently being proposed across the U.S.

While mostly known for its use in household cleaners, ammonia has a number of applications and products, from shipping fuel to explosives. This new ammonia production boom is being fueled by a global demand for its use to produce fuel and fertilizer. Ramping up production of ammonia will lead to increased air pollution and climate warming as well as serious health risks for neighbors in these communities.

Tell Congress: Protect Families From the Plastics and Petrochemical Industry

What is ammonia?

Large-scale manufacturing of ammonia uses fossil gas or coal, both as a feedstock and as an energy source. Under very high temperatures and pressures, producers combine hydrogen (stripped from methane gas) with nitrogen pulled from the air. The process produces almost 2% of global carbon dioxide. Ammonia has a strong smell, and the industrial facilities that make it can cause light pollution.

Anhydrous ammonia is compressed liquid ammonia gas without water. Growers inject it into the soil as fertilizer. It is extremely toxic, irritating the eyes, skin, and lungs, and can cause chemical burns as well as frostbite, as it needs to be stored at −28°F. “It targets any wet surfaces and pulls the water out of living tissue, causing a severe chemical burn on contact,” explains Cynthia Palmer, Moms Clean Air Force’s Senior Analyst on Petrochemicals.

Ammonium nitrate is another form. This solid or liquid fertilizer carries a major explosion risk.

Ammonia facilities also emit nitrogen oxides, formaldehyde, benzene, and PM2.5, the tiny particulate matter linked to asthma, heart disease, cancer, and neurological effects including dementia.

A tale of two facilities

The planned site in Karthaus is near farms as well as water sources for drinking and recreational purposes. “The site is three-quarters of a mile from the village, which we believe is really too close for safety,” says Rachel Meyer, Moms’ Ohio River Valley Field Organizer. Ammonia clouds caused by leaks can travel for miles depending on wind and weather. The plant would also require the construction of a new five-mile methane gas pipeline through hilly, landslide-prone territory. This gas supply is expected to last a few decades before it is depleted.

The project is in the pre-permit stage, so Rachel’s focus is on community education about the risks of an ammonia plant. “One good thing about this is that it’s in the early stages, and people are curious to find out more,” she says.

The people of Karthaus might look to their neighbors in Lima, a small city in northwest Ohio, where Nutrien operates the second-largest fossil-fuel fertilizer facility in the country, to learn how ammonia facilities can impact local communities. The Lima plant, which produces anhydrous ammonia, is situated in a petrochemical complex of several facilities, each permitted separately, and all close to historically marginalized, downwind neighborhoods. There are no air pollution monitors within three miles of the plants, so the people in nearby schools and daycare centers do not know how the facilities affect the air they—and their children—are breathing.

When the company applied to renew its permit in 2025, Cynthia joined forces with local groups and former EPA permitting experts to submit a 20-page technical comment letter demanding stronger clean air protections, with multiple community groups signing on in support. The state ultimately renewed the permit without addressing the inaccuracies, omissions, and discrepancies raised in the letter, so further public engagement will be critical. Communities have a right to speak out about facilities that could affect their health, hold decision-makers accountable, and keep pushing them to act.

When something goes wrong

Explosions and fires are a major concern at ammonia facilities. Cynthia cites a 2013 disaster at West Fertilizer Company in Texas as a cautionary tale to remember in the midst of today’s ammonia facility boom. An ammonium nitrate explosion left 15 dead, hundreds injured, and 500 buildings damaged. Four nearby schools were spared only because the incident happened in the evening. The Chemical Safety Board estimated that 10% to 40% of students and staff could have died if it had occurred during school hours. “It was just incredible luck that the schools were not in session,” she says.

In 2022, a fire at the North Carolina Winston Weaver fertilizer plant, which stores a lot of ammonium nitrate, burned for a week. The facility was in a neighborhood that was 80% people of color and 71% low-income, just one mile from Wake Forest University and near multiple daycare centers and schools. The fire engulfed the communities in toxic smoke and forced a large-scale evacuation.

What to do?

