A Brief Overview of the Bush Administration's Mercury Rule for Coal Plants
and their misnamed “Clear Skies Initiative”
Mercury is a toxic element of coal that is released into the air when power plants burn coal to produce electricity. This mercury ends up in the water where it is converted into methylmercury and builds up through the food chain to contaminate the fish that we eat. Through the consumption of fish, the Environmental Protection Agency recently estimated that one in six women of childbearing age have enough mercury in their blood right now to endanger a developing fetus. This statistic puts more than 600,000 babies born each year in the U.S. at risk of learning and behavioral disorders.
Even though coal is the biggest source of mercury emissions in the U.S., coal-fired power plants have never been regulated for mercury emissions. Thanks to powerful coal lobbyists, this industry was able to evade mercury rules that EPA developed for other industries under the Clean Air Act. However, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups sued EPA and the agency was required to issue draft mercury regulations on December 15, 2003.
Under Section 112 of the Clean Air Act, these regulations were supposed to require industry to install “Maximum Achievable Control Technology” (MACT), or the maximum degree of emission reductions that EPA determines to be achievable, based on current technologies. These technologies have successfully controlled over 90% of mercury reductions from incinerators and are rapidly developing to achieve similar reductions for coal plants.
Even though EPA told the coal industry in 2001 that 90% reductions will be required under this new rule by the end of 2007 (see Dec. 4, 2001 presentation to Edison Electric Institute), and EPA's own scientists just released a report stating that 90% reductions could be achieved across the entire industry by 2010 (see Feb. 2004 report (pdf, 211k)), EPA has weakened the mercury standards established under the Clean Air Act to be more in line with legislation proposed by the Bush Administration. This bill, misnamed the “Clear Skies Act”, requires only 29% mercury reductions in 2010 and 69% reductions in 2018 (a full decade later than what is required under the existing Clean Air Act).
The way EPA and the Bush Administration plan to accomplish this nasty task is by ignoring the Clean Air Act's MACT rules altogether - rules that were specifically designed by Congress to regulate hazardous air pollutants like mercury - and instead regulate mercury under a completely different section of the Clean Air Act that was not designed for toxic pollutants and would make it easier for EPA to set standards at whatever level they (and the energy executives) want. Moreover, unlike the strict MACT standards, this strategy will allow the trading of mercury pollution credits. This will allow dirty plants to continue emitting high levels of mercury by buying credits from cleaner plants, and therefore create toxic "hotspots" around dirty plants that would put local public health in jeopardy.
These actions taken by the Bush Administration will ensure that our fish are unhealthy to eat for decades to come, and that hundreds of thousands of unborn babies will be at risk of developmental problems every year. Please urge EPA to develop mercury standards that are determined by what technology can really achieve and not on what energy executives and their friends in the Bush Administration believe should be the standard…