EPA's Mercury Proposal: More Toxic Pollution for a Longer Time

[reprehensor]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/120703G.shtml

EPA's Mercury Proposal: More Toxic Pollution for a Longer Time
The Natural Resources Defence Council

Friday 05 December 2003

Earlier this week NRDC and other environmental groups leaked a draft Environmental Protection Agency proposal that would weaken and delay efforts to clean up mercury emissions from America's coal-fired power plants. Those 1,100 facilities are the largest unregulated industrial sources of mercury contamination in the country. The 50 tons they spew into the air every year amount to roughly 40 percent of total U.S. industrial mercury emissions.

In news stories on the draft proposal, EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt defended it as an emissions trading program similar to the one that has reduced acid rain. A close examination of the draft proposal, however, reveals that by emphasizing a cap-and-trade program, Leavitt was trying to deflect attention from the heart of the proposal: It would downgrade mercury from being regulated as a "hazardous" pollutant to one that requires less stringent pollution controls. By doing so, EPA's "cap" would allow nearly seven times more annual mercury emissions for five times longer than current law. Moreover, an emissions trading program would allow "hot spots" of mercury contamination in the lakes and rivers neighboring the plants that buy pollution credits instead of reducing their mercury emissions.

The proposal, an early Christmas gift to the Bush administration's friends in the energy industry, speaks volumes about the administration's unspoken policy toward America's children. Toxic mercury emissions from power plants put 300,000 newborns each year at risk for neurological impairment. But not only children suffer from mercury exposure. Adults also are threatened. Mercury exposure can damage adult cardiovascular and immune systems, and 8 percent of American women of childbearing age have mercury in their blood above EPA's "safe" level. That's nearly 5 million women.

Subverting the Clean Air Act

In 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed a Clean Air Act amendment requiring EPA to study whether regulating hazardous air pollution from power plants was necessary to protect public health. If the agency found that such regulation was necessary, it was supposed to require all power plants to install the most effective equipment available to reduce hazardous emissions. Ten years later, in December 2000, EPA finally concluded that it is necessary to regulate hazardous power plant air pollutants, including mercury. Under the law, the agency is required to set emissions limits for these hazardous power plant air pollutants, and those limits must take into account the maximum amount of reduction that is technologically achievable.