In addition to community education around the proposed Karthaus facility, Rachel and local organizers are focused on outreach to the Department of Environmental Protection, township supervisors, county commissioners, and state officials. They also connect Karthaus residents with people in Gulf South communities who have had similar facilities coming into their neighborhoods. “Ultimately, we’ll stand behind what the community wants. If the facility does move forward, then we’ll advocate for the best protections,” Rachel says. Those would include monitoring and reducing emissions and accountability in the permit itself.

Cynthia says that getting informed about ammonia is an important first step, both for anyone who learns of a plant planned in their community and those living near one already. But even finding out these facilities’ whereabouts is tricky, as there is so much secrecy. “There are nearly 14,000 facilities that store ammonium nitrate in the U.S., but community members are kept in the dark—the locations are not public.”

She’s calling for regulatory changes, especially given EPA’s exclusion of ammonium nitrate from the Risk Management Program’s chemical disaster rules and proposed federal rollback of public participation requirements for permitting. “These rule changes would make it easier for facilities to build or expand toxic and explosive ammonia facilities without health and safety protections,” Cynthia says. Coupled with the current ammonia production boom, that would increase the risk for everyone.

If an ammonia facility is being considered near you, check out our Ammonia Fact Sheet: Is Planned Ammonia Boom a Bust?

Tell Congress: Protect Families From the Plastics and Petrochemical Industry

“Memphis is a rich tapestry of American history and culture, beauty and heartbreak,” said Isabel González Whitaker, Moms’ Associate Vice President for Public Engagement, at an NYC Climate Week event yesterday at The New School. She was setting the stage for a panel discussion about the environmental impacts of AI data centers, like Elon Musk’s xAi, located a few miles from her home in Memphis. She was also following the advice of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who had been on the stage moments before encouraging the audience to make connections between climate impacts and real-life harms.

The event, titled AI, Energy, and Our Fight for Democracy and a Healthy, Affordable Future, was hosted by the Tishman Environment and Design Center, in collaboration with Climate Desk Live, Mother Jones, Capital B, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It brought together a powerhouse lineup of mayors from other cities, too, from Boston to Phoenix, community leaders advocating for clean energy and clean air, and artists and journalists using their work to make change. Over three panel conversations, event attendees covered the collision of technology, energy, and democracy, not just the explosion of AI data centers, but also the legacy of the nuclear arms race in Indigenous and other communities of color and pathways for building people power to shape real solutions.

Tell Congress: Protect Families From Dangerous Data Center Air Pollution

Isabel’s remarks, excerpted below, captured many of these themes. The xAI data center is in the majority Black Boxtown neighborhood of Memphis. It materialized virtually overnight with no community input. But since it started operations in 2024, it has faced enormous public pushback, and the community has celebrated some wins. Read on for Isabel’s story:

Now newly added to Memphis’s soulful landscape is a soulless creation of our modern day: a data center. And not just any data center, but Elon Musk’s xAI, the single largest artificial intelligence data center and supercomputer cluster in the world.

This two-gigawatt behemoth uses enough power for 1.5 million homes. It came online about two years ago, when most people didn’t know what to expect from data centers. In Memphis, many of us were cautiously curious, even naively hopeful. Look what Elon is gifting our community: Thousand of jobs! Sexy tech! The future!

But here’s what it really brought: dozens of illegal industrial-sized methane gas turbines located next to a historically marginalized neighborhood, just 10 miles from downtown Memphis. Thus far, xAI’s lasting gift to Memphis has been nitrogen oxides, formaldehyde, soot particles—not to mention the methane that’s warming our planet and turbocharging our extreme weather.

For those of us who breathe in this stew, there’s the risk of premature birth, cancer, strokes and heart attacks, and asthma—especially in the most vulnerable populations.

Curiously, my young son developed asthma as xAI started operating, and while many doctors didn’t want to make the connection between the generators and his asthma, I couldn’t help but notice we were never the only families dealing with respiratory issues when we landed in urgent care for yet another nebulizer treatment.

I approached that difficult season with the ferocity of a mama bear, fighting for my son’s health while simultaneously fighting against this conniving intruder in my backyard. Fortunately, I wasn’t alone. At Moms Clean Air Force, where I work, nearly 2 million fellow caregivers link arms fighting for policies that protect children from air pollution, climate pollution, and toxic chemicals…

And even at a moment when the administration is most unfriendly to the well-being of children, we are logging wins. Thanks to the power of organizing, mobilization, and good old civic engagement, Moms are stopping data centers in Wisconsin, shutting down “advanced recycling” plastics burning plants in Ohio, ensuring the strongest methane regulations in New Mexico, and plugging the 400th leaking gas well in Pennsylvania.

And in Memphis? Thanks to broad collective effort, xAI stopped running some of the turbines, and my son’s health is improving.

Of course, it’s one battle after another, and sometimes those fights seem as daunting as the Mississippi itself. But just like that mighty river, we persist, fueled by a mother’s love.

Read Isabel’s full remarks here.

Tell Congress: Protect Families From Dangerous Data Center Air Pollution

Last week, we saw a crucial win for voting rights when the Supreme Court upheld a lower court injunction blocking the U.S. Postal Service from restricting voting by mail. In a year marked by attacks on our free and fair elections, this win brought some relief.

Voting is an essential right. With only 40 days left until Election Day, the most important thing you can do right now is make sure you have a plan to vote. Use our Turbovote tool to check your voter registration, find out what’s on your ballot, and see where, when, and how you can vote.

Make a Plan to Vote By November 3

Using the tool could not be easier. Just type in your home address, and it will

• show you a sample ballot,
• tell you what voting rules are in place in your state,
• give you options for voting early, by mail, or in person on Election Day,
• help you register if you’re not registered already, and
• provide a list of election-related deadlines in your state.

Once you’ve made a voting plan for yourself, make sure your friends and family do the same. Anyone can check their voter registration status, deadlines, and polling place here.

Voting is the most powerful tool we have to ensure a safe and healthy future for our children. It is an essential right. Let’s all make sure we use it.

Make a Plan to Vote By November 3

If you’re worried about the environmental impacts of AI and the data centers that power it, you’ll want to pay attention to the latest threat from the Trump-Zeldin EPA.

Last week, EPA finalized a rollback of 2024 climate pollution limits for fossil fuel power plants, like coal and gas plants—and proposed another rule that would prevent future administrations from limiting climate pollution from power plants too. This is frightening, and Moms are speaking out.

Tell EPA: Don’t Backslide on Cutting Power Sector Climate Pollution

Fossil fuel power plants are one of the largest sources of planet-heating greenhouse gases in the country. Our families and communities are feeling the impacts of an increasingly chaotic climate every day. Extreme weather, from triple-digit temps to unrelenting wildfires to superstorms, is a threat to our children’s health and our safety.

It’s especially frightening that EPA would take action like this right now, as data centers are driving a major increase in electricity demand around the country. Many data centers are powered with gas-fired combustion turbines—the same kind of power sources EPA just weakened protections against.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has said that AI growth is a top priority for his EPA. But promoting unchecked AI and data center growth isn’t EPA’s job.

EPA’s clear mission is to protect human health and the environment. Rescinding protections against power plant pollution at a time of growing electricity demand is dangerous, irresponsible, and morally bankrupt—not to mention, this move is estimated to result in up to 84,000 more premature deaths and more than 28 million more asthma attacks by 2047.

Join Moms in telling Administrator Zeldin that EPA must not abandon its responsibility to limit climate pollution from the power sector. These protections for our health matter, now more than ever.

Tell EPA: Don’t Backslide on Cutting Power Sector Climate Pollution

This article is part of our series The Climate Questionnaire, where we talk with authors, writers, filmmakers, podcasters, and other content creators about their work illustrating the human impacts of air pollution and global warming.

“It’s the most intimate story I’ve ever told,” says Nichole Sobecki, the award-winning photographer and director behind Natura, a photography series and documentary film following women on four continents navigating motherhood and unprecedented environmental change. Last month, Nichole’s photography of women navigating pregnancy and climate-supercharged extreme weather was published in National Geographic. This week, she joins Moms Clean Air Force’s Isabel González Whitaker at New York Climate Week for a September 22 panel about how the climate crisis is redefining motherhood.

Nichole has been documenting the intersection of climate change and reproductive life for 15 years. Natura is especially meaningful because she became a mother while making it. “The pregnant body is one of the most sensitive instruments we have for measuring a warming planet, and for so many people, climate change remains abstract, something happening elsewhere or later. A child is the most universal object of care there is. Start there, and the crisis stops being abstract,” she says.

Tell Congress: The Climate Clock Is Ticking. Act Now for Our Kids’ Future.

Read on to discover what Nichole learned from the women she followed for Natura, where she finds inspiration, and how she thinks about the changing planet.

What did you learn from working on Natura?

This story asked me to photograph something largely invisible: heat, and what it does inside a pregnancy, a question science itself is still racing to answer. In South Florida, I followed climate doulas, birth workers trained through Florida Clinicians for Climate Action, to assess heat and disaster risk for pregnant and postpartum clients.

Miami-Dade County now averages more than 130 days a year above 90°F, and the burden falls unevenly: Black women in Florida die from pregnancy-related causes at roughly three times the rate of white women, and lower-income households are far less likely to have reliable cooling at home. So the images are quiet ones. A doula’s home visit. A window air-conditioning unit in the bedroom of a woman 29 weeks pregnant whose car’s air-conditioning had blown out.

The story also took me to a climate chamber [a controlled indoor space used for testing reactions to environmental conditions] in Sydney, where researchers are searching for the threshold at which a pregnant body can no longer cool itself, and to Palau, the country with the world’s steepest rise in pregnancy heat-risk days.

What do you hope people will take away from your images?

The climate crisis is not only a story of ice sheets and emissions curves. It’s a story that lives in bedrooms and birth rooms, in the most intimate decisions of our lives. And the women closest to the risk—the mothers, midwives, doulas, and scientists in these photographs—are already doing the work of adaptation, long before policy arrives. Natura is meant to offer a quiet path through the enormity of our planet’s transformation.

Who are your favorite environmental photographers?

The photographers I return to aren’t environmental photographers in the traditional sense. Evgenia Arbugaeva, whose Arctic work feels like memory rather than reportage. Xavi Bou, who makes the flight of birds visible in ways no human eye could see. Jim Naughten and Tamara Dean, who both stage our entanglement with the natural world rather than simply documenting it.

And recently I was introduced to River Claure and Bade Fuwa, whose work feels fresh and exciting: Claure reimagining the Andes outside the colonial gaze, Fuwa turning loneliness into a way of seeing our abandonment of nature. All of them expand what an image of the natural world can be.

Do you call yourself an environmentalist?

I call myself a photographer, because my job is to look closely and report precisely, and I’ve found the facts of this crisis need no embellishment. But I don’t pretend neutrality about whether the world my son inherits is livable.

What’s your current state of mind when it comes to the climate crisis?

Clear-eyed and not despairing. I’ve spent years in the company of women who have every reason to give up and have chosen work instead: reclaiming forests, walking patrol routes with their daughters, setting good fire, gathering a generation to speak its fear aloud. The question I keep returning to is the one I now carry as a mother: what can we teach a child to love in a time like this? Love, it turns out, is the beginning of defense.

Who are your climate heroes in real life?

People who have contributed almost nothing to the emissions driving this crisis and who are already bearing the brunt of its danger and upheaval, an inequity set to grow steeper. What I’ve witnessed, again and again, is people meeting something grossly unfair not with bitterness but with imagination and care: reclaiming land, adapting old knowledge to new conditions, teaching their children both to love what remains and to fight for what can return. None of them would use the word hero, but all of them are keeping the world alive.

What book, past or present, best captures climate issues today?

I recently read Daisy Hildyard’s The Second Body, and it reshaped how I understand this crisis. She writes that every person has two bodies. The first moves through a day, eats breakfast, walks the dog. The second is distributed across the planet, present in the melting ice, the burning forest, the rising water. Climate change is so hard to hold because we live in the first body and cause harm through the second. Her thinking runs through the film I’m making now.

Tell Congress: The Climate Clock Is Ticking. Act Now for Our Kids’ Future.